Presence, workload and performance effects of synthetic environment design factors

There remains a limited understanding of factors in presence and its relation to performance. This research examined a range of synthetic environment (SE) design features (viewpoint, auditory cue type and visual background) suspected to influence presence, and evaluated differences in presence, workload and task performance caused by manipulations of the factors and task difficulty in a virtual-reality-based basketball free-throw task. Thirty-two research participants were also required to perform secondary-monitoring tasks to assess attention allocation to the virtual and (surrounding) real environments, as an indicator of presence. Analysis of variance results demonstrated immersiveness (viewpoint) and auditory cue type to significantly influence the sense of subjective presence and perceptions of workload. Virtual task performance was significantly affected by task difficultly. This study also provided further evidence of significant positive relations between presence and workload, but no evidence of a correlation of objective presence and performance. These results have general applicability for the design of multimodal SE-based interfaces for real-world tasks, such as telerobot control.