The Igroup Presence Questionnaire (IPQ) is a scale for measuring the sense of presence experienced in a virtual environment (VE). It has been constructed using a large pool of items and two survey waves with approximately 500 participants. It was originally constructed in German, but is now also available in English and Dutch.
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Head Mounted Display (HMD) Design

Technical orthotic

The title of the Diploma Thesis is an abstraction of the idea that one task of an industrial designer is to make technology applicable for the user by organizing them from the point of human needs. "Technische Orthesen - Head-mounted Displays in virtuelle Realität" (technical orthotic - head mounted display into virtual reality). An orthotic encaptures a part of the body and expands or replaces its function. So a head mounted display is an orthotic that allows the user to get into the visual part of a virtual environment.

The first part shows the history of head mounted displays and the contradiction in the possible quality and the quality of the state of the art head mounted displays. This part leads to the seven thesis:

  1. A head mounted display is a tool to use a virtual reality. It is bend to the human body, therefor it could be seen as an orthotic.
  2. The development of a head mounted display needs an interdisciplinary discussion in which one part of the faculties is the artist design.
  3. Without a futher development of software for virtual environment there is no sense in developing head mounted displays.
  4. A head mounted display allows, as it is an output device for virtual reality, a total and body related inclusion of the user in a virtual environment. This function should be the leading aim while the design process.
  5. Over its functionality, a head mounted display has to be a sign for the user of the immersive step into an alternative world
  6. By getting out the product "head mounted display" of the hightech and research context, it could become a personal accessory instead of being an anonymous technical device
  7. The human demand of availability of technology should be stand in the spot during the development of a head mounted display.

The second part was a sketching part that leads to nine posters about five thesis (see the posters in the online version of the thesis).

The third part was a specification of a development of a head mounted display that comes out of the thesis and leads to a first design of two head mounted displays (see figure 01 and figure 02). We summed up the technical and human parameters and their possible translation into action. At last we made a briefing for the development of those head mounted displays.

Two eye monoscopic head mounted laser display

Figure 01: Two eye monoscopic head mounted laser display

One eye monoscopic head mounted laser display

Figure 02: One eye monoscopic head mounted laser display

To see the entire Diploma Thesis (in german) have a look at the web version at the Bauhaus-Univesity Weimar.