ISNESS-D IN NATURE SCIENTIFIC REPORTS
Our citizen science study comparing group VR to psychedelics.
For more info check out the article, “Group VR experiences can produce ego attenuation and connectedness comparable to psychedelics”, which is available open access at www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-12637-z
ISNESS-DISTRIBUTED CITIZEN SCIENCE STUDIES
Isness-Distributed (Isness-D) is the latest development of our Isness research project, inspired by a need for connection during lockdown.
Read about our latest project, working with a global network of citizen scientists to investigate the use of VR to elicit scalable mystical-type experiences which are comparable to pyschedelics https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.07796
How to visually describe ISNESS: A lightpainting exploration
Communicating the experience of ISNESS to those who haven’t experienced it is difficult, and the in-world visuals are so subtle that they do not convey it’s beauty when seen as footage or stills. While developing ISNESS-D it became even more apparent that we wanted imagery to help us describe the experience we were about to offer to people we may never meet in person! This inspired the team to arrange a photoshoot to create images which better illustrate the ISNESS experience.
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.