Congruence and Plausibility, Not Presence: Pivotal Conditions for XR Experiences and Effects, a Novel Approach

Presence is often considered the most important quale describing the subjective feeling of being in a computer-generated and/or computer-mediated virtual environment. The identification and separation of orthogonal presence components, i.e., the place illusion and the plausibility illusion, has been an accepted theoretical model describing Virtual Reality (VR) experiences for some time. This perspective article challenges this presence-oriented VR theory. First, we argue that a place illusion cannot be the major construct to describe the much wider scope of virtual, augmented, and mixed reality (VR, AR, MR: or XR for short). Second, we argue that there is no plausibility illusion but merely plausibility, and we derive the place illusion caused by the congruent and plausible generation of spatial cues and similarly for all the current model’s so-defined illusions. Finally, we propose congruence and plausibility to become the central essential conditions in a novel theoretical model describing XR experiences and effects.