Be careful of old research papers for VR concepts that were written well before we had access to VR HMD's that could reliably give presence as well as Cresent Bay and VIVE.

As stated by Valve and Oculus, often times entire research papers they look into are no longer relevant or even true anymore because of how terrible the VR HMD's were that they used to perform their studies. They didn't even have low persistent global displays, nor were they anywhere near the low latency requirements for triggering the primitive switch for presence reliably.

I'm not saying to discount this research paper, though there are some issues I found with it including how they detected presence in addition to the technology used.

Either way, I think you might be thinking too much into this phenomenon of people being impressed with the VIVE so much more than Cresent Bay.

It all comes down to being able to walk around a large room, which greatly increases how often a powerful prescense cue trigger is being used, and the input solution finally bringing your hands into the equation and also in a way that allowed you to for once (at least in Valve's demos) interact with the virtual environments in a way that was fun and you'd want to come back to.

The paper goes to much lengths trying to accurately break up the definition of 'presence' into 2 different entities. I don't think that is required anymore and was merely a consequence of the technology of that time being so limited that most people never experienced true presence, so whenever someone talked about it, it had different meanings between different people.

Today, presence is either active or not, and everything else in the experience is just different amounts of 'evidence' which helps convince the primitive portion of the unconscious mind to switch on the belief that what it sees is real.