The paper below disappeared from my archive until recently, however here it is again and hopefully it will be of interest.

Authors: Susan Turner, Phil Turner, Fiona Carroll, Shaleph O’Neill, David Benyon, Rod McCall, Michael Smyth

Presented at: Environmental Psychology in the UK Conference, 2003

Abstract: The EC funded project BENOGO seeks to re-create real places using photo-realistic immersive virtual reality technology and in so doing investigates the nature ofpresence and sense of place in such environments. We discuss the first stages in ourwork investigating how far a sense of place can be created in a virtual environmen tand benchmarked against the real world. This paper reports early studies which investigated sense of place in a real-world location – a glasshouse in a botanical garden – and the first in a series of planned experiments with its virtual equivalent. The results provide preliminary indications of which elements of sense of place

manage to penetrate the considerable constraints of the current virtual environment
and how the virtual experience might be redesigned in future. We also discuss
techniques for investigating sense of place in this context and briefly describe the next
steps in the work.

PDF: Re-creating the Botanics: towards a sense of place in virtual environments