The use of cooper-harper technique to enhance the measurement of rated sense-of-presence in virtual and real environments

A recent study has shown that the Presence Questionnaire (PQ) developed by Singer and Witmer (1996) fail to detect a significant difference between the sense-of-presence reported by participants exposed to a virtual environment (VE) and to its corresponding real environment (RE). Two experiments were conducted to examine the reported failure of PQ and study the benefits of using Cooper-Harper presentation technique. In the first experiment, participants were exposed to a virtual, telematic, and real environment showing similar audio and visual content. In contrary to the literature, the reported PQ total scores reported for the RE condition was significantly higher than that of the VE condition (p<0.05). This suggests that PQ can be a sensitive tool to measure rated sense-of-presence. In the second experiment, the use of Cooper-Harper technique to present PQ yielded mixed benefits. Actual and potential applications of this research include the development of an enhanced PQ that can be used across virtual, telematic, and real environments.