What's in a BIP? Exploring the Lived Experiences of Breaks In Presence

AI summary

Overview

• Research area: Human-Computer Interaction / Virtual Reality — specifically presence, breaks in presence (BIPs), and first-person phenomenological methods (micro-phenomenology).
• Technical level: Intermediate. No heavy mathematics or engineering is required, but readers benefit from familiarity with VR presence theory (Place Illusion / Plausibility Illusion) and qualitative research terminology (diachronic/synchronic analysis).
• Scope (one sentence): An exploratory study of 14 participants in a fear-of-heights VR environment that deliberately triggers distractors and then uses micro-phenomenological interviews to model how 57 breaks in presence were actually lived through, revealing four recurring temporal patterns.

What This Paper Is About

Presence — the sense of "being there" in a virtual world — is periodically interrupted by what the literature calls breaks in presence, yet almost all prior work has studied these breaks from the outside, via physiological sensors, behavioral measures, or questionnaires that say little about how a break actually feels to the person experiencing it. This paper asks what BIPs are like from the first-person perspective: how they appear, how they unfold over time, and how they differ between users. The goal is to build a phenomenological characterization of BIPs, rather than only cataloguing their causes or trying to detect them automatically.

Key Contributions

1. The first first-person, phenomenological investigation of BIPs. The authors describe their study as the first of its kind to investigate BIPs from a first-person perspective, collecting lived-experience descriptions rather than relying on sensor or questionnaire proxies.
2. A modeled corpus of 57 BIP episodes. Using a diachronic/synchronic micro-phenomenological analysis procedure, they modeled 57 individual BIP episodes from 14 participants, each with a temporal structure and associated experiential constituents.
3. Four generic diachronic patterns of BIP episodes. The analysis surfaces four recurring ways BIPs unfold: reflected-upon, discarded, self-preservation, and contradictory mediation BIPs.
4. An awareness-based definition of BIPs, plus three design opportunities. The authors reinterpret their findings through the PI/Psi model of presence and propose a definition of BIPs grounded in awareness, alongside three BIP-related design opportunities (the specifics of the design opportunities are not detailed in the provided text).

Main Findings

• A variety of lived experiences and behaviors underlies "a break." The authors state that modeling the 57 BIP episodes brought to light "a variety of experiences and behaviors," indicating that BIPs are not a single uniform phenomenon.
• Four generic diachronic patterns emerged: reflected-upon BIPs, discarded BIPs, self-preservation BIPs, and contradictory mediation BIPs. These are diachronic patterns, meaning they describe the temporal organization of the episode.
• The environment successfully induced presence. On the SP-IE questionnaire (18 questions across 6 dimensions, where 4.5 is a very high level of presence), participants scored highest on affordance of the environment (Mean = 4.27, SD = 0.44) and attention allocation to the task (Mean = 4.27, SD = 0.70), followed by sense of spatial presence (Mean = 3.79, SD = 0.73).
• Enjoyment and realness were moderate. Enjoyment scored Mean = 3.46 (SD = 0.63) and sense of reality Mean = 3.49 (SD = 0.66); some participants found the unsecured under-construction setting unrealistic or unpleasant.
• Cybersickness was low. Mean = 1.81 (SD = 0.69), and most participants remained fully engaged in the task (except P5).
• Distractors can misfire and unexpected breaks occur. The design reproduced Chertoff et al.'s distractor types (external, inconsistent mediation, contradictory mediation, unrefined mediation, plus internal distractors, which were not induced). The authors also report a two-headed seagull in the environment that caused unexpected BIPs, and note that the black-screen distractor exploited a bug that META fixed two weeks into the study, preventing its use with participants P7 to P14.
• Not every modeled episode was a genuine BIP. Episodes were only retained as BIPs if participants reported not being fully "there" (break in PI), an intrusion of the real world (break in PI), something perceived as implausible or incoherent with the VR world (break in Psi), or a situation similar to others already reported; the rest were excluded.
• BIPs are treated as continuous rather than binary. Building on Slater's later position and on Biocca's three-pole model as used by Murphy and Skarbez, the paper frames BIPs as continuous, varying in intensity, and potentially hybrid — with presence simultaneously distributed across real and virtual settings.
• Attention remains an unresolved issue in the presence literature. The paper notes that it is still unclear whether a lack of attention to the VR world should count as a break, and that the relationship between presence and attention "is still insufficiently understood."

Methodology in Plain English

The researchers placed 14 participants in EVEREST, a VR environment originally built for acrophobia exposure therapy: a 150 m skyscraper under construction with two elevators opening onto external platforms, a cityscape around it, and a plank to cross between platforms. A real wooden plank, calibrated to match the virtual one, sat in the experimental room to reinforce the sense of presence. Participants progressed through 19 steps, from floor 1 to floor 54, and crossed the plank at each elevator stop.

At five specific steps the experimenters triggered distractors designed to break either Place Illusion (PI) or Plausibility Illusion (Psi), drawing on the PI/Psi model (Slater) and on Chertoff et al.'s five cause categories. Distractors included: music ("I Will Survive" by Gloria Gaynor) at step 5; removal of the physical plank at step 8; a knock plus the participant's name at step 14; three 0.5-second black screens at step 16; and helicopter noise, seagulls, and a floating tarpaulin at step 17. Distractors were deliberately not randomized, because the study focused on describing each BIP individually. Six pilots preceded the main experiment to tune the distractors, the procedure, and the interview technique.

After the VR session (each session lasted about one hour), participants completed the SP-IE presence questionnaire, and were then interviewed using micro-phenomenological interviews — a first-person method designed to help people re-live and describe a past experience in detail rather than rationalize it. Interview analysis followed a diachronic/synchronic procedure: transcribe and filter verbatims for authenticity, build a temporal (diachronic) structure for each candidate BIP, add experiential (synchronic) categories, then group and generalize those moments into a hierarchy of increasingly generic diachronic moments — producing the four generic patterns.

Participants were screened with the Visual Height Intolerance Severity Scale (vHISS) and the Acrophobia Questionnaire (AQ), selecting only those scoring less than 45 on the AQ and less than 7 on the vHISS. The sample was 11 women, 2 men, and 1 non-binary person, aged 20 to 56 (mean = 34.86, SD = 11.51); they were not compensated. The environment ran on a standalone Oculus Quest 2; recordings used a 13" MacBook Pro M1 on Mac OS Sonoma (14.5). The protocol was approved by the local IRB (IORG0011023, reference 22052024-1).

Why This Matters

Impact on research. The work opens a phenomenological line of inquiry into a phenomenon that has mostly been measured from the outside. It argues that questionnaires cannot tell you when a break occurred, how it was experienced, or what triggered it — and it notes the literature's gap in describing how BIPs unfold over time. By supplying modeled episodes and generic temporal patterns, it offers a vocabulary and a method for future studies of presence disruption, and it directly engages with open theoretical questions such as the presence–attention relationship and binary versus continuous conceptions of presence.

Real-world applications:

• VR exposure therapy. The study itself used EVEREST, an acrophobia therapy environment, where losing presence can undermine the therapeutic effect; understanding how patients break out of presence can inform session design.
• VR training and simulation. In skill-training scenarios, undesired breaks draw attention away from the task; knowing how users recover can guide recovery-support strategies.
• Immersive entertainment and games. The paper cites prior work showing BIPs have varying impacts on playing experience with non-constant recovery times, which matters for pacing and for handling technical anomalies gracefully.
• Distractor design more broadly. The authors note that no dedicated taxonomy exists to systematically guide the creation of distractors; their use of Chertoff et al.'s categories in a concrete protocol provides a worked example.

Industry relevance. Any developer of VR applications cares about keeping users present, and about what happens when presence fails — a frozen frame, a black screen, a lost audio channel. This paper reframes those moments as experiences users actively manage (recovering, discarding, reflecting, self-preserving) rather than simple on/off failures, which points toward designing for graceful management rather than only for avoidance.

Future Directions

• Detailing and validating the proposed design opportunities. The paper announces three BIP-related design opportunities but the provided content does not specify them; turning these into concrete, testable design guidance is an open step.
• Testing whether the four patterns generalize. The four patterns (reflected-upon, discarded, self-preservation, contradictory mediation) come from 14 participants in one fear-of-heights environment with 57 modeled episodes; whether they hold in other applications, tasks, and populations is unresolved.
• Clarifying the presence–attention relationship. The paper explicitly identifies this as insufficiently understood and calls for further clarification, including whether inattention to the VR world should count as a break.
• Connecting first-person accounts to objective detection. Since prior work detects BIPs from heart rate, skin conductance, pupil diameter, electrodermal activity, secondary task reaction times, and EEG, linking those signals to the lived patterns described here could make automatic detection more meaningful.
• Studying how BIPs evolve across an entire session. The authors deliberately did not randomize distractors because they focused on describing individual BIPs, leaving the session-level evolution of breaks as a question for future work.

Target Audience

This paper is most valuable to HCI and VR researchers studying presence, immersion, and breaks in presence; to qualitative researchers interested in micro-phenomenology and diachronic/synchronic analysis as applied to interactive systems; and to VR designers and developers — particularly those building exposure therapy, training, or immersive entertainment applications — who need to understand how users experience and recover from disruptions. Readers with a background in phenomenology or in presence theory (PI/Psi, spatial presence) will get the most from it.

Authors’ abstract

Occasionally, individuals immersed in a Virtual Reality (VR) environment may experience distractions that disrupt their sense of presence, a phenomenon referred to as a break in presence (BIP). Better understanding BIPs is crucial to designing VR applications that keep their users present. BIPs have been studied using a variety of methods, exploring their origins or trying to detect them from physiological or behavioral measurements. However, despite the importance of understanding how they are actually lived and managed by VR users, very few studies focused on their phenomenological characterization. We employed micro-phenomenology to collect the descriptions of BIPs experienced by users (n=14) of a height exposure VR application. We precisely modeled 57 BIP episodes, bringing to light a variety of experiences and behaviors. Four generic diachronic patterns of BIP episodes emerge: reflected-upon, discarded, self-preservation, and contradictory mediation BIPs. We discuss these in light of the PI/Psi model of presence, propose an awareness-based definition of BIPs, as well as three BIP-related design opportunities.