ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Virtual Real.
Sec. Virtual Reality and Human Behaviour
Measuring Perceived Physical Fidelity in Virtual Reality and Virtual Environments
Bree McEwan
Clarice Wu
Harris Yang
Michael Nixon
University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
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Abstract
Abstract As communication scholars become increasingly interested in studying virtual reality (VR) as a communication channel it will be important to establish useful measures related to perceptual variables in virtual environments. One such variable is physical fidelity: the degree to which virtual environments replicate or resemble places in the physical world. Often in computer science and other fields interested in VR, this variable is measured as reaction time within the system. However, for social scientific VR scholars, it can be important to understand how much the user perceives the environment to have physical fidelity. In the existing literature when physical fidelity is measured as a perceptual variable, it is often conflated with measures of immersion or spatial presence. This paper presents a confirmatory factor analysis approach to establishing a well-fitting scale of perceptual physical fidelity over three separate samples as well as delineating the conceptual and operational differences between physical fidelity, immersion, and spatial presence.
Summary
Keywords
Measurement, Physical fidelity, scale, Survey, virtual reality
Received
07 November 2025
Accepted
17 February 2026
Copyright
© 2026 McEwan, Wu, Yang and Nixon. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
*Correspondence: Bree McEwan
Disclaimer
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