Presence in Visual Mental Imagery
Best Paper Award at the 3rd International Visual Informatics Conference 2013 (IVIC'13) Institute of Visual Informatics, Bangi, Malaysia, Nov 13-15, 2013 Jayesh S. Pillai, Uday A. Athavankar, Colin Schmidt, Simon Richir Abstract: ‘Presence’, the sense of being inside a virtual environment evoked with the help of computer mediation, has come to be a subject well explored in the field of virtual reality. Studies on mental imagery confirm that we can intuitively evoke objects and spaces in our minds and interact with them temporally. We believe that a sense of presence could be experienced in such self-evoked reality as well. This paper explores the experience of presence in visual mental imagery. We studied verbal expressions, physical movements and gestures, exhibited during mental imagery experiences in two scenarios - a guiding task and a mental walk exercise. A ‘protocol analysis’ was performed followed by analysis of time taken and mapping of physical movements. Th