Presence as a means for understanding user behaviour in virtual environments

Presence has become a key concept in characterizing and evaluating Virtual Environments. Our contribution is to show that current measures of Presence, as a metric of users’ experience of Virtual Environments, are highly problematic: results from the literature cannot be repeated and it lacks a theoretical basis. We synthesize results from three experiments we conducted and in conclusion point the way to alternative approaches to the problem of characterizing Collaborative Virtual Environments.