Presence and co-presence in collaborative virtual environments

Abstract

Presence in Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs) can be defined into personal presence and co-presence. Personal presence is having a feeling of "being there" in the CVE yourself. Co-presence is having a feeling that one is in the same place as the other praticipants, and that one is collaborating with real people. The focus of this research was to conduct exploratory studies to investigate and verify some of the factors believed to affect personal presence and co-presence in a CVE. This was achieved by designing and performing experiments in CVEs, and using subjective measures to assess the levels of personal presence and co-presence in the CVE. In addition, we have developed a subjective measure of co-presence in the form of a pencil-and-paper questionnaire. This co-presence questionnaire was used to measure the amount of co-presence experienced by the participants in the CVE. In this dissertation we describe three experiments used to investigate some of the factors which might affect personal presence and co-presence in a CVE.