Measuring perceived physical fidelity in virtual reality and virtual environments

As communication scholars become increasingly interested in studying virtual reality (VR) as a communication channel it will be important to establish useful measures related to perceptual variables in virtual environments. One such variable is physical fidelity: the degree to which virtual environments replicate or resemble places in the physical world. Often in computer science and other fields interested in VR, this variable is measured as reaction time within the system. However, for social scientific VR scholars, it can be important to understand how much the user perceives the environment to have physical fidelity. In the existing literature when physical fidelity is measured as a perceptual variable, it is often conflated with measures of immersion or spatial presence. This paper presents a confirmatory factor analysis approach to establishing a well-fitting scale of perceptual physical fidelity over three separate samples as well as delineating the conceptual and operational differences between physical fidelity, immersion, and spatial presence.