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With the availability more cheap and powerful computing, interest in the use of mixed-reality experiments has grown in the engineering and physical sciences. These experiments consist of a simulated, or virtual model coupled directly to physical experiments. Within the physical experiment, there is a good deal of noise since it is connected to the real world. In contrast, the virtual part of the coupled system represents a somewhat idealized version of reality in which noise can be eliminated entirely, or at least well characterized. Thus, mixed-reality systems have very skewed sources of uncertainty spread through the entire system.

Motivated by physical experiments, we consider a generic model of a mixed-reality system, and show how noise in the physical part of the system can influence the virtual dynamics through a large fluctuation, even when there is no noise in the virtual components.The virtual large fluctuation happens while the real dynamics exhibits only small random oscillations. We quantify the effects of uncertainty by showing how characteristic timescales of noise induced switching scale as a function of the coupling between the real and virtual parts of the experiment.