Beyond Presence: Embodied Presence and Interaction Scale for Virtual Reality (EPIS-VR)

Assessment of VR experience quality has long been performed through measurement tools that are focused on measuring presence, usability or simulator sickness or embodiment separately. This approach becomes less and less applicable to the modern standalone HMDs where users interact using both handheld controllers and optical hand tracking. Not only is the sense of location in a virtual environment an important aspect of modern VR experience, but there is also a sense of ownership of one’s body in this environment, agency, naturalness of actions, tracking precision, Cognitive Fluency and comfort. This study introduces a multidimensional questionnaire for the assessment of embodied and modality-dependent interaction in modern VR—the Embodied Presence and Interaction Scale for Virtual Reality (EPIS-VR). The paper provides a synthesis of relevant literature and describes a structure of the proposed 28-item scale based on seven dimensions: Spatial Presence, Embodied Ownership, Embodied Agency, Interaction Naturalness, Interaction Fidelity, Cognitive Fluency and Interaction Comfort. Empirical validation includes sample descriptions, factor-analytic findings, reliability scores, convergence and discrimination validity tests, and comparisons of handheld and optical hand-tracking modalities. The EPIS-VR provides an initially validated multidimensional evaluation model for controller-based and hand-tracking interaction within an educational informatics context. Further studies are required to establish its applicability across other populations, VR domains, interaction modalities, and hardware systems.