The Relationship Between Presence and Trust in Virtual Reality

Virtual Reality (VR) has seen a fast growth in the past decades, thanks to increases in the quality of the visualization technologies and decreases in costs. VR is currently applied in different domains, such as medical and psychological therapy, industry, entertainment and training. Given the importance established by this system, it is fundamental to understand the factors that could lead to a better implementation. Trust has been seen as an important factor for other technologies, but little attention has previously been given to trust in VR systems. This work aimed to understand if the concept of presence could be one of the factors influencing trust in VR. To do so, an experiment has been conducted at The University of Nottingham. The results show that there is a relationship between presence and trust, which exists for different VR systems and encompasses all the sub-factors of trust.