Empirical review reveals that specific components of immersion enhance user outcomes in virtual environments, indicating that full immersion is not always necessary for practical success.
Solid evidence of virtual reality's benefits has graduated from impressive visual demonstrations to producing results in practical applications. Further, a realistic experience is no longer immersion's sole asset. Empirical studies show that various components of immersion provide other benefits - full immersion is not always necessary. The goal of immersive virtual environments (VEs) was to let the user experience a computer-generated world as if it were real - producing a sense of presence, or "being there," in the user's mind.
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Bowman et al. (2007) studied this question.
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