The Why, What, and How of Immersive Experience

Assessing and modelling the quality of immersive experience has become a trending topic in QoE. To achieve this purpose, we would firstly want to know why an immersive experience is important to us, what exactly is defined as an immersive experience, and how we could actually measure an immersive experience. This paper aims to answer these questions. We start from the rationales of designing immersive experience, and then briefly go through the definitions of immersion from the system and user perspectives. We also provide our own definition of immersion that fits into the QoE assessment and measurement paradigm. We continue to discuss the pros and cons of four popular measurements of immersion, namely, the psychometric questionnaires, the continuous subjective measures, the primary or secondary task performance, and the neuro-psycho-physiological methods. We also provide a global view of comparing and evaluating these measurements by profiling them along five quality dimensions. Finally, we postulate, briefly, four novel methods of measuring immersion, linking the definitions and theories of immersion with the measurements we have discussed in this paper.