When we humans are dealing with complex things in our daily lives, for example an artifact, we tend to ascribe different characters to it. This is our way of getting a quick overview of the artifact and makes it understandable to us. The ascribing of character is not based on thorough examination of the object at hand though, but rather on a certain thing, i.e. a characteristic that catches our attention. This characteristic gives us a certain feeling about the artifact and makes it possible for us to make a judgment about it, even if it is a snap one. With this as a starting point we try to identify the different characteristics, which constitute the overall character, i.e. realism. In many visualisations with this objective, realism is juxtaposed with copying static structures, i.e. buildings and streets. This is also a strong contributor to the realism character in the Botnia-track visualisation. In our opinion this is not enough to get a realistic character. We have identified a few other prominent characteristics that also are important contributors to the realism character, for example landmarks, sound, moving objects and narrator voice. Our main conclusion is that if a realistic character is desirable, more than visualisation of static structures is necessary. We found at least five additional characteristics that influence people’s perception of a virtualisation; landmarks, sound, moving objects and narrator voice. In our opinion, all of these are important for a realistic character to emerge and something that designers have to take in to consideration to reach the intended goal.