‘The key to defining virtual reality in terms of human experience rather than technological hardware is the concept of presence. Presence can be thought as the experience of one’s physical environment; it refers not to one’s surroundings as they exist in the physical world, but to the perception of those surroundings as mediated by both automatic and controlled mental processes (Gibson, 1979):

Presence is defined as the sense of being in an environment.

Many perceptual factors contribute to generating this sense, including input from some or all sensory channels, as well as more mindful attentional, perceptual, and other mental processes that assimilate incoming sensory data with current concerns and past experiences (Gibson, 1966). Presence is closely related to the phenomenon of distal attribution or externalization, which refer to the referencing of our perceptions to an external space beyond the limits of the sensory organs themselves (Loomis, 1992).

‘A “virtual reality” is defined as a real or simulated environment in which a perceiver experiences telepresence.’ (Steuer, 1993: 7)

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