Abstract
A sense of being together with other people, so-called “co-presence”, has great practical importance for the shared virtual reality (VR) system that requires joint operations. Our previous study demonstrated that participants’ prior experience of interaction with their co-actor in the VR enhances co-presence. The present study investigated to what extent mere presentation of co-actor’s movement information can increase co-presence, by using the social Simon effect as a measure. Before performing the social Simon task, half of the participants had a 3-min pre-session to interact with their co-actor in the VR (full communication condition). The other half of participants had a 3-min pre-session to see their co-actor’s movements in the VR (movement presentation condition). Results showed no difference between these two conditions. This suggests that the presentation of co-actor’s movement information alone is enough to evoke co-presence.
