Edinburgh Napier University

  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