Measuring Presence: A Response to the Witmer and Singer Presence Questionnaire
Mel Slater · PRESENCE Virtual and Augmented Reality · 1999
ly for all of these types of things metrics can be established which are descriptions of the system, and not descriptions of people's responses to the system. Witmer and Singer, however, define immersion as the person's response to the VE system. This difference in terminology is unfortunate, but not a matter of any great concern. In order to Measuring Presence 2 avoid further confusion I will use the term `system immersion' to denote my meaning of the word, and `immersive response' to denote W&S's meaning. On a second reading of their paper, I realised that this terminological difference was a sign of a very profound difference in methodology regarding the elicitation of presence. The purpose of this note is to explain why I would never use the W&S questionnaire for studying presence - even though I am sure that in itself it can lead to useful insights about the nature of VE experience. About the meaning of presence itself, I find W&S's var