Two Phenomenological Studies of Place

Abstract

We introduce our initial investigations into the phenomenology of place as part of the BENOGO project. BENOGO is concerned with giving people the experience of 'being there without going there'. Employing a state-of-the-art mixture of photorealistic, real time rendered images, three-dimensional soundscapes and augmented reality to create a sense of place. The work reported in this paper we describe as 'benchmarking', that is, establishing how people experience and describe places in the real world. We then will be able to compare the BENOGO experience with these benchmarks. This approach should be seen to be more naturalistic and relevant than the use of post hoc presence questionnaires.