DET Research — HOTE-RS-01 / GEO-01

Most people have had the experience: the sense that someone is looking at them, without any obvious visual cue. That feeling has been studied before, with mixed and methodologically contested results — and this project treats the honest prior as sceptical, not favourable.

DET asks a narrower question than whether the feeling is real. It asks: if such a perception occurs at all, does it carry directional information? Can a person who does not conventionally know where the observer is produce a measurable directional response that corresponds to where that observer actually was?

01 — The name

What DET stands for

Directional Eye Transmission

The name labels the hypothesis under test. It is not an assertion that any transmission occurs, and the frozen protocol makes no mechanism claim — it does not assert a physical carrier, it does not invoke quantum field theory, and it does not interpret a later result as proof of a named process. The only claims that can succeed or fail here are behavioural.

02 — Why direction

From a yes/no question to a geometric one

Earlier work almost always asked a binary question: watched, or not watched. That question is hard to answer cleanly, because a yes/no report carries response bias, and bias has no direction to hide in.

The older question

“Did you feel someone looking at you?” Two possible answers, and a tendency to say yes can inflate the result on its own.

The DET question

“Was your response oriented toward where the observer actually was?” A continuous direction, scored against a known position.

The transmitter occupies a known bearing, which supplies ground truth. Every response can then be expressed as an angular error against that truth. An ambiguous subjective question becomes a constrained geometric one — and chance is a uniform circular model, not a 50/50 guess.

03 — Who is who

TX and RX are two people

TX transmitter

A human participant, at a known experimental location, who intentionally directs gaze toward the receiver. Not a device, not a screen, not a stimulus of any kind.

RX receiver

A human participant whose directional response is being measured, and who is not told the transmitter’s position or whether any look is happening.

04 — What happens

One trial, in plain terms

1. 01A position is chosenThe schedule selects one mark on the ring — or selects a sham trial, in which nobody looks at all. The receiver is told neither.
2. 02A look, or no lookOn a real trial the transmitter stands on that mark and intentionally looks at the receiver. On a sham trial there is no look. The receiver is not told which is happening.
3. 03The receiver reports a directionNear the end of the trial the receiver commits one continuous bearing — a direction around the circle — not a yes or a no.
4. 04The angle is the dataThe difference between the reported bearing and the true mark is the directional error. That single angle, collected over many trials, is what gets analysed.

This is repeated many times in a session — 200 trials for the confirmatory session, of which roughly 40 trials are sham controls with no look at all. The research question is whether reported directions systematically align with the transmitter’s actual position beyond what chance allows.

The full design — timing, blinding, exclusion rules, randomisation — is on the study page. Nothing above replaces it.

05 — Conceptual streams

Three possible streams, and one that decides the result

A conceptual model has three possible data streams. They are not equal in status, and the frozen Phase 1 protocol does not record all three. The difference is the single most important thing to get right before reading the protocol.

Transmitter gaze and head orientationNot instrumented in the frozen protocol

Where TX is actually looking, and which way their head faces.

The protocol handles a transmitter who fails to look through a monitor-flagged exclusion code observed by a human, not through a measurement. Instrumenting TX gaze is a candidate addition, not a current requirement.

Receiver gaze and head orientationOptional quality control — never confirmatory

Where RX looks, and whether their head turns.

A wearable export may fill the bearing column only when the dial cell is empty, and its sidecar carries a confirmatory gate that is permanently false. The study is designed to run with no eye tracker at all.

Ground-truth transmitter positionGround truth by construction

The assigned bearing the transmitter was scheduled to occupy.

This is a room-fixed floor mark chosen by the schedule and measured against a room reference. It is not a GPS fix, and no GPS appears anywhere in the research record.

06 — The programme

Three stages of research

1. Program Stage 1

   Does a directional effect exist at all?

   Establish — or falsify — a reproducible directional response under controlled conditions.

   It does not test, and cannot prove, any physical carrier.

   This is the stage the frozen protocol describes.

2. Program Stage 2

   What conditions change the effect?

   If an effect repeats, constrain it: determine what preserves, reduces, changes, or eliminates it.

   Constraining an effect narrows the possible explanations. It still does not identify a mechanism.

   Broader Stage 2 follow-up is conditional on a repeatable Stage 1 result.

3. Program Stage 3

   What physical process, if any, correlates with it?

   Only after a behavioural effect survives rigorous testing and replication: collect synchronised physical sensor streams and search for repeatable correlates.

   No claim is made anywhere in this project that such a signal exists.

   Long-range. Not started, and not reachable without Stage 1.

07 — What it would mean

The inference ladder

A positive Stage 1 result would support a statement of roughly this shape, and no wider one:

“Under these controlled conditions, receiver responses were directionally associated with transmitter location beyond the preregistered chance model.”

That result would not establish any of the following:

• an unknown frequency
• a new force
• an eye-generated physical carrier
• quantum effects
• transmission of conscious content
• biophotons
• paranormal causation
• any named mechanism whatsoever

The gap between “directional information was detected” and “we know what carries it” is the whole of Program Stage 3, and it is not closed by a behavioural test however clean.

A null result is scientifically useful. If the confirmatory test does not reject the null, the study will report that it failed to detect directional concentration at the locked alpha. That result would not, by itself, establish the practical absence of an effect. Both outcomes are reportable.

08 — How the work is sequenced

Measure first. Explain later.

The programme can be ambitious while the first study stays deliberately narrow. A first study does not have to explain a phenomenon; it has to answer the smallest useful falsifiable question about it. Mechanism is pursued only if the behavioural result survives rigorous testing.

Aimed at a long-range question, the work still produces usable science if it reaches only the first stage — a controlled, preregistered measurement of a directional question that has never been asked this way, reported whichever way it comes out.

09 — Present tense

What DET is today

• a falsifiable directional hypothesis about human perception
• a controlled experimental framework built to test it
• a directional extension of an older question — not a claim that the older question was ever settled
• designed to yield an interpretable result whether that result is positive or null
• focused first on measurement, and only later on mechanism

No human data exists. Nothing has been submitted to, approved by, or agreed with any institution. The current state, gate by gate, is on the status page.