Laboratory of Informatics of Grenoble Équipe Ingénierie de l'Interaction Humain-Machine

Équipe Ingénierie de l'Interaction
Humain-Machine

Is it Real? Measuring the Effect of Resolution, Latency, Frame rate and Jitter on the Presence of Virtual Entities

In ISS ’19. 2019. to appear.

Thibault Louis, J. Troccaz, Amélie Rochet-Capellan, François Bérard

ACM (Eds.)

Abstract

The feeling of presence of virtual entities is an important ob-
jective in virtual reality, teleconferencing, augmented reality,
exposure therapy and video games. Presence creates emotional
involvement and supports intuitive and efficient interactions.
As a feeling, presence is mostly measured via subjective ques-
tionnaire, but its validity is disputed. We introduce a new
method to measure the contribution of several technical pa-
rameters toward presence. Its robustness stems from asking
participant to rank contrasts rather than asking absolute val-
ues, and from the statistical analysis of repeated answers. We
implemented this method in a user study where virtual entities
were created with a handheld perspective corrected display.
We evaluated the impact on two virtual entities’ presence of
four important parameters of digital visual stimuli: resolu-
tion, latency, frame rate and jitter. Results suggest that jitter
and frame rate are critical for presence but not latency, and
resolution depends on the explored entity.