An Empirical Study on Spatial Presence in Immersive Geo-Environments

Research on immersive virtual reality (VR) indicates that VR technologies facilitate understanding through the formation of spatial presence, which is the user’s feeling of “being there” in a virtual place. These findings make VR a highly interesting tool for geographic information science and the visualization of geospatial phenomena. However, immersion and presence are often studied under laboratory conditions, while research on virtual representations of real-world environments is still rare. This paper aims to reduce this gap empirically through a user study on spatial presence in immersive geo-environments. A total of 60 subjects entered a VR replica of a coral reef in the Mexican Caribbean built upon WorldView2 imagery. After testing within- and between-subject performance under both VR headset- and desktop-based visualization conditions, all users completed the IPQ self-report questionnaire to evaluate the sense of presence experienced. The results indicate a strong effect of immersion, leading to statistically significant higher levels of spatial presence in immersive geo-environments.