Focus, locus, and sensus: the three dimensions of virtual experience

A model of virtual/physical experience is presented, which provides a three dimensional conceptual space for virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR) comprising the dimensions of focus, locus, and sensus. Focus is most closely related to what is generally termed presence in the VR literature. When in a virtual environment, presence is typically shared between the VR and the physical world. "Breaks in presence" are actually shifts of presence away from the VR and toward the external environment. But we can also have "breaks in presence" when attention moves toward absence--when an observer is not attending to stimuli present in the virtual environment, nor to stimuli present in the surrounding physical environment--when the observer is present in neither the virtual nor the physical world. We thus have two dimensions of presence: focus of attention (between presence and absence) and the locus of attention (the virtual vs. the physical world). A third dimension is the sensus of attention--the level of arousal determining whether the observer is highly conscious or relatively unconscious while interacting with the environment. After expanding on each of these three dimensions of experience in relation to VR, we present a couple of educational examples as illustrations, and also relate our model to a suggested spectrum of evaluation methods for virtual environments.