EVALUATING IMPACT OF NAVIGABILITY AFFORDANCES AND NARRATIVE TRANSPORTATION ON SPATIAL PRESENCE

Open Access
- Author:
- Balakrishnan, Bimal
- Graduate Program:
- Mass Communications
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- July 16, 2008
- Committee Members:
- S. Shyam Sundar, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Mary Beth Oliver, Committee Member
Loukas N Kalisperis, Committee Member
Aleksandra B Slavkovic, Committee Member - Keywords:
- virtual reality
narratives
navigability
spatial presence
HCI
affordances - Abstract:
- With advances in technology, mediated environments-especially video games-are increasingly designed around the metaphor of space. Today, media interfaces provide a variety of tools and affordances for users can interact with and freely navigate these mediated cyberspaces. Users of these new media often forget their immediate physical surroundings and experience a sense of “being there” in the mediated environment. This idea of “being there”, referred to as the sense of presence, has received much attention from scholars from diverse disciplines. However, the exact mechanism of its formation is still not understood and hardly any research has systematically approached spatial presence formation as a function of navigability – a key affordance of new media. The present study examines spatial presence formation as a function of navigability affordances to fill this gap in literature. To this end, the study begins by explicating the concept of navigability to define it as well as identify its components. The concept of spatial presence is explicated to clarify its meaning, define the boundaries of its meaning and to identify factors affecting it. After explicating the two key concepts, various theoretical mechanisms by which navigability components affect spatial presence are discussed and specific hypotheses proposed. The impact of navigability on spatial presence is examined through a controlled experiment (N=240) in a large screen, passive stereo virtual reality display. Narrative transportation is added as a user-centric variable in the experiment to examine whether user-centric characteristics can compensate for, or interact with technology affordances. Findings reveal that steering control, which affords locomotion through the virtual environment, is a strong predictor of spatial presence with greater steering control and maneuverability leading to greater spatial presence. Contrary to expectation, narrative transportation had a negative impact on spatial presence. Findings indicate support for heuristic processing of spatial cues and revealed capacity limitations in processing spatial cues. The study also revealed boundary conditions for the role of spatial situation models in formation of spatial presence. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.