Weighting the Remote Schema: A Sensory-Fidelity Account of What Governs the Depth of Split Embodiment in First-Person View Drone Flight

In first-person view (FPV) drone flight, a pilot wearing video goggles perceives and acts from the vantage of a remote aircraft while their physical body remains on the ground. This paper asks what governs the depth of that experience: why some flight conditions draw the pilot strongly into the remote vantage and others leave them only loosely coupled to it. It proposes a sensory-fidelity account, on which the depth of remote engagement is set by the completeness, quality, and degradation profile of the sensory channels coupling pilot to aircraft. The deeper structure is treated as a weighting variable rather than a relocation: the pilot’s sensorimotor organization is divided between a body-anchored pole and a remote pole, and sensory fidelity sets the moment-to-moment balance of dominance between them, rather than moving a single self from body to drone. A candidate mechanism, precision-weighting under predictive processing, is proposed to unify four determinants of this balance: sensory channel fidelity (control, video, audio, telemetry), tether topology, relational boundary awareness, and environmental co-presence. The account further distinguishes the behavioral and affective signatures that appear when the pilot-aircraft link is severed, including a distinctive waiting state during unresolved signal loss and a longitudinal bond that builds with a specific aircraft over time. Seven testable predictions are derived, each accessible within legal recreational FPV practice. The framework develops and extends a recent proposal that FPV flight produces a divided, or split, form of embodiment. Where that proposal describes the structure — a divided sensorimotor organization with a body-anchored pole and a remote pole — the present paper identifies what sets the balance between them. It is an account of the dial, not a rival map: the map says the division exists; the dial specifies what governs how deep it runs.