Abstract:

The ongoing research on Presence is aimed at understanding how people
experience virtual reality (VR) and how to build better VR systems. As
part of this research we introduce participants to highly immersive
social virtual environments and measure their physiological singals:
galvanic skin response, heart rate, respiration, EEG, and shortly fMRI.
By crossing this data from the body and the brain with information
gathered from interviews, we hope to gain a multi-layered picture of
people's experience in VR. In addition, we use the physiological signals
as an input device to the VR, thus working within the domains of
affective computing, brain-computer interface, and machine learning. In
this talk I will provide some background and applications for this line
of research, and review two recent results.