Context-Relevant Locations as an Alternative to the Place Illusion in Augmented Reality

Presence is a powerful aspect of Virtual Reality (VR). However, there has been no consensus on how to achieve presence in Augmented Reality (AR) or whether it exists at all. The Place Illusion, a key component in presence as defined in VR, cannot be obtained in AR as there is no way to make the user feel as though they are transported somewhere else when they are limited to what they can physically see in front of them. However, recently it has been argued that coherence or congruence are important parts of the Place and Plausibility Illusions. The implication for AR is that the AR content might invoke a higher Plausibility Illusion if it is consistent with the physical place the content is situated in. In this study, we define the concept of a Context-Relevant Location (CRL), a physical place that is congruent with the experience. We present a study with a between-subjects design that allowed users to interact with AR objects in a CRL and in a generic environment. The results indicate that presence was higher in the CRL setting than the generic environment, contribute to the debate about providing a concrete description of presence-like phenomena in AR, and posit that CRLs play a similar role to the Place Illusion in an AR setting.