Experiencing the Sense of Presence within an Educational Desktop Virtual Reality

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

This study examines the sense of presence in MaxWhere desktop virtual reality. Thirty-one people participated in the research. The participants spend about fifteen minutes in the virtual environment. For measuring presence, the Igroup Presence Questionnaire (IPQ) was used. The results showed that more automatic navigation positively relates to spatial presence. This research also measured the participants' level of experience with the VR software. A significant difference was found in the spatial presence and experienced realism: the more experienced users gave higher ratings on both subscales. At the same time, the involvement and the general presence scores were similar in the two groups, which is advantageous in education as the presence is positively related to the learning outcome.