Co-occurence Matrix

VOSviewer visualisation online

Observations

This visualisation is available online at [Here], allowing readers to explore the landscape of terminology used in presence research. The term ‘presence’ has been evident in VR literature for over three decades. As expected, the term ‘presence’ features in the central portions of this visualisation, as does virtual reality, sense, immersion, experience, and participant. Zooming into the central portion of this map reveals terminology surrounding the personal experience and context of presence in VR for users.  The co-occurrence network shows a spread of the average year of publication ranging from 2014 to 2020, demonstrating that the term has been used more recently.  

As expected, the term ‘presence’ features in the central portions of this visualisation, as does virtual reality, sense, immersion, experience, and participant. Zooming into the central portion of this map reveals terminology surrounding the personal experience and context of presence in VR for users. 

The top right quadrant features a range of terminology such as cybersickness, sensory conflict, heart rate, intensity, and other terminology describing the potentially challenging experiences for users in VR. 

Adjusting the colour settings reveals a pattern gradient beginning with an average age close to 2014 in the lower right quadrant toward an average age of 2020 in the upper left quadrant. Terms in 2014 are centred on elements of the immersive descriptive features of a VR experience. These include dominant terms such as ‘system’, ‘environment’, ‘technology’, ‘object’, ‘scene’, ‘display’, ‘real-time’, ‘tracking’, and more. The upper left quadrant terms tend toward applied settings for VR, such as ‘intervention’, ‘efficacy’, ‘outcome’, ‘investigation’, ‘engagement’, ‘teaching’, ‘learning’, ‘consumer’, and ‘user experience’. 

The term ‘presence’ has been evident in VR literature for over three decades. The co-occurrence network shows a spread of the average year of publication ranging from 2014 to 2020, demonstrating that the term is being used with increasing frequency.  Presence remains a vital feature in VR research and is associated with many aspects of the VR experience.
Furthermore, far from being a simple conception, presence is a term that touches on all aspects of virtual reality implementation. A search for the term ‘presence’ in the map reveals several directly related terms.  Presence, therefore, remains a relevant and multidimensional term.