Modeling presence, cognition, and embodied experience across virtual, augmented, and physical environments — grounded in Basic Formal Ontology and Aristotelian genus-differentia definitions.
The Immersion Ontology provides a formal, BFO-aligned specification of immersive phenomena — integrating six major component matrices, 63 defined terms, and explicit relationship mappings across cognitive, emotional, embodied, environmental, and individual-difference dimensions.
Click any card to explore its full definition, BFO category assignment, sub-classes, and relationships.
Each component bears typed relationships to others — part_of, supports, enables, moderates — formally encoded as OBO Relation Ontology properties.
Complete is-a hierarchy from the BFO root through every major component and sub-class. Click nodes to expand or collapse.
Six persistent gaps in immersion research — terminological inconsistency, binary treatment, neglect of individual differences — motivated this BFO-aligned formal solution.
Prior frameworks from Witmer & Singer (1998), Slater (2009), Nilsson et al. (2016), and Agrawal et al. (2019) each captured aspects of immersion but used incompatible vocabularies. The ontology merges them under a single Aristotelian hierarchy with unambiguous genus-differentia definitions.
System-based immersion maps to material entities and environmental processes. Narrative-based immersion maps to information content entities. Challenge-based immersion maps to dispositions and realizable entities — giving each dimension a formally distinct ontological home while preserving functional interrelationships.
Immersion_Tendency is formalized as a BFO Disposition paired with Environmental Immersive Potential (a Quality of the environment) to produce the realized immersive state — making the person-environment interaction tractable for computational reasoning.
An 11-test automated validation suite confirmed zero errors and zero warnings across all 63 defined terms. The OWL-compatible structure supports machine reasoning, cross-study semantic integration, and principled design guidance for immersive system developers.