The Sense of Verisimilitude Has Different Spatial-Temporal Characteristics from Those Producing the Sense of Presence in the Evaluation Process of Audiovisual Contents

Abstract

Realization of high-definition multimodal displays is keenly required for the advancement of information and communications technologies. As an index of high-definition display systems, the sense of presence has been widely investigated. Both theoretically and empirically such sense has been found to relate more dominantly to background components contained in a scene. In contrast, the appreciative role of foreground components in multimodal contents has not been investigated in detail. Therefore, we have been focusing on the sense of verisimilitude as another index. We recently studied how the sense of verisimilitude and the sense of presence were affected by temporal asynchrony between foreground audio-visual components of a Japanese garden and suggested that the sense of verisimilitude has significantly different characteristics from the sense of presence. To investigate whether this result would be valid more generally, we conducted an experiment using other audio-visual content, namely, a clip of western orchestral music. Results showed the sense of verisimilitude is more sensitive to audiovisual synchronicity than to display size, while the sense of presence is more sensitive to spatial size than the temporal property. Hence, the sense of verisimilitude can be another useful index, distinguishable from the sense of presence.