Abstract

Virtual Reality has been around for a long time, but the last couple of years it has really taken off. Most people you ask why Virtual Reality became so popular, will tell you because of the sense of presence. The sense of presence people feel when walking around in a virtual world is one of the best known attributes of Virtual Reality. But what is this sense of presence? How can we measure presence?

To find out more about presence, an experiment has been done in which people were treated who suffered from acrophobia, the fear of heights. The results of this experiment could be used to answer the questions from two different fields. The psychologists were glad to see that it was possible to treat people by using Virtual Reality. The computer science people got 5 assertions from this experiment. Using these five assertions, better experiments can be done later to find out more about presence.

Thesis Preface TOC
Rob Kooper
 kooper@cc.gatech.edu
Last modified: Wed Aug 9 12:02:03 GMT 1995