Virtual Experience Test: A virtual environment evaluation questionnaire

We present the development and evaluation of the Virtual Experience Test (VET). The VET is a survey instrument used to measure holistic virtual environment experiences based upon the five dimensions of experiential design: sensory, cognitive, affective, active, and relational. Experiential Design (ED) is a holistic approach to enhance presence in virtual environments that goes beyond existing presence theory (i.e. a focus on the sensory aspects of VE experiences) to include affective and cognitive factors. To evaluate the VET, 62 participants played the commercial video game Mirror's Edge. After gameplay both the VET and the ITC-Sense of Presence Inventory (ITC-SOPI) were administered. A principal component analysis was performed on the VET and it was determined that the actual question clustering coincided with the proposed dimensions of experiential design. Furthermore, scores from the VET were shown to have a significant relationship with presence scores on the ITC-SOPI. The results of this research produced a validated measure of holistic experience that could be used to evaluate virtual environments. Furthermore, our experiment indicates that virtual environments utilizing holistic designs can result in significantly higher presence.