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Presence and Immersion in Virtual Reality

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Synonyms

Telepresence, Virtual presence

Definitions

Immersion is user’s engagement with a VR (virtual reality) system that results with being in a flow state. Immersion to VR systems mainly depends on sensory immersion, which is defined as “the degree which the range of sensory channel is engaged by the virtual simulation” (Kim and Biocca 2018).

Presence within the context of virtual reality is defined as one’s sense of being in the virtual world. The illusion is perceptual but not cognitive, as the perceptual system identifies the events and objects and the brain-body system automatically reacts to the changes in the environment, while cognitive system slowly responds with a conclusion of what the person experiences is an illusion (Slater 2018).

Even the VR professionals may mistakenly use the terms “presence” and “immersion” interchangeably; immersion stands for the objective level of sensory fidelity provided by a VR system (Slater 2003), whereas presence is the subjective...

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Communication Design, Bahçeşehir University Faculty of Communication, Istanbul, Turkey

    Mehmet Ilker Berkman

  2. Digital Game Design, Bahçeşehir University Faculty of Communication, Istanbul, Turkey

    Ecehan Akan

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  1. Mehmet Ilker Berkman
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  2. Ecehan Akan
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Correspondence to Mehmet Ilker Berkman .

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  1. and Scholarships, Institute for Education, Research,, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Newton Lee

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Berkman, M.I., Akan, E. (2019). Presence and Immersion in Virtual Reality. In: Lee, N. (eds) Encyclopedia of Computer Graphics and Games. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-08234-9_162-1

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