Presence in Visual Mental Imagery

Abstract

‘Presence’, the sense of being inside a virtual environment evoked with the help of computer mediation, has come to be a subject well explored in the field of virtual reality. Studies on mental imagery confirm that we can intuitively evoke objects and spaces in our minds and interact with them temporally. We believe that a sense of presence could be experienced in such self-evoked reality as well. This paper explores the experience of presence in visual mental imagery. We studied verbal expressions, physical movements and gestures, exhibited during mental imagery experiences in two scenarios - a guiding task and a mental walk exercise. A ‘protocol analysis’ was performed followed by analysis of time taken and mapping of physical movements. The results evidently point to this spatio-temporal phenomenon of experiencing presence. Furthermore, we present a comparative review on the sense of presence experienced during mental imagery and virtual reality.