The Illusion of Being Present : Using the Interactive Tent to Create Immersive Experiences

We describe a novel immersive environment – the Interactive Tent – and an artistic production within it – The Illusion of Being. In this production, immersants experience a vivid cycle of the seasons in a way that depends on their bodily movements. Everybody’s experience of The Illusion is unique, since by moving immersants slip from one version of the seasonal cycle to another. In all, there are four versions, created to have differential effects on sense of presence and of time’s passage, according to a theoretical model. An experiment, conducted to assess the effects of the different content versions, is reported. The results confirmed the model’s prediction that rated presence is relatively high when the content elicits predominantly concrete (perceptual) processing, and relatively low when the emphasis is on more abstract (conceptual) processing. But the concrete-abstract dimension had no direct effect on judged duration, contrary to our predictions. However, there was some evidence that judged presence and estimated duration were positively correlated for content categorised as real, but there was no evidence of a correlation for content categorised as virtual.