Responses of Participants During an Immersive Virtual Environment Experience

—This paper reports on the results of an experiment designed to study fine grain physiological responses of participants to an immersive virtual simulation of an urban environment. An experiment was carried out with 40 participants who were asked to walk through a virtual street, which had virtual characters walking through it. The analysis of differences in participant responses at various stages of the experiment (baseline recordings, training, first half and second half of the urban simulation) is examined in detail. It was found that participants typically show a stress response during the training phase and a stress response towards the end of the simulation of the urban experience. The impact of realism on the reported presence was evaluated. The results suggest that the lowest presence was achieved with the higher fidelity characters but the less varied textures. There is some evidence also that variations in the level of visual realism based the texture strategy used was associated with changes in mental stress.