mcantamesse.net

Project

During last years, virtual reality (VR) has proved to be an emergent field of research for psychology, and there have been examples of opportunities to build “planned experience”, to re-create specific environments, to act complex tasks and to drive interaction into a simulated social context that VR offers to psychological research and practice.

This chance could be useful in many ways, mainly VR could be a tool for explore human experiences, for instance how people behave in critical conditions, and, in second instance, virtual environments (VEs) could be examined by themselves, as a medium, or as a brand new context. A preliminary literature review (Schuemie et al., 2001; Seo & Kim, 2002) shows that VR could be useful in different contexts: education (Roussos et al., 1999; Salzman, 1999), industry (Burdea & Coiffet, 2003), medicine (Krummel, 1998), general psychology (Loomis & Blascovich, 1999) and clinical psychology (Glantz & Rizzo, 2003; Pull, 2005; Riva et al., 2002; Vincelli et al., 2003; Vincelli et al., 2001).

In such rich scenery, an emergent topic researchers are discussing about is the construct of “presence”: presence is often defined as “being-there”, “immersion”, “realism” (Lee, 2004).
In literature mMany definitions of “presence” could be found , but we can underline some prevalent positions: presence could be studied and defined by its technological elements (Issenberg et al., 2001; Pakstas & Komiya, 2002; Whitten & Cook, 2004), such as specific input and output devices, or specific software solutions, or by VE’s features (Saretto, 2001). Presence could also be studied as “physical presence” (Lo & So, 2001; Mikropoulos & Strouboulis, 2004; Terveen & Hill, 1998; Woolgar, 2002), or “social presence” (Biocca et al., 2003; Hoyt, 2003; Davide, 2001; Greef & IJsselsteijn, 2001; Mark, 1999; Youngblut, 2005; Zhao, 2003). As a consequence of such an activity, there is a wide variety of presence measure tools: questionnaire such as Barfield et al. Questionnaire (Barfield, 1993), Igroup Presence Questionnaire (IPQ) (Schubert, 2001), and Basdogan et al. Questionnaire (Basdogan, 2000), “continued measure” (IJsselsteijn, 1998), psychophysiologic measure, etc.

Development of multi-user software, advances in collaboration environments and shared VEs require to re-define constructs, methods and approaches of social psychology (Biocca, Burgoon, Harms, Slater, 2001). Presence could be examined by its social dimensions, using tools closely related to traditional social psychology, such as discourse analysis and conversation analysis (Rourke et al., 1999) and thinking aloud (Turner, 2003).
In this sense, it could be useful to define presence as co-presence (Goffman, 1959), as in Biocca (Nowak, 1999) (Biocca & Nowak, 2001), or as subjective experience (Heeter, 1992), as studied by Gunawardena (Gunawardena & Zittle, 1997), or, again, as “other’s presence” (Short & Christie, 1976), as studied, for example, by Galimberti and Riva (Galimberti & Riva, 2001).

Such a topic requires to understand by which means VR could influence experience social dimensions, in order to gain useful insight and to project and design psychologically consistent VE, to use them in research and as a tool, for instance in VR-based Cognitive-behavioral therapy.

My phD project goal is to study the impact of VEs affordances on presence and social presence and to define and validate a qualitative methodology based on content analysis and thinking aloud.

References

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Basdogan, C., Ho, C., Srinivasan, M. A., & Slater, M. (2000). An experimental study on the role of touch in shared virtual environments. ACM Transactions on Computer Human Interaction, 7(4), 443-460.

Biocca, F., Burgoon, J., Harms, C., Stoner, M. (2001). Criteria and scope conditions for a theory and measure of social presence. Paper presented at the 4th International Workshop on Presence, Philadelphia, USA.

Biocca, F., Harms, C., & Burgoon, J. K. (2003). Toward a more robust theory and measure of social presence: Review and suggested criteria. Presence, Vol. 12, No. 5, 456-480.

Biocca, F., & Nowak, K. (2001). Plugging your body into the telecommunication system: Mediated embodiment, media interfaces, and social virtual environments. In C.Lin & D. Atkin (Eds.), Communication technology and society (pp. 407-447). Waverly Hill, VI: Hampton Press.

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