ISNESS-D [ISNESS distrubuted]

Isness-D (or Isness Distributed) is an extension of Isness-C: it’s a multi-person VR experience where participants dial in from remote ‘nodes’ to meet others in a guided meditative ritual. It was developed during lockdown to address issues of alienation and loneliness in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Unlike Isness-C, where participants were co-located, Isness-D participants would log in remotely, joining one another in the same virtual space. The subsequent citizen-science study comprised of 29 individual sessions, with 109 total participants, spanning 14 nodes across two continents in which the molecular physics calculations were run on one of the three possible servers (London, Frankfurt, or Washington D.C).

Isness-distributed' (Isness-D) harnesses the unique affordances of distributed multi-person VR to blur conventional self-other boundaries. Within Isness-D, groups of participants co-habit a shared virtual space, collectively experiencing their bodies as luminous energetic essences with diffuse spatial boundaries. It enables moments of 'energetic coalescence', a new class of embodied phenomenological intersubjective experience where bodies can fluidly merge, enabling participants to have an experience of including multiple others within their self-representation.

To evaluate Isness-D, we adopted a citizen science approach, coordinating an international network of Isness-D 'nodes'. We analyzed the results using 4 different self-report scales previously applied to analyze subjective YD phenomenology (the inclusion of community in self scale, ego-dissolution inventory, communitas scale, and the MEQ30 mystical experience questionnaire). Despite the complexities associated with a distributed experiment like this, the Isness-D scores on all 4 scales were statistically indistinguishable from recently published YD studies, demonstrating that distributed VR can be used to design intersubjective STEs where people dissolve their sense of self in the connection to others.