Does the participant feel located inside the environment?
Scale, viewpoint, motion tracking, and stable spatial relationships support the sensation of being there.
Applications are open for the January 2027 cohortApply
The Science of Digital Presence
Investigating the point at which a rendered environment stops feeling like an image and starts being treated as a place.
The central research question
Which combination of visual coherence, spatial audio, bodily representation, and environmental response makes a person behave as though a virtual place is real?
Research scope
Presence is not a synonym for visual realism. Research distinguishes the sensation of being located inside a virtual place from the plausibility that events inside it are genuinely happening. A visually detailed room can still feel artificial when sound, scale, body movement, object behaviour, or social response contradict one another.
Inviox will examine presence as an observable response rather than a marketing adjective. The study will combine established questionnaires with navigation, memory, hesitation, avoidance, and reaction to controlled events. It will also record discomfort so that a stronger illusion is never treated as automatically better.
Why this question
Presence is built from agreement between the senses.
The experiment separates four factors that are usually changed at the same time.
Do events seem to be happening to the participant?
Objects, characters, and the environment must respond coherently to movement, attention, and action.
Does the virtual body behave like the participant’s body?
Tracked hands, reach, posture, latency, and collision can be more important than visual detail alone.
Initial Inviox study
The Threshold of Being There
Participants will experience matched versions of the same short virtual room. Visual fidelity, spatial audio, bodily representation, and environmental response will be isolated and recombined to identify which changes affect subjective presence and observable behaviour.
How the study will run
- 01
Define presence precisely
Separate place illusion, plausibility, embodiment, attention, comfort, and enjoyment instead of combining them into one score.
- 02
Build matched conditions
Create versions of the same eight-minute environment in which only the tested sensory or behavioural factor changes.
- 03
Pilot for safety and clarity
Test event timing, tracking stability, readability, accessibility, and simulator discomfort before recruiting the main sample.
- 04
Preregister and balance the order
Set hypotheses and exclusions in advance; randomize condition order to reduce learning, fatigue, and novelty effects.
- 05
Record reports and behaviour
Combine validated questionnaires with task accuracy, spatial memory, movement, hesitation, avoidance, and response to a controlled event.
- 06
Report the threshold and the trade-off
Identify which combinations produce meaningful change, which add cost without benefit, and which increase discomfort.
What will be measured
- Place and plausibility ratings
- Body ownership and agency
- Spatial-memory accuracy
- Navigation errors and hesitation
- Response to an unexpected but safe event
- Simulator discomfort
- Frame latency and tracking stability
Participant protections
- Informed consent and immediate stop control
- Accessibility and motion-sickness screening
- No hidden recording of voice or identifiable video
- Anonymized movement and response logs
- A disclosed and approved event-marker protocol
- Participant count determined after pilot power analysis
Research value
Planned outputs
This page does not claim a result. It defines the evidence and public outputs the study is expected to produce.
Presence map
A comparison showing which sensory and behavioural combinations meaningfully change the experience.
Open study scene
A controlled real-time environment that can be repeated by other educators or researchers.
Design guidance
Evidence-based recommendations for allocating effort between graphics, audio, embodiment, and interaction.
Comfort record
A parallel report documenting when stronger sensory intensity increases discomfort or excludes participants.
Evidence base
Existing work that frames the question
Presence research gives Inviox established concepts and measurement approaches; the selected combination and production context remain the subject of our study.
INVIOX / RESEARCH
Help define what “being there” means.
Researchers, designers, audio specialists, and accessibility practitioners can contribute to the study design and review criteria.