The Influence of Immersion on Situational Awareness in a Virtual Environment

Abstract

Abstract Researchers have pointed out the need to find an alternative to subjective questionnaires to measure presence in a virtual environment. Situational awareness has been proposed to objectively measure the concept of presence. However, the link between situational awareness and specific factors of presence has not been established. To study this relationship, 60 participants executed a driving task in a virtual environment under different visual conditions while we measured their situational awareness with the situational awareness global assessment technique (SAGAT), and their presence with the presence questionnaire (PQ). During the driving task, we objectively and meaningfully manipulated immersion, a factor of presence, by varying our participants' contrast sensitivity, size of the field of view, and visual acuity. The meaningful manipulation of presence also allowed us to evaluate the functional thresholds of the three aforementioned visual qualities for a driving task, which were previously measured from a multidirectional selection test. Our results indicated a significant positive correlation between SAGAT and PQ. They also showed that SAGAT was sensitive to an immersion's degradation and brought a good diagnosticity on the effect of an immersion's manipulation. Consequently, we conclude that it could represent an objective alternative to subjective questionnaires to measure presence in a virtual environment. Moreover, our assessment of the functional thresholds allowed us to confirm that they were context dependent. Our results indicated that only the contrast sensitivity functional threshold was valid in both a multidirectional selection test and a driving task.