Presence, engagement and shared attention at a distance — studied against real 360° excursions and live multi-room broadcasts already running in schools, not a lab demo built to look good once.
Event Broadcasting already turns a real location into an explorable 360° panorama and carries a single live feed into every room an audience fills — see the product in full at Event Broadcasting. Here, we study what that actually changes for a learner.
A real virtual field trip to a place a bus can't easily reach is a genuinely different experience from a slideshow of the same place — the open question is how much of that difference shows up in what a student actually retains.
A standing broadcast room carries an event live to a parent at work or a whole other campus — worth studying is whether "live and remote" narrows the gap with "there in person" more than a recording watched later ever could.
The same feed reaching every filled room at once, instead of a separate broadcast per space, is meant to keep a scattered audience feeling like one audience — a claim worth testing directly rather than assuming.
Delivering a live feed straight into a messenger group, toggled per event, is a deliberate design choice — we study where that convenience helps attendance and where it risks feeling like just another notification.
Because the underlying broadcast and VR-excursion technology is already running real school concerts, assemblies and field trips, this research doesn't rely on a synthetic study setup — it observes real events, with a real remote audience and real students in VR headsets, as they actually happen.
That trades some experimental control for something we think matters more here: results that reflect an ordinary school day, not a demo built to perform well once.
Event Broadcasting is the live infrastructure behind this work, already running in schools.
