Cummings and Bailenson’s meta-analysis, How Immersive Is Enough?, challenges the simple idea that “more immersive technology always produces more presence.” Their argument is that although higher technological immersion can increase presence, the relationship is uneven across different system features.
Their findings show that technological immersion has an overall medium-sized effect on presence. Display quality is treated as a technological variable, while presence is the psychological experience of “being there.” Importantly, not all technological features contribute equally. Features such as user tracking, stereoscopic visuals, and a wide field of view have a stronger effect on presence than features like high-resolution imagery or high-quality audio.
Increased presence often intensifies user affect: the more present someone feels, the more their responses to virtual stimuli resemble their responses to real-world equivalents. The goal of immersive technology is to create interactions and sensory cues that approximate real-world counterparts closely enough to evoke those parallel reactions.
A persistent problem in the literature is that presence and immersion are often used interchangeably, which causes conceptual confusion. The distinction only began to solidify in the late 1990s with foundational work in telepresence. Presence in mediated environments is fundamentally a psychological phenomenon, which means it is subjective. When describing presence, it is essential to frame it as something that may be experienced rather than something that is guaranteed.
Presence reflects the degree to which a person experiences a mediated environment as the place where they are consciously located. Slater and Wilbur (1997) note that a system is more likely to be immersive if it offers high-fidelity stimulation across multiple sensory modalities. This echoes Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis on the multisensory nature of cognition: vision, touch, sound, and body movement all contribute to our sense of being in a place.
A general rule of thumb is that the more immersive the system, the greater the likelihood of presence, though individual differences mean not everyone will feel presence to the same degree. Immersion increases the opportunity for presence but does not guarantee it.
Slater describes two conditions needed for spatial presence:
- The user must draw on spatial cues to perceive the environment as a plausible space.
- The user must experience themselves as located within that space.
The second condition depends on how well the system represents the user’s body and actions, including body tracking and responsiveness. This links to concepts such as body ownership, self-presence, and agency.
Wirth et al. (2007) describe presence as a binary state in which perceived location and action possibilities become tied to the mediated environment. In this state, mental capacities are organized around the virtual space rather than the physical world. This is critical because mental capacities are contained within the boundaries of the mediated environment, and those boundaries are defined by the technology itself. Virtual worlds operate according to the physics of the game engine, the logic of the code, and the constraints chosen by designers. In other words, the structure of the environment shapes the structure of the user’s possible actions and perceptions.
Within my research design, I am focusing on one particular aspect of immersive systems: avatar animation fidelity. This includes the degree to which avatar expressions and movements are possible, expressive, and physically convincing. This involves both visual fidelity (how the avatar looks) and animation fidelity (how well the avatar moves, emotes, and mirrors the user’s physical actions). Since this research identifies avatar fidelity as one of the impactful features of immersive technology, my study centers on how these expressive capacities influence the user’s sense of presence.
Advanced immersive systems rely on faster update rates and higher fidelity, including more detailed avatars and richer facial expressions. Animation fidelity plays a central role in creating a believable correspondence between the user’s actions in the physical world and the avatar’s behavior in the virtual one.
Terminology:
Mediated experience
experience that is interpreted and given meaning through cognitive processes rather than perceived directly. Mediated environments deal with the secondary properties of objects: what the system presents, not what physically exists in front of the user.