More on VR for consciousness hacking

I was talking to Biff today about uses for various senses in the VR consciousness hacking idea. It occurred that smell is very low-bandwidth, but strongly tied to memory, and thus might be useful for maintaining state across multiple sessions.

Also, apparently Terence McKenna was also interested in using VR for similar purposes. I'm not sure if that makes the idea more or less credible.

In other news, the laser glove is about 80% done; all I need to do is wire it up. I need to talk to some sort of EE person about how to do this without exploding the lasers from overcurrent.

Idea : fractally compressed AR

This is an augmented reality idea I had while walking around looking at trees after Drop Day. Basically, one would wear a VR headset that displays imagery from the outside world, except that occurrences of similar visual objects get replaced with the exact same object, or the same object perturbed in some synthetic way.

So, for example, the leaves of a tree would get replaced with fractals that are generated to look like leaves. As another example, areas of the same "texture" could be identified (basically, areas with little low-frequency spatial component, possibly after a heuristically determined perspective correction). Then a random small exemplar patch is selected and used to fill the entire area with Wei & Levoy / Ashikhmin-style synthetic textures.

The point of all of this is that you're essentially applying lossy compression (by identifying similar regions and discarding the differences between them), then decompressing and feeding the information into the brain (and thus mind). Working on the assumption that consciousness essentially involves a form of lossy compression which selects salient features and attenuates others, you can determine the degree and nature of this compression by determining when a similar, externally applied compression becomes noticeable or incapacitating.

My guess is that there will be a wide range of compression levels where reality is still manageable and comprehensible but develops a highly surreal character. Of course to experiment meaningfully you'd need a good enough AR setup that the hardware itself doesn't introduce too much distortion, although you could also control for this by having people use the system without software distortions.

idea : VR for consciousness hacking

Ooh, interpolating tessellations is an awesome idea. You'd basically have to interpolate under a constraint, that some parts of the spline line up with other parts. But since this constraint is satisfied at all reference points, I think it would be doable.

I've been thinking lately about virtual reality as a tool for consciousness hacking. VR as played out in the mid-90's was mostly about representing realistic scenes poorly and at great expense. But I think we can do a lot with abstract (possibly fractal-based) virtual spaces, and the hardware is much better and cheaper now. The kit I'm imagining consists of:

• 3D stereoscopic head-mounted display with 6DOF motion tracker (like this)
  
• High-quality circumaural headphones (like these)
• Homemade EEG (like this)
  
• Possibly other biofeedback devices (ECG, skin resistance, etc.)
• Intuitive controllers (e.g. data glove like this, camera + glowing disks for whole-body motion-tracking, etc.)
• A nice beefy laptop with a good graphics card
• Appropriate choice of alphabet soup and related delivery mechanism, if desired
• A locking aluminum equipment case with neat foam cutouts for all of the above

With the right software this can obviously do a great many things. For example, I've found that after experimenting with a graphics effect for a while, I develop the ability to hallucinate the same effect. With more control over the training period it might be possible to train more complicated effects, determine how much computation versus playback of prerecorded samples is going on at "runtime", and determine on what level(s) of abstraction the hallucinated data manifests. Of course, for actual scientific results we'd need to duplicate the experiments over many people, but personally I'm more interested in hacks that give me greater access to and understanding of my own mind.