Disclaimer: Presence research is not my area of expertise. I’m basically speaking as an interested layperson, and just writing down some vaguely related observations that have re-occurred to me recently.

So, presence. What is presence, and why should we care? Libraries full of papers have been written about it, and there’s even a long-running journal of that title. I guess one could say that presence is the sensation of bodily being in a place or environment where one knows one is not. And why is it important in the discussion of virtual reality? Because it is often trotted out as the distinguishing feature between the medium of VR (yes, VR is the medium, not the content) and other media, such as film or interactive 3D graphics; in other words, it is often a feature that’s used to sell the idea of VR (not that there’s anything wrong with that).

But how does one actually measure presence, and know that one has achieved it? Some researchers do it by putting users into fMRI machines, but that’s not really something you can do at home. So here are a few things I’ve observed over sixteen years of working in VR, and showing 3D display environments and 3D software to probably more than 1,000 people, both experts and members of the general public:

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