Education and Information Technologies 5:4 (2000): 277±289 # 2000 Kluwer Academic Publishers, Manufactured in The Netherlands Perfect presence: What does this mean for the design of virtual learning environments? DENISE WHITELOCK* Institute of Educational Technology, The Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes,MK7 6AA. * Correspond- ing author. E-mail: d.m.whitelock@open.ac.uk DANIELA ROMANO Computer Based Learning Unit, University of Leeds. E-mail: d.m.romano@cbl.leeds.ac.uk ANNE JELFS Behavioural Studies, University College Northampton, Boughton Green Road, Northampton NN2 7AL. E-mail: anne.jelfs@northampton.ac.uk PAUL BRNA Computer Based Learning Unit, University of Leeds. E-mail: p.brna@cbl.leeds.ac.uk One of the advantages of building a virtual reality system is that it allows students to enter new worlds which in these instances include trips to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, a ®eld visit to an Oak Wood and a close encounter in a 3D maze. In all these environments the factors affecting a sense of `being there' or presence was investigated. Enhanced audio feedback increased a subjective sense of presence but did not increase students' conceptual learning scores. We have also found that a sense of social presence enhanced the notion of `being there' together with measures of collaboration. However `being there' can take its toll on students and our ®ndings suggest it imposes a cognitive overload. Where students have a choice, they try and reduce this overload by asking for conceptual tools to assist them in their learning tasks. The studies reported in this paper provide some benchmark data about these issues which deserve further investigation if we are to design effective virtual environments for conceptual learning. Keywords: virtual reality; presence; conceptual learning; collaborative virtual environments; conceptual tools. Introduction Virtual Reality systems offer users exciting opportunities to enter new worlds. They no longer have to be passive spectators but can experience and manipulate these virtual worlds in a number of novel ways. For software designers, these worlds can mean constructing anything from a games environment which can be placed on a mountain slope or located on an imaginary island inhabited by some rather strange creatures, to the implementation of a more serious training system. Indeed Virtual Reality systems that have been designed to represent `real' environments, such as the British Aerospace virtual cockpit (Kalawsky, 1991a; Kalawsky, 1991b), have a proven successful track record for training pilots. Multimedia specialists have also been called upon to design more educational worlds;