ISNESS receives best paper award at CHI 2020
Our paper “Isness: Using Multi-Person VR to Design Peak Mystical-Type Experiences Comparable to Psychedelics” (doi:10.1145/3313831.3376649 & arxiv.2002.00940) has been recognized with a best paper award at the 2020 ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing! Less than 1% of all paper submissions receive this award, so it’s really exciting!
The paper describes our efforts adapting “Narupa” (our open source VR software platform) to elicit ‘mystical-type experiences’ comparable to those reported by participants in psychedelic psychotherapy sessions. It builds on a body of work by a number of researchers, including Prof. Roland Griffiths, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at the Johns Hopkins Centre for Psychedelic & Consciousness Research, who has investigated both naturally occurring & drug-induced ‘mystical type experiences’, and also Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris at the Imperial College Centre for Psychedelic Research, who speculated in a March 2018 paper that psychedelics combined with VR might have therapeutic benefits in a neuro-psychopharmacology context.
ERC support
Super excited to announce that the European Research Commision (ERC) has agreed to fund a project called NANOVR (NANOscale design using Virtual Reality) under their ‘Consolidator Grant’ scheme. The ERC’s generous financial support will commence in summer 2020, enabling us to continue our efforts developing the Narupa VR tools as open source community resources, and carry on exploring all sorts of interesting research applications across domains like biochemistry, materials engineering, and nanoscience!