in The Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley recounted his experience taking mescaline under the guidance of the psychiatrist Humphrey Osmond. he wrote how it enabled him to glimpse the intrinsic energetic luminosity of matter:
“the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence… flowers shining with their own inner light and all but quivering under the pressure of the significance with which they were charged… [even] the folds of my grey flannel trousers were charged with Isness”
Isness participants are co-located in a virtual environment using the ‘Mudra’ gloves in place of standard VR controllers to allow movement, touch and more intuitive tactile interaction
Isness-C [ISNESS COLOCATED]
Using Multi-Person VR to Design
Peak Mystical-Type Experiences Comparable to Psychedelics
Isness is designed to explore whether VR designed to visualize the energetic essence of matter can elicit perceptual responses comparable to psychedelics.
Studies combining psychotherapy with psychedelic drugs (YDs) have demonstrated positive outcomes that are often associated with YDs' ability to induce 'mystical-type' experiences (MTEs) - i.e., subjective experiences whose characteristics include a sense of connectedness, transcendence, and ineffability. The “Isness” project aims to understand whether phenomenology constructed in VR can produce MTEs similar to YDs.
Isness-C is a co-located multi-person VR journey where participants experience the collective emergence, fluctuation, and dissipation of their bodies as energetic essences. To design and evaluate Isness, we used concepts, methods, and analysis strategies from YD research.
In a 2020 study, we analyzed the responses of Isness participants using a common YD experience questionnaire (MEQ30). The results indicated that Isness participants had MTEs comparable to those reported in double-blind clinical studies after high doses of psilocybin & LSD. Within a supportive setting and conceptual framework, these results suggest that VR phenomenology can create the conditions for MTEs from which participants derive insight and meaning.
PUBLICATIONS
Isness: Using Multi-Person VR to Design Peak Mystical-Type Experiences Comparable to Psychedelics D. R. Glowacki, M. D. Wonnacott, R. Freire, B. R. Glowacki, E. M. Gale, J. E. Pike, T. de Haan, M. Chatziapostolou, O. Metatla, arXiv: 2002.00940, CHI ’20: Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, doi: 10.1145/3313831.3376649,
OMG-VR: Open-source Mudra Gloves for Manipulating Molecular Simulations in VR R. Freire, B. R. Glowacki, R. Roebuck Williams, M. Wonnacott, A. Jamieson-Binnie, D. R. Glowacki arXiv:1901.03532, 2020
