I interviewed Symbiosis/\Dysbiosis: Sentience co-directors Tosca Terán and Brendan Lehman at Venice Immersive 2024. See more context in the rough transcript below.
Here’s their artist’s statement:
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.458] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR Podcast. It's a podcast that looks at the structures and forms of immersive storytelling and the future of spatial computing. You can support the podcast at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. So in today's episode, I'm going to be diving into a piece called Symbiosis, Dysbiosis, Sentience. So This is a piece, Tosca Turan, that I talked to her before in a previous project that she did called Mycelia, where she was hooking up all these biosonification electronics into these mycelia and fungi and using them to create music in this really beautiful place. audio reactor world. This had some similar types of vibes of going into these like mushroom worlds, but it was much more of like an immersive adventure going from like scene to scene, interacting with these different immersive theater actors who were giving you little clues, speaking to you in riddles. And you're trying to go on this epic journey to get into the small sizes, exploring these different mycelia networks. And so there's a lot of different technical integrations in this piece. There's some like PCI with Amuse headbands. There was using Resonite, which is a social VR platform. And there happened to be some technical difficulties throughout the early showings of this piece. And so when I saw it, I didn't have a chance to actually have the audio that was supposed to be in world. And so there's certain things that I missed as I was going along within the experience that I would have had. And there's also some potential transformations that if you do have the muse headband that's all working correctly then if you get into these different flow states uh then your avatar can kind of go through this different transformation as well so there's this kind of connection to the mycelia and the fungi as well so that's what we're coming on today's episode of the voices of vr podcast so this interview with the team behind symbiosis dysbiosis sentience happened on friday august 30th 2024 so with that let's go ahead and dive right in
[00:02:04.478] Tosca Terán: I'm Tosca Turan aka Nanotopia and I work a lot in sound and live performance in VR and working with mycelium and bio data and trying to integrate that into a feeling more immersive type of experiences with haptics and things like that.
[00:02:30.214] Brendan Lehman: I'm Brendan Lehman, aka NeuroChems. I'm a neuroscientist by trade and a lot of my academic work over the years has been in game immersion and immersive experience and exploring the brain in that context. Most of my work is in screen-based video games, but every so often a VR project comes around I can't refuse. They're just as fun, and yeah.
[00:03:03.941] Kent Bye: Great. Maybe each of you could give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into this space.
[00:03:10.103] Tosca Terán: I am a metalsmith and glass artist and work with electronics. And so for decades, I have always been really interested in melding all of that together, like bringing the electronics together. into the metal work and into the glass work and creating installations and immersive installations. I've even founded galleries in New Mexico where I created, they were caves that people would walk into and crystals came out of the floor that held special instruments in them and stuff like that. And I'd say I've been a huge fan of VR since Jaron Lanier and probably first it was Lawnmower Man and What in the World and then learning about Jaron Lanier creating these instruments that were virtual and that really just inspired me so much. Throughout the 90s I was just waiting for the moment I would be able to go into VR and so cut to decades later I think for This moment in particular, it happened in 2020 through the Goethe-Institut's Climate Science Exchange. And that was between Germany, Canada, Mexico and the United States. And it was called New Nature. And they were asking artists, technologists and scientists to envision what the new nature after pandemic restrictions might be. And so they were a bit responsible for getting me into a headset and things like that because they started having meetings in alt space. And I just immediately wanted to create like, how could I bring the world of like my metal art and strange organisms I made and sculpted out of these materials? How could I do that in a VR kind of situation and integrate the sound and things like this?
[00:05:02.374] Brendan Lehman: yeah and yeah through my academic work that work took me to some consciousness conferences like just to take a step back what is a bit more about your context and background and then journey yeah my so through my experience in grad school in neuroscience school my research in particular was looking at we have brain activation during immersion and game immersion and how that relates to meditative states and meditation practice. And through presenting that work at these conferences, I ended up connected to Robin Arnott, the creator of Sound Self, and was really inspired by that project and talking with Robin and just his approach to VR was really inspiring. And shortly after that, graduating, I got a job working at Muse, the EEG headset and meditation app company. And some of the work we were doing after hours was involved with microdose VR. And that was also a really inspiring project. And through my connections at that job, ended up teaching a workshop on using bio data with game engines and yeah and Tosca took that workshop and then yeah Tosca invited me to collaborate on some early versions of the symbiosis dysbiosis project and almost five years later here we are yeah.
[00:06:40.416] Tosca Terán: Yeah, for sure. I should mention that through the Goethe Institutes Climate Science Exchange thing, I had applied for a residency with Dames Making Games and Trinity Square Video in Toronto and received that. And that's how I got a PC desktop because I've always been a Mac user. And a headset, like they were really great. And I earlier, I guess it was 2018 or 2019, Because I've been working with biodata with mycelium, when I saw this workshop, Biodata into Unity, I was just, wait a minute, what? So I had to check that out and see what that was about. And the EEG and things, I figured I must be able to bring biodata from fungus into VR. Yeah.
[00:07:30.994] Kent Bye: So I know that I actually was going back and recounting my own reconnection to VRChat. And it was like during the pandemic. And it was actually Venice and Raindance that started to do more stuff in VRChat. And then I was a juror with Mike Salmon. And then Mike Salmon was curating all these different experiences and keeping me up to date and stuff. And he said, hey, there's this show of Mycelia that's showing at the AmazeFest. It's all virtual during the pandemic. And so I signed up and I saw it. And then Yeah, it just really blew my mind in terms of what you were doing with integrating these mushrooms and fungi and mycelia, like this biosignification and music and all these audio reactive shaders and this beautifully built world. And yeah, there's really mind blowing concepts and ideas that we had a chance to talk about back in 2021 after you showed it again, I think at Venice. And so now I guess maybe you could just set a little bit of context of going from that biosynthetication workshop and then starting to develop that piece that then led into what you're showing here at Venice this year.
[00:08:32.663] Tosca Terán: Yeah. Okay. So what happened was we were working on symbiosis, dysbiosis, and it would have been a standalone type of situation built in Unity. And so to take a break in a way and explore a totally different platform I didn't know about at the time. So I guess it was the end of 2020. I learned about VRChat and was completely blown away by VRChat when I first went into it. And then Brendan, actually, you knew about Amaze and you were like, oh, hey, Amaze Fest is like taking applications or something like that. And at the time, I was also collaborating with Sarah Lisa, who is known as Root. And she happens to know Thorsten and stuff. So I remember speaking to Thorsten. He was like, you had me at Mushrooms. Of course, what I did there was we were just streaming in the audio. And in my studio in Toronto, I should say our basement music room at the time because of pandemic restrictions. was using haptic like sleeves and so I cultivated some mycelium and the container it was in I placed the haptics around that and so people could go into mycelia like we I worked with the MVC and A group of incredible developers came together. I don't know if I should mention like everybody, but anyways, by name or if MVC is enough. But Sarah Lisa and I put together a mood board. And so it was like I thought Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Crystal Cave. And there'd be these strange organisms in there like playing music or something. And you could do some dance performances there. So people could come into the world, and they could touch the avatar, which would send triggers to these haptics, which would vibrate the container. The mycelium would react. You could hear that sonically, and you'd see it, obviously, through this audio-reactive, incredible world, just so beautiful. That Tyson X, Face, Deke, and ToneTastic helped put that together. And just incredible work, just... yeah blood sweat and tears and so that was like i like to say it's a branch off of symbiosis dysbiosis because we were still really trying to figure out the look and what we really wanted to do there it started with photogrammetry working with photographer artist allison moore who is from like saturn island in british columbia and i met her through the climate science exchange in concordia But it's still really tricky, I think, in a way to work with point clouds and things and how trying to make them move and really interactive. They're gorgeous to look at. And then from there, after Mycelia really took off and people really loved it and we loved performing it, I just started having different thoughts about maybe it needed to be in a social VR platform. But unfortunately, I think it was around that time VRChat had shut down the ability to modify the game engine. So people told me about Neos. And then I thought, oh, Neos was really great. But long story short, I was told, don't do it because Neos could fall and not be around anymore. And it was actually last year I was a world guide hop for Venice, taking people through the in-competition worlds of Horse Canyon and Complex 7. And I was bringing the Metamovie crew through Complex 7 and somebody was commenting on how beautiful the space is and some of the shaders. and saying, oh, all of this is about to change with Resonate. And I was, what's Resonate? The moment I was done with that tour, I took my headset off, went to the Patreon and became a supporter of Resonate. And then, yeah, I've just been building this world in Resonate. I connected with a developer named Rix through the MMC awards that took place actually in 2023 in NEOS.
[00:12:39.286] Kent Bye: It's a monthly Metaverse competition with Medra.
[00:12:42.609] Tosca Terán: yeah with medra they had asked me to do a performance and so we did a little homage to mycelia they created a swimming pool mycelia has a big pond in the center with a crystal stage that i would stand on top of and perform so they made it's like a kid's swimming pool with some coral like floaties in it and they had a rock and my rock floated up into the sky as i performed And people would joke that I was going back to VRChat, but I would say, no, I'm going to Resonate. And Rix and I had such an incredible rapport. And Rix is a genius. In fact, even Medra and everybody still joke that he might be an AI, but I'm probably one of the first that have actually met Rix in human form. And he's not an AI, but he's just incredible. And he helped a lot with level design and just thinking like any idea. That's what I love about Resonate and NEOS is what I liked is the collaborative ability to be within the world and iterate within the world, have everybody there. Brendan can be there and Rix and Brendan are looking at different codes and putting them together. Like how can we bring in this bio data? I'm looking at how can I make stack layers better? of textures to make it like a shader you might use in VRChat or different things like that. I really love that ability to work in real time with everybody and everyone's based around the world too that's involved.
[00:14:10.057] Kent Bye: Yeah, it's a big, strong, kind of open sandbox. It's a tool that is really geared towards makers and creators and developers to be in VR and make VR. So it sounds like that was a key part of that collaborative process to not be outside of VR making stuff, to actually be together and be able to build out this world.
[00:14:27.232] Tosca Terán: Yes, absolutely. Because we have tried to build in unity and then pass that off in plastic or like a collaborative way you can do that or GitHub or something. And there's always like disconnect. But being able to be in the same space together is... and create and then have the avatar creators in there and have friends be able to drop in and even though you know we're using different technology like the EEG device and things and they can't have that on we can still have them come through the world and see how it works and things like that.
[00:15:02.956] Kent Bye: Okay. And so it sounds like that the symbiosis dysbiosis has been going for three or four years, long running project. And have you been involved with it the whole time? And maybe just catch up for what you've been working on through all this time with the mycelia branch off and then yeah, just what you were doing in the interim there.
[00:15:20.914] Brendan Lehman: Yeah, sure. Yeah, back in 2020, the initial idea of symbiosis, dysbiosis started in Unity and my background's more in those game engines. So we had a lot of like fun just plugging the EEGs in and messing with the data and seeing what we could connect it to different shaders, like manipulating objects and just driving different things in the world and getting really like psychedelic and fun with it. and just trying different experiments to create these feedback loops where the experience responded to how immersed you got in it and then would deepen the experience further. So it would just send you deep in a kind of unique and more powerful way than maybe would otherwise be possible. So we did a lot of those initial tests experimentation with the design concepts and things and yeah we took it pretty far and in parallel also working with the data from the mushrooms in the same way that Tosca makes the music with it and working with the same data and then it just developed into oh maybe we can affect the game environment at the same time that the music's being played and just oh this would be a really cool installation and then It just spiraled from there. And then, yeah, we took that pretty far. We had a show in Toronto that was really fun. And then, yeah, the lockdown happened and things shifted onto these VR platforms. And Tosca invited me along to a few of some like education workshops that Nios would put on. and we gave some talks to the NEOS community, and everyone was really stoked about the idea of that. And as things shifted to Resonite, it was a little bit out of my element, just because I was used to Unity, but Rix was so amazing. As you said, I learned so much so fast, and Rix is such a wizard. I could just say, oh, maybe we could do this, and then 30 seconds later, after he would whip around, it would happen. and our iterative process was so fast just because of the way the collaboration in NEOS works. We took pretty much everything we'd tried in Unity, made its way to NEOS, and then some, and it just got polished, and we made it here. I'm really grateful for how that process turned out. I still have some ideas about things we could do and ways we could deepen it, and I feel like we're just getting started a little bit.
[00:18:02.261] Kent Bye: Nice. Yeah, that's certainly my interview with Medra. I did a deep dive into the evolution of Neos, then into Resonate, and then how there's like what Frukshias calls like a real-time synchronization engine where you can be in VR and it's like live editing while being rendered at the same time. So there's no real differentiation between edit mode and the save mode. So it just facilitates that type of evolution. dynamic process that it feels like in some ways very metaphorical to the type of organic emergent type of behaviors of the fungi and mycelia itself so i can see the resonance there
[00:18:35.839] Tosca Terán: yeah and rix too is on the board of the creator jam and generally is this german shepherd and the more i've gotten to know rix i really understand that german shepherd like very caring loyal and helpful rix is really the glue of a lot of creator jams because of their ability to just help and oh we have the technology and But also, for me, at first, Neos, I'd never even touched really code or anything in there. It just was the menu system and everything. It's quite convoluted and very deep. And you're like, oh my gosh, I don't even know. Like, where do I begin? With your developer tool and the pen tools and this tool and that tool. And Resonate is very similar in that way but thankfully there are mods that you can add search features and for me that changed everything. I'm not a whiz or any kind of coder or anything in Unity but I understand the inspector window and things like that. So for me I started to be able to translate that into Resonate and having that search feature helped me suddenly I could do these things where it's also node-based programming and I'm really into touch designer and so I could also get a bit of a handle on that but yeah I think that it's true because Brendan and I would talk often about how do we do this what might take us three to six months to figure it out let's ask Rix because Rix could probably do it in 30 seconds to 10 minutes and And it's pretty amazing. You really can do a lot in that. And because you can modify the engine and we can bring in any type of sensor, we were first working with WebSockets and Node-RED to bring the biodata through. And the whole thing is trying to cut back all these different, like, third-party, like having to jump from, you know, this app to the PC to that app, then to Node-RED, you know, then your command line. I'm like, command lines? Like, I'm learning how to do this. But so over maybe I'd say this past year, it's just been pretty incredible for me anyways, as someone that went from zero to now being able to build worlds. Most of this world too, I should say a lot of it is my sculpts and things in ShapeLab and like Substance. modeler and doing all this and that and then having to bring it into Blender and figure out how to retopologize things and I must admit I wish there was a way that you could just go straight from some of these. I love sculpting in VR very much and then just bring that like straight in. But yeah, so most of that. And then we had a couple of Avatar creators help because the Avatar that we're working with, my whole concept there was how people might see their connections with nature and the human holobiont. So how we don't see all the microscopic life forms around us wriggling and moving on you, on the table, in the air between us, on the wall. Probably a good thing that our vision isn't like that or... but it's done in a very science fiction way I'll say for this experience but yeah so you connect with the mycelium with your brain waves and when that wavelength connects with the mushrooms wavelength or I should say mycelium then these transformations start to happen and that's the symbiosis because the opposite is dysbiosis yeah
[00:22:19.392] Kent Bye: When you say transformation, because when I went into this VR experience, there's a lot of integrations that you're doing that is probably one of the most ambitious pieces I've seen, where it has a Muse headband. There's a VR headset. You've got a lot of analog music that is coming in. You've got some mushrooms, mycelia, potentially some sort of connection to them. And so there's a lot of data sources. But where is that data from the Muse headband going to? How is it impacting and modulating the environment or the experience of the people that are going through this kind of adventure?
[00:22:53.654] Brendan Lehman: Yeah, so Muse were very gracious enough to sponsor the project and allow us the access to the sort of back end metrics on their app. And it's their trade secret proprietary metric that sort of integrates EEG bands and things in this engineered signal processed way that their engineers have figured out and comes up with this score that accurately reflects in a research backed way your meditative state and use integrating my work my thesis work that meditative state does accurately reflect like a flow in a game context so We combine that with the mushrooms activity. So it reflects the player's immersion in the experience. So as you deepen your experience in the world, interacting with things and the music responding to you and the effects in the world also responding in the same way the music does, again, creates those feedback loops I mentioned. yeah the bringing all these data streams into the worlds was definitely a like technical challenge and getting everything like to stream around in a stable way but it took a lot of testing like again it took years actually to get it sorted and some of that time tasca mentioned like taking a break to work in vr chat at that time in vr chat there were some technical limitations that kept us from trying it out in VRChat just the way the data streams work but as we mentioned like being able to do it in Resonate as the social VR sort of technology improves over time really helped us out and
[00:24:47.338] Tosca Terán: too that I think it was this year because we were working with, like I said, Node-RED and things like that. Just by happenstance, Fruxious apparently had a pet project with Open Sound Control. So Open Sound Control suddenly became this native thing in Resonate. We thought, oh, we can completely get rid of Node-RED and work with open sound control. And Brendan's really, you're well versed in open sound control. So that is how we started to bring in, because also how the muse metrics works that way as well. So we could work with the bio data from the fungus that way. So we are like averaging it, right? We're creating like there's frequencies that the MUSE metrics hit, like these numerical values, and then the mycelium similarly. So of course we're anthropomorphizing that into a positive or a negative. So when your brain waves kind of hit this threshold, these transformations in the avatar can begin. Or similarly, if you connect with another person in the environment. And so that's something that there's research papers on and stuff like that talking about entrainment. And when people are on the same wavelength, so to speak, it turns out they are. And so we later can look at the data, like the brainwave data. And just the other day, I think Brendan was saying like, wow, these people were almost completely aligned at a certain point. And so you start to see like certain connections happening between you and that the other people don't see. But what you do all witness is if somebody's transforming. And there's sounds that happen for each transformation. There's a little esoteric stuff that I put in there as well. So each transformation, there's five stages of transformation. And even though it's not a meditative or mindfulness exercise, I was thinking of like chakras and stuff like that with the five and five points. So there's five different tones that happen. And I was thinking of binaural beats.
[00:27:04.770] Kent Bye: Is the tone coming through the audio channel? OK, because when I went through it, my audio wasn't working, so I wasn't noticing any of those tones or anything.
[00:27:14.602] Tosca Terán: Unfortunately, but what I hear, this happens a lot, is there can be all these technical challenges. So we're working for the festival with Quest 3s, but most of us, when we've been iterating together in Resonate, are wearing index headsets or big screen or Vive or things like that. So we're usually very tethered, but what I really like about the Quest 3 is the resolution is fantastic. and also to a certain degree they might have been more readily available and things like that to use in an environment like this. But we also knew because of the live soundtrack or soundscape accompaniment that it would be best to have people wear headphones and either isolating headphones or sound cancelling headphones. And we did some tests in Toronto using sound isolating. And I'm still not very clear, to be honest, why there were some feedback issues. It could have been proximity and mics open. So my concern was that feedback can be horrible, right? It hurts your ears. So we are working with sound canceling. However, we're not familiar with the sound canceling, but also how the Quest wants to see it. And there's three levels of volume we have to go through. So it's Steam, the PC... Oculus and then Resonate. So we have to make sure all the volumes are the same and that there were some things that happened unfortunately the day you came through that we had to switch power and that really set the tone unfortunately for the whole day. We were really ready to go. Everything was running. perfectly and we had all the headsets set up, all the audio set up, and we had the switch powered. So that meant we had to kill everything and literally start all over. And it had taken us a while to get everything up and running perfectly. simply due to all these different things pretty much just with the quest. Resonate, the only issue we've had with Resonate maybe was just I don't really think anything other than just some items not being completed up to making sure something's culled on somebody's face so they can see where they're going. And that comes from the final transformation. You've become this full-on holobiont, and you're swimming through the mycelium network. And there's particles that look like stars, so we're all made of stardust. But if you stand still, you look like this space alien squid jellyfish thing. But if you stand still and then you move, you'll see a human form still there in this star field. So we need to cull that. So that means blocking off your eye where your lenses are. Otherwise it'll fill with stars and you can't see anything. So just things like that we needed to finish. Because I will say, again, Rix is really amazing as far as being able to really work with that engine and knows its limitations and what we can fix to make the performance aspect. We've culled everything and everything. I know Resonate's still working on performance to make it really rock for everybody and not have issues. And I just think we're super, I don't think, I know, we're like super fortunate to have Ricks with us.
[00:30:47.379] Brendan Lehman: This was our premiere, so you can only go so far having your friends come over to test it before you get to the show and things happen that you couldn't predict. Sometimes it takes a while to work the kinks out in the first day or two, but people had a great time today.
[00:31:08.167] Tosca Terán: really incredible performance it's really based on how people impact the shared environment and how we communicate with one another how we interact with one another how we recognize that we're all connected without wanting to sound super new age or anything but we really are a part of nature we're not separate from it though we tend to separate ourselves from it and think of nature as the weather or something like that so And also working out how we really introduce, okay, we need to talk to the people and reiterate what this is about for them to better understand this is what you're coming into. You can work together and you can talk to each other and listen to the actors and follow what they're saying. But again, like there were audio issues. We've ironed those out, it seems. So it'd be, you're welcome to come back through. Even without the EEG or anything like that. Like it's... It is a really large world. So part of the actor thing is the kind of a whimsical way of storytelling. I'm thinking to get people out of, no pun intended, the mindset that they have this EEG device on and just see how they move through it and connect. How quickly are they connecting with the environment if they connect with the environment? Are they speaking to each other? And that's actually been challenging. And I think it's maybe the nature of the festival too. And people are going to experiences that are singular, individual, or they're going into big worlds that are just, you just walk through the world. So this is really more than just multiplayer. It really is a social interaction with your fellow travelers into the virtual old growth forest.
[00:32:56.900] Brendan Lehman: The tone of the project is similar to going out into the forest and taking a walk and being meditative and contemplative and trying to wind down a little bit and trying to convey that at an extremely large international festival can be challenging.
[00:33:19.813] Kent Bye: Yeah, I wanted to just give a bit of a trip report from my experience in terms of the content and the experience. Because there's a lot of moving parts to this piece. There's a lot of integrations. There's the Muse headband. There's getting into Resonite. Resonite has its own menu system that can be confusing sometimes. I've thankfully been in Resonite enough to be able to navigate that. So there's a music that's playing and then we go into this space where we're just hanging out waiting for everything to get started. The only real indication that I saw of my brainwaves was seeing a screen with a graph of brainwaves but there was four people and four colors and I didn't know what color I was and I didn't know what my brainwaves were and so from my experience at least that was the only indication I had of the brainwaves because I didn't have any other audio or any sort of trace of my neurological agency throughout the piece. And then we go into the next phase where we start the adventure into this world of Mycelia, where there's like this moth who gets us on other moths. We go to this other place where there's like a series of different adventures where there was in some ways a surprising open-endedness to be like, go explore around and figure out what you have to do next. And then... encountering little helpers along the way who were like immersive theater actors who were like guiding us or giving us little clues and solving riddles and trying to get to the top of this whole. So it was like a whole adventure where there's eating things, where there's like psychedelic shader type of effects that are happening. And so, and then, yeah, also just the live music being playing in the background as well. So at the very end, I got into this place where I was going through a maze and I just, I thought to myself, I'm going to like, I'm just going to go continue to explore around like I've explored in other places. And then apparently there was things I needed to see or hear, and I didn't hear those cues, and I got lost in a maze. And so the ending of my experience was getting lost in a maze where I would have been guided towards how to get to a portal to go into this other realm. It felt like it's an open world adventure. It's very open-ended. You've got some guidance along the way and some mushroom themes that are happening throughout. Really expansive world of getting into the mushrooms. And there's actually mushrooms that are there. And then there's also audience that are there watching this whole thing happen. That was a little bit of my kind of memory capture of my experiences. But I'd love to hear any other thoughts of this kind of journey that you're taking people on.
[00:35:35.024] Tosca Terán: Okay. it's actually a loop and so if you heard if you could have heard what's happening whenever you eat some of those psychedelics or there's a slime mold field you go through and there's crystals within the slime mold when you eat those a depth map kind of shader happens and you hear moth panning in your head so it's a bit psychedelic saying, look for sounds. And if you look around and you eat more, you see these organisms moving and showing you, like, go in this direction. If you go in that direction, after you've met this character called Slug, who speaks to you and talks to you about this golden spore, like, you must find the golden spore, Moth sends you, let me backpedal a little, so quickly, Moth sends you on, well, asks you, you know, the forest needs your help. Will you go find the mycelial entity? And then Moth says to climb the steps of Ganoderma to find the mycelial entity. You meet Slug. Slug tells you about this golden spore that to get into the mycelial entity, you have to give this golden spore to this other character called Cornutus, which is a fungus beetle. And then something happens to Slug, and these other things are there as little guideposts. You find this metallic psychedelic mushroom, these sunbeams come out, and there's the golden spore. So it's tricky because it's like, are people going to eat those spores, or are they going to remember? Slug also speaks in riddles, and it's very Alice in Wonderland in that respect. What I was thinking is, it's just, what is this thing even saying? but maybe you'll remember after you find that golden spore like oh okay or people eat them there's a portal or a strange organism people step through that and then they're in this totally psychedelic area and everything's getting larger around you so it's like you're starting to get more smaller and smaller to enter this microscopic world of the mycelium network you meet beetle or cornutus played by michael barngrover and and maybe you have that golden spore or you've eaten it or lost it and beetle calls you on that and asks you what are you doing here because they recognize you're human you shouldn't be there but you look a little odd and different because maybe one of you's transformed or something beetle is the guardian of the steps of ganoderma opens those up this huge structure opens they can either help you by you climb onto their back or you go up the ramp I want to say, and this is partially due to timing, the Resonite menu is not a part of the experience. Only people that know the Resonite menu open the Resonite menu and start to fly or this or that. That has been entirely shut down now because you are not supposed to go in that. So if you heard me saying dysbiosis, that's me saying eject that person right now. but that didn't happen. So you climb the steps or you're helped by beetle and there's a portal underneath one of the giant Ganoderma on the tree. You walk in that, you get beamed into the mycelium network through the mushroom and the tree and swimming a literal swim mechanic where you have to move your arms or fly. And it is a huge network. So there's other things that are moving around in there. And maybe an actor is swimming around as a rogue DNA. And you come to a huge arena, which might be a bit reminiscent of mycelia, like it's a large area. And there's some strange things growing there. Electricity, if you put your hands out, there's neurons because mycelium does very much look like cortical columns or dark matter. Like I'm trying to make all these connections with things. And I say some words, this gigantic organism opens up inside of the space, showing you the evolution of man and there's like these gifts playing and stuff like that. And then I say something else and open a singularity and everybody gets pulled into that black hole and brought right back to the onboarding space. So I was trying to create a loop, like maybe it never happened or you were in a dream or... And... I think now knowing what we've nailed the tech issues pretty much we know okay this is what's been causing issues and if we can get people to come through and talk to each other and maybe just slow down a little bit going through the whole thing I think that We'll have more moments like we did today where I can fully play with the mycelium because the mycelium is making a lot of sound and there's field recordings in there. So you hear the forest and everything like that. I just, it's fantastic. It felt really great to see all these people really working together and waiting for one person was having difficulties, but then like no one left behind. but yeah so it is there sorry there is a loop feature yeah I'm very much a big fan of Mobius like Jean Giraud's comics and things like that and there's always like a looping kind of feature in where you've started you end up
[00:40:58.533] Brendan Lehman: Just to add a little bit extra to what Tosca was saying there with respect to the EEG and we tried really hard to not make a meditation mechanic in and of itself because not everyone, we wouldn't expect people to be that experienced of a meditator to be able to get into a deeply calm state with a headset on and a room full of people so the fleeting, maybe more fleeting moments of Calmness sort of cumulatively add together to create your avatar transformation and it was more of a way to color the experience than maybe be a gimmicky hang up that might be a kind of a roadblock in the flow of the experience. We tried to not make it be that gimmick in the forefront and more of an added thing that may deepen the experience if you've got it in you, yeah.
[00:41:53.410] Kent Bye: Yeah, that makes sense. And yeah, I guess as we start to wrap up, I'd love to hear what each of you think the ultimate potential of immersive media and all these integration with neurotech and bio integrations and... what that might be able to enable.
[00:42:09.522] Brendan Lehman: That's a tough one. I mean, all these technologies are definitely in progress. And there's still lots of work to do in the way signal processing engineering develops and the way these things can become more of a reliable stream of data that can be used reliably in an experience. It's not a perfect system by any means. There's always some signal quality problem or something that can happen as it goes, but I think as these technologies develop, they can, especially with things like OpenBCIs, Galeas, and all these like big budget projects that are coming out the future is bright for it and definitely can create some like really deep things that can really maybe have some therapeutic potential too like and really help some people cope with some anxieties and various things that interactive and like fun way that's not just going to therapy
[00:43:17.018] Tosca Terán: I'd be interested in how it might be able to, because I think there are some things happening. I don't know with EEG, but for like stroke victims and things like that. I know that when, for instance, for me, when I go through and I look later at the Muse app, it shows my theta waves. It's like I've been asleep the whole time I've been in VR. And usually my EEG is flatlining, but the moment I turn away or I'm talking to somebody, explaining something, people are like, wow, look at your data is like going crazy. I think initially people can have a lot of fun with it and moving objects and making things like trigger things and stuff like that but I think that yeah I would say on a therapeutic level and being able to help people because we can also look at the time I should have mentioned that early on we're not collecting like people's names or anything but we can look back at the app and we can see timing like okay here they are in the onboarding and then for instance there was one woman that was in 80 78 to 80 percent calm state the entire her entire experience. And we can see when that happened. And then you can see the time. So I think that kind of thing, if you can look at in real time, that's of interest, perhaps, in like, where are points where people are being lost, or they're just getting more into this or, yeah, it'd be interesting, because OpenBCI has that incredible headset. with vario and things and if that could become more artist friendly affordably i think it's like twenty two thousand dollars or something like that so thousand usd we had been shortlisted for that but anyways until that price but yeah i think that letting artists get a hold of things like that also just makes things more interesting yeah
[00:45:08.300] Kent Bye: Awesome. Is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the broader immersive community?
[00:45:15.324] Brendan Lehman: Personally, I still feel like it's young, and I'm just excited to see it develop and see where it goes, and happy to be along for the ride.
[00:45:25.595] Tosca Terán: Thank you for this and thank you too. To all be meeting on the Venice Island is just so unimaginable that it's happening. It's still very surreal and it's fantastic. So yeah, I think just I'm looking forward to all the new things to come with technology and integrating it so it's not so many bits and pieces having to possibly not work.
[00:45:54.048] Kent Bye: Yeah, with those increased integrations, there's more potential points of failure. And yeah, it's an inherent trade-off to be ambitious on that cutting edge and then have to have more debugging of all that stuff. So it pains me greatly to have not seen the full experience. And so it saddens me that that happened. But I guess that happens at these festivals. So it's to be expected every now and again. But I really appreciate the vision and ambition of all the different integrations and experimentations with this and being inspired by the mycelium mushrooms and fungi and all the kind of that same emergent interconnected vibe that is embedded within the organisms itself i feel like you're carrying through that spirit for how you're even making this project and pulling in all these different threads and trying to weave it all together so even if you know my experience had some of those technical difficulties you know i can see the the promise of where it's going to continue to iterate and I hope to see it again at some point in its full version. But yeah, it seems like it's going to continue to evolve and grow over time as well. So yeah, thanks again for joining me today to help share a little bit more about each of your journeys and a little bit more about creating symbiosis, dysbiosis. Thank you.
[00:47:03.896] Brendan Lehman: Thank you, Kent. Thanks, Kent.
[00:47:06.960] Kent Bye: Thanks again for listening to these episodes from Venice Immersive 2024. And yeah, I am a crowdfunded independent journalist. And so if you enjoy this coverage and find it valuable, then please do consider joining my Patreon at patreon.com slash voices of VR. Thanks for listening.
