I would try to find articles in Caves environment

Hmmm

Not many (any?) I'm aware of dealing specifically with presence in a CAVE.

I know the work of Abbink etc at Delft  (shameless plug for the TU) looks at haptic steering and gas pedals in a lightweight immersive driving simulator.  

Our research team deals with problems of virtual reality and presence. But we did not deal with haptic interfaces. Though, on our opinion the methods of presence evaluating are rather universal. Natalya Averbukh deals with presence domain. Her research on presence evaluating is published in Averbukh N. Subjective-Situational Study of Presence. in Lecture Notes in Computer Science Volume 8525, 2014, pp 131-138 (Proceedings of "Augmented and Mixed Reality. Designing and Developing Virtual and Augmented Environments" Conference. Crete 2014. ) (http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-319-07458-0_13#)

(We may send this paper if you are interested.) Also it is necessary to warn that her method is not quantitative, but qualitative and descriptive.

To answer your questions, we would like to know in more detail about your research, about what is its task, why presence is necessary in your system. Also we would like to know in more detail about virtual environment under consideration. What user actions are possible there? What feedback is possible? What is the user immediate objective within your virtual environment?

What are criteria of task solution? What is the abstractness level of visualization in your system? Do you use graphs, diagrams or real images? What is quality of rendering? How realistic are object visualisations? How realistic is feedback? What as such is haptic in the system? Why this entity is used? What it is meant?

If it is interested, you may write me ([email protected]), or Natalya Averbukh ([email protected]).

colleagues of mine published a study on spider phobia in which they presented visual (VR with HMD) and haptic (a plastic spider model) and measured fear and presence. I think they used one of the standard presence scales available. it is a bit off topic but they use a visuo-haptic simulation.

Here's the link: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23792847

Well, I think the answer to your first question is essentially "like you would evaluate presence in any other environment", so I'm a bit unclear on why you focus so much on specific technologies in the rest of the question?

Your approach to evaluating presence depends on your conception of presence and what kind of issues you want to relate to in the end. Essentially, it either comes down to using some version of questionnaires and/or interviews after subjects have spent some time with the system or measuring reactions (behavioral or physiological) that you expect to be different depending on whether they are (strongly) present in the virtual environment while they are using the system. Of course these approaches can also be combined in different ways and some measurements (like brain measurements) are more complex than others.

I am intrigued by the context of your question and I would be happy to discuss this further. Feel free to contact me directly.

/Daniel

I am currently working on my BA in Interaction Design, wherein I propose future virtual spaces as allowing the visitor to be immersed in the identity of the curator of said space, as opposed to avatars or userprofiles in current social media.

In the paper this will be discussed, and the actual design project will be an interactive installation that users interact with to 'curate' a virtual room. As a proof-of-concept I programmed two sketches in Processing/Java that used an oculus rift to immerse the user in a space. In one, users where confronted with a frame in the virtual space that changed appearance (as did the atmospheres' sound environment) when they touched a foil in its corresponding place - wearing the VR-headset they did not see the foil. A short presentation can be found here:

http://creative-coding.tumblr.com/post/91950415049/polylith-proof-of-concept-presentation-for

This is by no means meant to be scientific, rather to show one such approach. I would be highly interested in where the discussion leads. See attached images for screenshots.

Although it isn't a direct answer to your questions, the following article could be interesting:

Charles Pontonnier, Georges Dumont et al. - "Designing and Evaluating a Workstation in Real and Virtual environment: from Digital Mock-up to Realization". CogInfoCom 2012

Please find below a small part of the abstract:

"A subjective evaluation of the Real (RE), Virtual (VE), and Virtual with Force Feedback (VEF) environments is provided. Results indicate a real sensory and difficulty gap between RE and VEF, whereas a smaller difference was observed between VE and RE.

Results also highlight the impact of cognition and sensory feedback on user’s feeling and presence sensation."

As has been hinted at, there has only been limited research on this topic. There was some "passive haptics" work a number of years ago. Things like Meehan et al's work with the pit, as well as other work by that group. Those works were all done in an HMD and reported large impacts at the time. I recently published an article, which of course cites some older relevant works, about the impact on presence and environmental realism of a 'floor based' audio-haptic device. That work was done in a L-shaped (2 sided CAVE-like system) immersive projective display.

KJ Blom, S Beckhaus Virtual Travel Collisions: Response Method Influences Perceived Realism of Virtual Environments Transactions on Applied Perception. 10(4) ACM. October, 2013. doi:10.1145/2536764.2536772

Meehan, Michael, et al. "Physiological measures of presence in stressful virtual environments." ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG). Vol. 21. No. 3. ACM, 2002.

We have a recent paper on the use of vision, sound and haptics for collaboration in immersive environments.

"Measuring the Collaboration Degree in Immersive 3D Collaborative Virtual Environments".

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/264193265_Measuring_the_Collaboration_Degree_in_Immersive_3D_Collaborative_Virtual_Environments

Hope it can help you.

Conference Paper Measuring the Collaboration Degree in Immersive 3D Collabora...