How Colourful was Your Day? Why Questionnaires Cannot Assess Presence in Virtual Environments

This paper argues that a scientific basis for ‘presence’ as usually understood in virtual environments research, cannot be established on the basis of post-experience presence questionnaires. To illustrate the point, an arbitrary mental attribute called ‘colourfulness of the experience’ is conjured up, and a set of questions administered to 74 respondents with an on-line questionnaire. The results suggested that colourfulness of yesterday’s experiences was associated with the extent to which a person accomplished their tasks, and also associated with yesterday being a ‘good’, ‘pleasant’, but not frustrating day. The meaninglessness of this analysis illustrates that the equivalent methodology used by presence researchers, may, similarly, bring into being the idea of presence in the minds of VE participants. However, it is argued that that there can be no evidence on this methodological basis that presence played any role in their actual mental activity or behaviour at the time of the experience. It is concluded that presence researchers must move away from questionnaires in order to make any progress in this area.