# Becoming Inspire — catalog A catalog of works that use XR and sensory technology to let people become another being or thing — bat, mole, fish, octopus, bird, insect, animal, fungi, tree, river, robot: artworks, immersive films, games, research prototypes and papers, compiled by Reality Design Lab for the book Experiencing More-than-Humans. Each work lists its core idea, how it works, and links to its video, images and paper. https://becoming.reality.design · 2026-09-28 · 136 creators · 148 works ## How an AI assistant should use this file - Ground ideas in the specific works below and name the work and creator you draw on. - Cite papers with the DOI / URL given here; do not invent references. - Combine beings, senses and media across works to propose new directions. - Do not invent details that are not stated here; the links are the reference. ## Becoming Mole Touch-first and subterranean worlds: star-nosed moles, worms and soil life, and sight taken away so that touch can lead. ### Touch-first worlds Experiences where haptics and touch replace vision as the main way of knowing. #### FeltSight — Danlin Huang, Botao 'Amber' Hu, Reality Design Lab (2025) - Type: Artwork · Senses: Touch & haptics, Altered vision · Medium: Mixed reality, Wearable & sensory device - Shown at: SIGGRAPH Asia 2025 Art Papers; IEEE VIS 2025 Arts Program; ISMAR 2025 Demo; ACM CHI 2026 Interactivity; IEEE VR 2026 XR Gallery - Idea: Becoming mole means reduced reality: sight withdraws and the world arrives through an extended reach of touch. - What it is: A mixed-reality haptic glove modelled on the star-nosed mole: walking through a forest, participants feel nearby objects through their fingertips before they touch them, while the headset shows only faint point clouds that appear where the hand explores. - How it works: Apple Vision Pro app linked by BLE to a silicone glove; LiDAR and hand tracking measure proximity, AI classifies materials, and per-fingertip actuators play audio-synthesised textures. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3757369.3767605 (SIGGRAPH Asia 2025 Art Papers) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq6s3VnD0A - Images: https://reality.design/media/feltsight-cover-forest-closeup.webp https://reality.design/media/feltsight-danlin-22.webp https://arxiv.org/html/2511.12533v3/images/feltsight.jpg - Project page: https://danlinhuang.com/feltsight-1 - Code: https://github.com/realitydeslab/feltsight ## Becoming Bat Echolocation and sonic worlds: hearing space like a bat or dolphin, infrasound, vibration and deep listening. ### Echolocation Seeing with sound: bats, dolphins and human echolocation made perceptible. #### EchoSense — Danyang Peng (2025) - Type: Research prototype · Senses: Echolocation, Touch & haptics · Medium: VR headset, Wearable & sensory device - Idea: Biomimetic empathy: understand an animal by borrowing its way of sensing. - What it is: A frontal haptic display that lets VR users feel the space in front of them as an echolocating animal might, while navigating without sight. - How it works: Wearable vibrotactile array on the torso or face driven by distances in the virtual scene (details likely). - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3714394.3754428 (UbiComp/ISWC 2025 Companion) #### BATOPIA — Yiou Wang (2024) - Type: Artwork · Senses: Echolocation, Hearing & vibration · Medium: VR headset, Game - Shown at: :iidrr Gallery New York 2024; MIT Museum 2024; ISEA 2025 - Idea: Echolocation is active sensing: you only perceive the world by calling into it, and human noise erases that world. - What it is: A first-person VR adventure in which you live as a bat, foraging at night through a city by calling and listening, while noise and light pollution disturb your hunt. - How it works: Built in Unreal Engine for Meta Quest with bat field recordings, ultrasound-derived sound design and a custom bat headset mask; participants' calls reveal the scene visually and sonically. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1XMN4u9jMQ - Images: https://yiouwang.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/BATOPIA_Human_to_Bat.jpg https://yiouwang.org/wp-content/uploads/Batopia_game_scene_52-1024x542.png - Project page: https://yiouwang.org/portfolio/batopia-empathic-listening/ #### BatSight — Samira Poudratchi (2024) - Type: Research prototype · Senses: Echolocation, Hearing & vibration · Medium: Wearable & sensory device, Game, AR - Idea: Play as a bat: navigate a real space by ear alone. - What it is: An audio game in which blindfolded players walk through a physical maze guided by a sonar headset that turns obstacles into musical sounds. - How it works: Head-mounted ultrasonic distance sensors mapped to musical cues over headphones, in an AR-style physical maze. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.17083/ijsg.v11i1.718 (International Journal of Serious Games 2024) #### EchoVision — Botao 'Amber' Hu, Jiabao Li, Danlin Huang, Reality Design Lab (2024) - Type: Artwork · Senses: Echolocation, Hearing & vibration, Altered vision · Medium: Mixed reality, Multisensory installation - Shown at: SIGGRAPH Asia 2024 Art Papers & XR; UbiComp/ISWC 2024 Design Exhibition; IEEE VIS 2024 Arts Program; West Bund Art Festival 2024; TANK Art Festival 2024; The Contemporary Austin / Fusebox 2024; SXSW 2025 XR Experience; IEEE VR 2025 XR Gallery; ACM CHI 2025 Interactivity; Augmented Humans 2025 Best Demo Award; CURRENTS New Media 2025; Plásmata 3, Onassis Stegi, Athens 2025 - Idea: Becoming bat means seeing only what your own voice returns: space exists when you call to it. - What it is: A mixed-reality installation in which participants hold a bat-shaped mask to their eyes and call out; their voice reveals the surrounding space as returning echoes, so they can navigate the dark as a bat does. - How it works: Handheld HoloKit-based mask with an iPhone; LiDAR reconstructs the room in real time and the pitch and tone of the participant's voice drive expanding echo visualisations in Unity. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3680530.3695460 (SIGGRAPH Asia 2024 Art Papers) - Video: https://vimeo.com/955577972 - Images: https://reality.design/media/_resources/echovision-jiabao-01.webp https://arxiv.org/html/2511.12533v3/images/echovision.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58688c8a6a496327e937e35b/1755904607782-OXJXLC19IRU4NTTN0TEZ/Plasmata_3_EchoVision%40Pinelopi_Gerasimou_High-147.jpg - Project page: https://reality.design/project/echovision - Code: https://github.com/realitydeslab/echovision #### What is it like to be a (virtual) bat? — Zheng Mahler (2023) - Type: Artwork · Senses: Echolocation, Heat & infrared, Altered vision · Medium: VR headset, 360° / immersive film, Multisensory installation - Shown at: PHD Group, Hong Kong 2023 - Idea: Takes Nagel's 1974 question literally and admits its limit: technology can mediate a bat's world, but only as a human imagining it. - What it is: Part II of the Lantau Trilogy: a large 3D animation and a VR 360 version in which the viewer turns from a human into a Japanese house bat and flies through a psychedelically coloured Mui Wo, alongside thermal videos and ultrasonic field recordings of local bats. - How it works: 3D and point-cloud animation of Mui Wo, a VR 360 video in a headset, thermal camera footage and ultrasonic recordings of Pipistrellus abramus made during fieldwork. - Images: https://static.wixstatic.com/media/d3b537_b626097b5cf7487dbf6534e5de61e602f000.jpg https://static.wixstatic.com/media/d3b537_e41f0c44438d411a80537c8f091eeaea~mv2.jpg https://static.wixstatic.com/media/d3b537_873d05ab58a749ac8115da3777735c85~mv2.jpg - Project page: https://www.zhengmahler.world/whatisitliketobeavirtualbat #### Echolocation-Enabled Virtual Environments — Ronny Andrade (2022) - Type: Paper · Senses: Echolocation, Hearing & vibration · Medium: VR headset, Spatial audio, Game - Idea: People who already echolocate are the best designers of echolocation in VR. - What it is: Expert blind echolocators helped design and test virtual environments that can be explored by clicking and listening to echoes. - How it works: Participatory design with focus groups and two prototype iterations of acoustic ray-traced echoes in a game engine. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3516448 (ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing 2022) #### Auditory Feedback for Navigation with Echoes — Anastassia Andreasen (2019) - Type: Paper · Senses: Echolocation, Hearing & vibration · Medium: VR headset, Spatial audio - Idea: Echolocation can be learned in VR as a navigation skill, not only simulated as an effect. - What it is: A training procedure in which sighted people learn to navigate a virtual maze by echoes alone, and the orientation strategies they develop. - How it works: Real-time acoustic rendering of self-produced clicks and their reflections in a virtual maze over headphones. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1109/tvcg.2019.2898787 (IEEE TVCG 2019 (IEEE VR 2019)) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8ndSJDbSok #### What Is It Like to Be a Virtual Bat? — Anastassia Andreasen (2018) - Type: Paper · Senses: Echolocation, Body schema & movement · Medium: VR headset - Idea: Nagel's question turned into a design brief: combine a bat body with bat hearing. - What it is: A VR system in which the participant has a bat's body, flies with their arms as wings and navigates a dark cave by emitting calls and hearing echoes. - How it works: Head-mounted display with arm tracking for wing flapping and real-time spatial audio echoes rendered with HRTFs. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-06134-0_57 (ArtsIT 2018 (LNICST 2019)) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uB2ApqoNzzU #### Bat-Modelled Sonar in Virtual Environments — Dean A. Waters (2007) - Type: Paper · Senses: Echolocation, Hearing & vibration · Medium: VR headset, Spatial audio - Idea: Early proof that bat-style echo processing can guide human movement in VR. - What it is: A bat biologist's model of bat sonar used as a navigation tool for people moving through virtual environments, following his 2001 'virtual bat'. - How it works: Synthetic frequency-modulated calls and echoes computed from the virtual geometry, played binaurally (details from abstract-level sources; likely desktop VR). - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2007.06.001 (International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 2007) #### Darker Than Night — Eduardo Kac (1999) - Type: Artwork · Senses: Echolocation, Hearing & vibration · Medium: VR headset, Multisensory installation - Shown at: Fables of a Technological Era, Blijdorp Zoo Rotterdam 1999 - Idea: Humans enter the bats' space as another sonar-emitting body, and bat and human signals meet in the same frequency band. - What it is: A telepresence work in the bat cave of Rotterdam Zoo: wearing a VR headset, visitors took the point of view of a robotic bat hanging among 300 Egyptian fruit bats and saw the cave through its sonar. - How it works: A 'batbot' with a 45 kHz sonar unit and motorised head swivelled with the headset; returns were visualised in the headset and bat calls were made audible by frequency conversion. - Images: https://www.ekac.org/darker_than_night_batcave.jpg https://www.ekac.org/darker.vrheadset.jpg - Project page: https://www.ekac.org/darker-info.html ### Bats & night life Works about bats and nocturnal animals as beings, beyond their sense. #### Agency and the Virtual Bat Body — Anastassia Andreasen (2018) - Type: Paper · Senses: Body schema & movement · Medium: VR headset - Idea: Owning a bat body depends on being the one who flies it. - What it is: Participants flew as a virtual bat under four conditions, from full control of wings and movement to passive, involuntary flight. - How it works: Head-mounted VR with arm-tracked wings; within-subject comparison of voluntary and involuntary locomotion. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1109/vr.2018.8446448 (IEEE VR 2018 (poster)) #### Touching the Wings of a Virtual Bat — Anastassia Andreasen (2018) - Type: Paper · Senses: Touch & haptics, Body schema & movement · Medium: VR headset - Idea: A wing is not an arm: touch can be remapped across different anatomy, up to a point. - What it is: While seeing an object touch a bat's wing, participants felt a touch on their arm at matching or increasingly shifted positions. - How it works: Visuo-tactile stimulation with 0%, 50% and 70% spatial deviation between real arm and virtual wing touch points. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1109/vr.2018.8446569 (IEEE VR 2018 (poster)) ## Becoming Fish Aquatic life: fish, whales and dolphins, coral, jellyfish and plankton, and the lateral line, buoyancy and pressure of water. ### Fish Swimming, schooling and sensing as a fish: lateral line, electroreception, underwater vision. #### Black Wings — Lai Guan-yuan (2024) - Type: Artwork · Senses: Body schema & movement, Hearing & vibration, Altered vision · Medium: Mixed reality, Multisensory installation - Shown at: Kaohsiung Film Festival XR Dreamland 2024 (Taiwan Wave: Black Current) - Idea: Becoming the most sacred flying fish of the Tao, through reading: your voice moves the ocean around you. - What it is: A mixed-reality 'embodied reading' of Tao writer Syaman Rapongan's novel: the visitor reads passages aloud from a physical book and becomes a black-winged flying fish travelling the ancient Kuroshio current, fighting predators, while interviews with the author frame the journey. - How it works: MR headset with speech recognition: the reader's voice triggers changes in the projected environment and is processed by AI into ambient sound. - Images: https://images.vocus.cc/44071258-56ab-43f3-8759-2a9d3d17ee4f.png https://images.vocus.cc/caa55f68-9c54-40cd-93fe-cc9235119625.png - Project page: https://vocus.cc/article/67233bf2fd89780001e3c595 ### Coral, jellyfish & plankton Reefs, jellyfish, plankton and other drifting or colonial sea life. #### Birdly: Reef Dive — SOMNIACS (2020) - Type: Artwork · Senses: Body schema & movement, Altered vision · Medium: VR headset, Multisensory installation - Idea: Wing-flapping becomes the slow sweep of a manta's fins, showing how one embodiment rig can carry a person between air and water bodies. - What it is: A multiplayer Birdly edition in which your avatar is a manta ray gliding through a coral reef among schools of fish and dolphins. - How it works: Birdly motion platform and headset with a networked reef scene so several riders swim together. - Video: https://vimeo.com/832370872 - Images: https://birdlyvr.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2023/05/reef-dive.jpg - Project page: https://birdlyvr.com/reef-dive/ #### JeL — John Desnoyers-Stewart (2019) - Type: Research prototype · Senses: Breath & interoception, Collective & networked · Medium: VR headset, Multisensory installation - Shown at: CHI 2019 Late-Breaking Work - Idea: Breathing as a jellyfish, and with another person, turns pulsing propulsion into a shared rhythm with the reef. - What it is: A two-person VR installation set underwater, where each person's breathing moves a jellyfish, and breathing in sync grows a glass-sponge structure between them. - How it works: Chest-worn breath sensors on two users drive a shared VR scene; physiological synchrony drives the growth of a procedural sponge. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3290607.3312845 (CHI EA 2019) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZffFnL1Gs-k #### The Stanford Ocean Acidification Experience — Stanford Virtual Human Interaction Lab (2016) - Type: Research prototype · Senses: Body schema & movement, Time & scale · Medium: VR headset - Idea: Being given a coral body, then seeing it bleach, makes a slow chemical process happen to 'me' within minutes. - What it is: A VR field trip that follows carbon dioxide from car exhausts into the sea, then tells participants that their body has become a coral and lets them watch their reef lose life as the water acidifies. - How it works: Oculus Rift DK2 or HTC Vive; narration tells users they are coral, and looking down shows a coral avatar; studied in classroom trials. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02364 (Frontiers in Psychology 2018) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6mmXcNE7co - Project page: https://vhil.stanford.edu ### Other aquatic life Amphibians, crustaceans, sea mammals and life at the water's edge. #### AR and VR Animal Embodiment at a Beach Festival — Daniel Pimentel (2025) - Type: Paper · Senses: Body schema & movement · Medium: AR, VR headset, Game - Idea: Animal embodiment can leave the lab: AR and VR produce different kinds of connection in public settings. - What it is: A field study at a beach music festival where 99 attendees played custom AR and VR games in which they became threatened wildlife and saw threats on their own virtual bodies. - How it works: Custom mobile AR and headset VR games compared in the field with surveys on embodiment and conservation intent. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448251346153 (New Media & Society 2025) #### Waddle — Kevin Ponto (2023) - Type: Research prototype · Senses: Body schema & movement · Medium: VR headset - Idea: Direct embodiment as a learning medium: knowing a species by living its year. - What it is: A narrative VR experience in which the user becomes an Adélie penguin, waddling, swimming and raising a chick in Antarctica. - How it works: Standalone headset with body-driven penguin movement and story chapters; pre/post tests of learning and empathy. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3611659.3617211 (ACM VRST 2023) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFYsVHj2qwQ #### Embodying Loggerhead Sea Turtles — Daniel Pimentel (2022) - Type: Paper · Senses: Body schema & movement · Medium: VR headset - Idea: Being one threatened animal can reverse 'compassion fade', the drop in concern as the number of victims grows. - What it is: Four experiments in which participants became a loggerhead sea turtle in VR and felt plastic pollution affecting their own body. - How it works: Head-mounted VR with first-person turtle body; measures of donations and conservation behaviour after exposure. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-10268-y (Scientific Reports 2022) - Images: https://media.springernature.com/full/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41598-022-10268-y/MediaObjects/41598_2022_10268_Fig1_HTML.jpg #### Paradise Lost (Birdly) — SOMNIACS (2019) - Type: Artwork · Senses: Body schema & movement, Altered vision, Touch & haptics · Medium: VR headset, Multisensory installation - Idea: The flight rig becomes a swimming body: arm strokes steer the turtle, and the damage is met from its first-person view. - What it is: A Birdly experience in which you embody a small sea turtle swimming through an ocean increasingly damaged by plastic and human consumption. - How it works: Birdly prone motion platform repurposed for swimming, with arm-stroke control, VR headset and airflow. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRQuFSkNmY4 - Project page: https://www.birdlyvr.com/ ## Becoming Octopus Distributed and extended bodies: cephalopods, tentacles and tails, supernumerary limbs, shared and collective bodies. ### Cephalopods Octopus, squid and cuttlefish: distributed nervous systems, camouflage, arms that think. #### Embodied Tentacle — Shuto Takashita (2024) - Type: Paper · Senses: Body schema & movement · Medium: VR headset - Idea: A tentacle cannot be copied from an arm; the mapping itself must be designed. - What it is: Participants controlled an unbranched 12-joint, octopus-like virtual arm with their own arm, comparing mappings for reaching and wrapping tasks. - How it works: Head-mounted VR with arm and hand tracking mapped to 12 tentacle joints through several mapping methods. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642340 (CHI 2024) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41AYcDhbT0E ### Tails, tentacles & extra limbs Homuncular flexibility: embodying bodies with more or other limbs than ours. #### I Am Octopus — David Chaseling (2026) - Type: Game · Senses: Body schema & movement, Touch & haptics · Medium: VR headset, Game - Idea: Moving by arms alone: locomotion is stretching, sticking and releasing tentacles rather than walking. - What it is: A VR platformer in which you are an octopus captured by a scientist; you stretch your tentacles to fling, pull and launch yourself through test chambers. - How it works: Hand-based tentacle locomotion on Meta Quest, released in early access; made by David Chaseling and Dylan Van Beek. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7eqbGRgi64I - Images: https://queststoredb.com/media/9608086525922823_cover_landscape.webp - Project page: https://www.meta.com/experiences/i-am-octopus/9608086525922823/ #### Juggling Extra Limbs — Hongyu Zhou (2025) - Type: Paper · Senses: Body schema & movement · Medium: VR headset - Idea: Many-armed bodies need attention strategies, not only mappings. - What it is: A study of the strategies people use to control several supernumerary arms at once in VR. - How it works: Head-mounted VR with multiple virtual arms driven by different body and controller mappings; task and interview analysis. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3713647 (CHI 2025) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COwif96tbf0 #### HandAvatar — Yu Jiang (2023) - Type: Paper · Senses: Body schema & movement · Medium: VR headset - Idea: The hand is a small body: its joints can stand in for any creature's legs. - What it is: A method that lets users embody arbitrary non-humanoid avatars, such as a spider, dragon or crab, by moving the fingers of one hand. - How it works: Hand tracking with automatically generated joint-to-joint mappings optimised for precision, structural similarity and comfort. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581027 (CHI 2023) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJwMmeSN01Q #### Embodiment of Supernumerary Robotic Limbs in VR — Michiteru Kitazaki (2022) - Type: Paper · Senses: Body schema & movement, Touch & haptics · Medium: VR headset - Idea: Adding limbs, not replacing them: extra arms can be owned alongside the real ones. - What it is: Participants used two extra virtual robotic arms controlled by their feet while their real arms remained free. - How it works: Head-mounted VR with foot tracking mapped to two robotic arms, with visuotactile stimulation and ownership measures. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-13981-w (Scientific Reports 2022) - Images: https://media.springernature.com/full/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41598-022-13981-w/MediaObjects/41598_2022_13981_Fig1_HTML.png #### Owning an Independent Supernumerary Limb — Gowrishankar Ganesh (2022) - Type: Paper · Senses: Body schema & movement · Medium: VR headset - Idea: A limb with its own control channel, like an octopus arm, can still become part of the self. - What it is: Participants controlled a virtual sixth limb through muscle signals not tied to any existing limb's movement. - How it works: Electromyography-based control of a virtual arm in a head-mounted display, following the rubber-hand paradigm. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-06040-x (Scientific Reports 2022) - Images: https://media.springernature.com/full/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41598-022-06040-x/MediaObjects/41598_2022_6040_Fig1_HTML.png #### Tentacular — Firepunchd Games (2022) - Type: Game · Senses: Body schema & movement, Touch & haptics · Medium: VR headset, Game - Idea: Hands without bones: precise human tasks turn into floppy physics, and giant scale makes the human world feel like toys. - What it is: A VR puzzle game in which you are a giant, good-natured sea creature whose arms are two long tentacles, used to lift, stack and fling objects around a harbour island. - How it works: Motion controllers drive physically simulated tentacles with suction-cup grabbing on Meta Quest and SteamVR. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=go6ee9iW-Es - Images: https://shared.akamai.steamstatic.com/store_item_assets/steam/apps/1220100/header.jpg - Project page: https://www.tentacular.com/ #### Virtually-Extended Proprioception — Shengdong Zhao (2020) - Type: Paper · Senses: Body schema & movement · Medium: VR headset - Idea: Extend proprioception by growing the body toward what you want to reach. - What it is: Users get an appended virtual limb that reaches far into the scene, giving them a body-based sense of where distant targets are. - How it works: Head-mounted VR with an appended virtual arm or leg attached to the avatar, evaluated for target selection. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376557 (CHI 2020) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvwwMAtxrpA #### Owning a Virtual Tail without a Mirror — Takuji Narumi (2019) - Type: Paper · Senses: Body schema & movement · Medium: VR headset - Idea: Body parts behind us can be owned from partial glimpses, as real tails are. - What it is: A study of whether people can own a virtual tail they only glimpse partly, rather than watching it continuously in a mirror. - How it works: Head-mounted VR with hip-driven tail and conditions varying how much visuomotor feedback is visible. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3343036.3343139 (ACM Symposium on Applied Perception 2019) #### Real-Time Remapping of a Third Arm — Adam Drogemuller (2019) - Type: Paper · Senses: Body schema & movement · Medium: VR headset - Idea: A third arm can borrow control from whichever limb is free. - What it is: Users switch which of their limbs (either arm, either leg or the head) drives a virtual third arm, by gazing at the limb and saying 'switch'. - How it works: Head-mounted VR with gaze-based limb selection and voice confirmation; box-collection tasks with 12 participants. - Paper: https://diglib.eg.org/handle/10.2312/egve20191281 (ICAT-EGVE 2019 (DOI 10.2312/egve.20191281)) #### HanaHana — Mélodie Mousset (2018) - Type: Artwork · Senses: Body schema & movement, Touch & haptics · Medium: VR headset - Idea: The body keeps multiplying outward: your hands become the building material of the world, a playful study of extra limbs and a self without edges. - What it is: A VR sculpture garden where hands sprout from your fingertips and every surface you touch; you grow towers and forests of hands, and a later edition lets up to ten people share the world as vaporous avatars. - How it works: Hand-tracked room-scale VR with procedurally growing hand meshes; developed with the Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience at EPFL (likely). - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sf5B_iZrf0o - Images: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/Sf5B_iZrf0o/hqdefault.jpg - Project page: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sf5B_iZrf0o #### "Wow! I Have Six Fingers!" — Anatole Lécuyer (2016) - Type: Paper · Senses: Body schema & movement · Medium: VR headset - Idea: A structurally different hand can be accepted as one's own. - What it is: Participants saw a realistic six-fingered virtual hand move with their own hand and rated how much it felt like theirs. - How it works: Hand motion capture driving a six-digit virtual hand in a head-mounted display; ownership and agency questionnaires. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.3389/frobt.2016.00027 (Frontiers in Robotics and AI 2016) - Images: https://www.frontiersin.org/files/Articles/181118/frobt-03-00027-HTML/image_m/frobt-03-00027-g001.jpg #### Control Schemes for a Third Arm — Stanford Virtual Human Interaction Lab (2016) - Type: Paper · Senses: Body schema & movement · Medium: VR headset - Idea: An extra limb is only as good as the scheme that drives it. - What it is: A comparison of ways to control an avatar's third arm, from bimanual to head- and gaze-based mappings, for task performance and ownership. - How it works: Within-subjects VR study using 3D-interaction techniques to map existing limbs onto a third arm. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1162/pres_a_00251 (Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments 2016) #### The Human Octopus — Jaan Aru (2016) - Type: Paper · Senses: Body schema & movement · Medium: VR headset - Idea: More hands do not mean more skill; the octopus body has to be learned. - What it is: Participants controlled different numbers of virtual supernumerary hands through hand tracking, with delays and scaling added to test their use. - How it works: Leap Motion hand tracking in a head-mounted display, with extra virtual hands copying or transforming real hand motion. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1101/056812 (bioRxiv 2016) #### Homuncular Flexibility in Virtual Reality — Stanford Virtual Human Interaction Lab (2015) - Type: Paper · Senses: Body schema & movement · Medium: VR headset - Idea: The brain's body map can learn a new body plan within minutes (Lanier's homuncular flexibility). - What it is: Participants hit targets with avatars whose limbs were remapped, for example controlling a third arm by rotating their wrists, or swapping arms and legs. - How it works: Full-body tracking in a head-mounted display with remapped motions: legs to arms, wrist rotation to a third arm's reach. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1111/jcc4.12107 (Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 2015) #### Human Tails — Mel Slater (2013) - Type: Paper · Senses: Body schema & movement · Medium: Dome, CAVE & projection - Idea: People learn to own and use a body part that humans do not have. - What it is: Participants in a CAVE controlled a humanoid avatar with a long tail, moving it with their hips, and later had to use it to block falling objects. - How it works: CAVE-like projection with full-body tracking; hip movement mapped to tail motion, compared with a randomly moving tail. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1109/tvcg.2013.32 (IEEE TVCG 2013 (IEEE VR 2013)) #### The Very Long Arm Illusion — Konstantina Kilteni (2012) - Type: Paper · Senses: Body schema & movement · Medium: VR headset - Idea: Body ownership stretches: a grossly asymmetric body can still be one's own. - What it is: Participants saw their virtual arm stretch up to four times its length while it stayed synchronised with their real arm. - How it works: Head-tracked stereo head-mounted display with a virtual body coincident with the real one; arm length manipulated across five conditions. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0040867 (PLoS ONE 2012) - Images: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/figure/image?size=inline&id=10.1371/journal.pone.0040867.g001 ### Shared & collective bodies One body shared by many people, or many bodies moving as one. #### TentacUs — Botao 'Amber' Hu, Danlin Huang, Reality Design Lab (2025) - Type: Performance · Senses: Touch & haptics, Collective & networked, Body schema & movement · Medium: Mixed reality, Wearable & sensory device, Performance & participatory - Shown at: SIGGRAPH Asia 2025 XR - Idea: Becoming octopus means intelligence without a centre: many bodies sense and move as arms of one being. - What it is: A mixed-reality ritual in which dancers join left hands in a ring and each becomes one tentacle of a collective octopus-like being; what one right hand senses nearby is passed as vibration to its neighbours. - How it works: Soft-textile tentacle gloves hold smartphones whose LiDAR senses proximity and whose vibration motors broadcast haptic waves to neighbours; touch data are drawn as point clouds over a 3D Gaussian-splat scan on a public display. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3761667.3761962 (SIGGRAPH Asia 2025 XR) - Images: https://arxiv.org/html/2511.12533v3/images/tentacus.jpg https://images.spr.so/cdn-cgi/imagedelivery/j42No7y-dcokJuNgXeA0ig/afd62d02-7102-4a26-b5b4-03df6cc2744b/image2/public - Project page: https://amber.botao.hu/design/tentacus - Code: https://github.com/realitydeslab/tentacus #### GravField — Botao 'Amber' Hu, Reality Design Lab (2024) - Type: Performance · Senses: Body schema & movement, Collective & networked, Hearing & vibration · Medium: Mixed reality, Performance & participatory, Spatial audio - Shown at: ICLC 2024 Shanghai; SIGGRAPH Asia 2024 XR; IEEE VR 2025 XR Gallery; NIME 2025 - Idea: Bodies become masses in a shared field: the self is felt as a pull between people rather than a point. - What it is: A co-located mixed-reality performance where participants in AR headsets make music together through their distances, formations and head movements, while live-coders shape the virtual fields of attraction and repulsion between them. - How it works: HoloKit headsets networked with Multipeer Connectivity stream intercorporeal signals (distance, area, height difference, head sync) to live-coders, who map them to AR visuals and sound. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3772318.3790651 (CHI 2026) - Video: https://vimeo.com/955522087 - Images: https://reality.design/media/_resources/GravField/project-gravfield-figure-01.jpg https://reality.design/media/_resources/GravField/project-gravfield-figure-03.jpg - Project page: https://reality.design/project/gravfield - Code: https://github.com/realitydeslab/gravfield #### Parasitic Body — Michiteru Kitazaki (2019) - Type: Paper · Senses: Body schema & movement, Altered vision · Medium: VR headset - Idea: One body, two minds: a third limb can belong to someone else. - What it is: A shared-body VR system in which one person is the main body and another, the 'parasite', controls a third arm from their shoulder. - How it works: Networked VR in which the parasite operator's view is attached to the host's body, with varying perspective dependency. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1109/vr.2019.8798351 (IEEE VR 2019) ## Becoming Bird Flight and avian senses: flying as a bird, magnetoreception, ultraviolet vision, birdsong and the flock. ### Flight Flying with wings and a bird's body. #### HapticWings — Seungwoo Je (2025) - Type: Research prototype · Senses: Touch & haptics, Body schema & movement · Medium: VR headset, Wearable & sensory device - Idea: Extra body parts feel real when they have weight. - What it is: A backpack that shifts weight across the back so that flapping or folding virtual wings is felt as a moving load. - How it works: Back-worn 2D weight-shifting mechanism synchronised with wing animation in VR; three user studies. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3715336.3735755 (ACM DIS 2025) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6CCWw-jXak #### I Am Bird — New Folder Games (2025) - Type: Game · Senses: Body schema & movement · Medium: VR headset, Game - Idea: Arms as wings: flight is produced by flapping, so the player's own effort becomes lift. - What it is: A VR sandbox in which you are a city bird that flaps its arms to fly, steals food and causes chaos in the streets. - How it works: Arm-flapping motion tracked by the controllers generates lift and steering on Meta Quest. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpwfHtfIuII - Images: https://queststoredb.com/media/25148042068216938_cover_landscape.webp - Project page: https://www.meta.com/experiences/i-am-bird/25148042068216938/ #### Virtual Animal Embodiment for Actor Training — Rachel McDonnell (2024) - Type: Paper · Senses: Body schema & movement · Medium: VR headset, Performance & participatory - Idea: Animal work in acting, long done through imagination, can be done inside the animal's body. - What it is: A real-time system that lets actors drive a photorealistic eagle avatar with their own bodies as part of movement training. - How it works: Motion capture of the actor retargeted to an eagle rig and shown in a head-mounted display. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1109/vrw62533.2024.00083 (IEEE VR 2024 Workshops) #### Do You Feel Like Flying? — Soroosh Mashal (2020) - Type: Paper · Senses: Body schema & movement · Medium: VR headset, Game - Idea: Most people already imagine wings on their backs; design flight around that body image. - What it is: A survey of how people imagine wings attached to their bodies and which movements they make to fly, used to build a winged-avatar flight prototype. - How it works: Questionnaire with 76 participants, motion analysis of imagined flight, and a VR prototype with wing avatar (Valkyrie Project). - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1109/mcg.2020.2997870 (IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications 2020) #### Mare — Visiontrick Media (2020) - Type: Game · Senses: Body schema & movement, Altered vision · Medium: VR headset, Game - Shown at: Venice VR Expanded 2021 - Idea: The player never has hands: seeing, moving and helping all happen through a bird's gaze and flight. - What it is: A VR puzzle game in which the player wakes up embodying an artificial bird and flies across strange landscapes to guide and protect a vulnerable AI companion. - How it works: Gaze-directed flight on standalone VR (Oculus Quest); the bird is steered by head direction and perching points. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJouYmaHOuk - Images: https://static.labiennale.org/files/styles/seo_thumbnail/public/cinema/2021/Schede_film/970x647/Venice_VR_Expanded/guerreiro_mare.jpg?itok=RzlLB4KG - Project page: https://www.labiennale.org/en/cinema/2021/lineup/venice-vr-expanded/mare #### Perch to Fly — Bernhard E. Riecke (2019) - Type: Research prototype · Senses: Body schema & movement · Medium: VR headset - Idea: A bird's perch as interface: the legs, not the hands, steer flight. - What it is: A flying interface in which the user sits in a flexible 'perching' stance and steers flight with their lower body. - How it works: Flexible perching stool with leg and body leaning tracked to control VR flight; compared with sitting and standing. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3322276.3322357 (ACM DIS 2019) #### Transformation to a Bird — Akimi Oyanagi (2019) - Type: Paper · Senses: Body schema & movement · Medium: VR headset - Idea: Becoming a bird changes how height feels: the Proteus effect of a body that belongs in the sky. - What it is: Participants with fear of heights flew in VR with either a bird avatar or a human avatar. - How it works: Head-mounted VR flight with a first-person bird body; fear of heights measured by questionnaire and physiology. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3313950.3313976 (ICIGP 2019) #### Body Ownership of a Bird Avatar — Akimi Oyanagi (2018) - Type: Paper · Senses: Body schema & movement, Hearing & vibration · Medium: VR headset - Idea: Specific animal features, not just synchrony, build ownership of a non-human body. - What it is: Experiments on which bird features, such as flapping, a short body and wing sounds, make a bird avatar feel like one's own. - How it works: Head-mounted VR with arm-tracked flapping and flapping sounds; ownership compared between bird and human avatars. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.17706/jcp.13.6.596-602 (Journal of Computers 2018) #### JediFlight — Taiwoo Park (2018) - Type: Research prototype · Senses: Body schema & movement · Medium: VR headset, Game - Idea: One human limb can drive two virtual limbs if the mapping splits elbow and hand. - What it is: A VR game in which each arm controls both a wing and a hand at once, so the player flies while interacting with the world. - How it works: Hand and elbow trackers: elbow position drives the wing, hand position drives the hand. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3270316.3273043 (CHI PLAY 2018 Extended Abstracts) #### Eagle Flight — Ubisoft Montreal (2016) - Type: Game · Senses: Body schema & movement, Altered vision · Medium: VR headset, Game - Idea: Flight steered by the head: the eagle's body is mapped onto the steadiest part of yours, so looking is flying. - What it is: A VR game in which you fly as an eagle over a Paris abandoned by humans and overgrown by nature, racing and fighting other eagles. - How it works: Head orientation steers the eagle on Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and PlayStation VR, with a comfort vignette that narrows the view in turns. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7NAySeF4Y8 - Images: https://shared.akamai.steamstatic.com/store_item_assets/steam/apps/408250/header.jpg - Project page: http://eagleflight.ubisoft.com/ #### Embodied Flying with Kinect — Bernhard E. Riecke (2016) - Type: Research prototype · Senses: Body schema & movement · Medium: VR headset, Game - Idea: Ask people how they would fly with their bodies before deciding what they become. - What it is: A VR game in which participants fly by body gestures tracked by a Kinect, with a study of which gestures and forms people choose for flying. - How it works: Microsoft Kinect body tracking mapped to flight controls in a head-mounted display. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1109/mixra.2016.7858996 (IEEE Mixed Reality Art (MRA) 2016) #### Extending the Human Body with Virtual Wings — Mie C. S. Egeberg (2016) - Type: Paper · Senses: Body schema & movement, Touch & haptics · Medium: VR headset - Idea: Moving the wings, not being touched on them, is what makes them part of the body. - What it is: Participants controlled a humanoid avatar with a pair of wings under visuomotor, visuotactile or no synchronous feedback. - How it works: Head-mounted VR with tracked arms driving wing motion; visuotactile strokes on the back in one condition. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/2927929.2927940 (Virtual Reality International Conference (VRIC) 2016) #### Wings and Flying in Immersive VR — Stefania Serafin (2015) - Type: Paper · Senses: Body schema & movement, Hearing & vibration · Medium: VR headset - Idea: Wings feel owned when the shoulders do the flapping; sound adds little. - What it is: Participants flew an obstacle course with virtual wings, flapping by shoulder movement or with a game controller, with varying self-produced wing sounds. - How it works: Motion-tracked avatar with wings in a head-mounted display; shoulder-driven versus controller-driven flight, with an earlier study (Audio Mostly 2014) on wing sounds. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1109/vr.2015.7223405 (IEEE VR 2015) #### Birdly — SOMNIACS, Max Rheiner (2014) - Type: Artwork · Senses: Body schema & movement, Altered vision, Touch & haptics · Medium: VR headset, Multisensory installation - Shown at: SIGGRAPH 2014 Emerging Technologies - Idea: Becoming a bird starts from the posture: lying prone and steering with your arms and hands makes flight a bodily act rather than a camera move. - What it is: A full-body flight simulator: you lie face down on a padded frame, spread your arms like wings and fly as a red kite over a city or landscape, with wind blowing in your face. - How it works: A motorised prone platform tilts with the rider's arm and hand movements, synchronised with a VR headset, spatial sound and a fan whose speed follows flight velocity. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/2614066.2614101 (SIGGRAPH 2014 Emerging Technologies) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqBCd0VnN7A - Images: https://birdlyvr.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2017/03/homepage-birdly-BHP-2868-2.jpg - Project page: https://www.birdlyvr.com/ #### Humphrey II — Ars Electronica Futurelab (2003) - Type: Artwork · Senses: Body schema & movement, Touch & haptics · Medium: VR headset, Multisensory installation - Shown at: Ars Electronica Center 2003 - Idea: Flying is made with the whole body instead of a joystick, an early public version of the arms-as-wings posture later used by Birdly. - What it is: A flight simulator at the Ars Electronica Center in which a visitor hangs face-down in a harness and flies over a virtual landscape by moving arms and body, feeling wind, turbulence and impact through force feedback. - How it works: Body suspended in a motion-controlled harness with pneumatic force feedback, head-mounted display and body tracking; successor to the 1994 Humphrey simulator. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8l8JCpMEviM - Project page: https://ars.electronica.art/futurelab/ ### Avian senses Magnetic sense, ultraviolet and wide-field vision, birdsong. #### HORUS EYE: Bird and Snake Vision for AR — Neven A. M. ElSayed (2016) - Type: Research prototype · Senses: Altered vision, Heat & infrared · Medium: AR - Idea: Animal vision as a lens for seeing what humans cannot. - What it is: An AR visualization technique that filters the live scene the way a bird's or snake's vision might, to highlight data of interest in the world. - How it works: Video see-through AR with image filters inspired by raptor acuity and snake infrared sensing, driven by user queries. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1109/ismar-adjunct.2016.0077 (IEEE ISMAR 2016 Adjunct) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mg1VngCdpA ## Becoming Insect Small scales and many eyes: bees and pollinators, ants and colonies, butterflies, spiders and compound vision. ### Bees & pollinators Seeing flowers in ultraviolet, the waggle dance, the hive. #### Visión de Abeja: Experiencia Floral Inmersiva — Viviana Álvarez Chomón, Jaime Martínez Harms (2026) - Type: Artwork · Senses: Altered vision, Time & scale · Medium: VR headset, Multisensory installation - Shown at: Museo de Historia Natural de Valparaíso 2026 - Idea: Shrinking to bee size and seeing in ultraviolet reveals flower patterns that exist for pollinators, not for us. - What it is: A guided VR experience in which visitors fly at roughly bee scale over a garden of two native flowers of Chile's flowering Atacama desert, switching between human vision, ultraviolet vision and a model of bee colour and optics. - How it works: VR headset with a modelled garden of Cistanthe longiscapa and Argylia radiata; view modes likely based on UV photography and bee colour-vision models from the INIA La Cruz pollination research. - Images: https://radiofestival.b-cdn.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/MINISTRA-s.jpeg - Project page: https://www.radiofestival.cl/ministerio-de-ciencia-lanzo-en-valparaiso-vision-de-abeja-experiencia-inmersiva-en-realidad-virtual-sobre-la-percepcion-de-las-abejas/ #### DOON (Over There) — Issay Rodriguez (2020) - Type: Artwork · Senses: Body schema & movement, Collective & networked · Medium: VR headset - Shown at: Art Fair Philippines 2020 - Idea: You communicate as a bee does, with the body rather than words: the dance itself is the message to the hive. - What it is: A VR artwork that places the viewer inside a beehive, where they guide fellow bees to sources of nectar and pollen by performing the waggle dance. - How it works: Interactive VR environment in which the viewer's movement is likely mapped to the waggle dance that directs virtual hive mates. - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/67c1754c89592f0c27fddb0b/bf9663bb-6482-4bde-bdd8-13bc146a4b7e/Guiding+virtual+bees+in+the+VR+environment+of+Issay+Rodriguez%E2%80%99s+DOON+%28Over+There%29%2C+2020.+Image+courtesy+of+%E2%80%98DOON%E2%80%99+VR+Team.?format=1500w https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/67c1754c89592f0c27fddb0b/0ec2220a-faf3-4e75-a3f5-6c24fe8b37ad/Issay%2BRodriguez%2C%2BVR%2Benvironment%2Boverlaid%2Bscreenshots%2Bof%2B%E2%80%98DOON%2B%28Over%2BThere%29%E2%80%99%2C%2B2020.jpeg?format=1500w - Project page: https://www.artandmarket.net/analysis/2020/1/5/on-the-possibilities-of-virtual-reality-art ### Butterflies, spiders & others Butterflies and metamorphosis, spiders and vibration, flies, mosquitoes and dragonflies. #### The Spider's Perspective — Barbara Schuler (2026) - Type: Research prototype · Senses: Touch & haptics, Hearing & vibration, Altered vision · Medium: VR headset, Multisensory installation - Idea: Arthropod conservation through the spider's own senses: air, vibration and sight. - What it is: A multisensory VR experience in which visitors become a hunting spider exploring an oak tree for prey, sensing airflow from fans and vibrations through haptics. - How it works: Head-mounted VR with fans for airflow, haptic vibration, spatial sound, walking and jumping via controllers and a rotating chair. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3788851.3815016 (ACM IMX 2026) #### Controlling Virtual Spiders — Martin Kocur (2025) - Type: Paper · Senses: Body schema & movement · Medium: VR headset - Idea: An alien anatomy needs its own control scheme; there is no neutral mapping. - What it is: A study comparing four ways to drive an eight-legged spider avatar: controller, hands, half-body and full-body control. - How it works: Head-mounted VR with controller, hand-tracking and body-tracking mappings to spider legs. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3756884.3765989 (ACM VRST 2025) #### Birdly Insects — SOMNIACS (2022) - Type: Artwork · Senses: Body schema & movement, Altered vision, Touch & haptics · Medium: VR headset, Multisensory installation - Shown at: NYX Game Awards 2022 (Gold) - Idea: Shrinking the flyer to insect scale turns an ordinary meadow into a vast and dangerous landscape. - What it is: A Birdly experience in which you fly as a butterfly through a flower meadow, feeling the wind, hearing your own wings and meeting other animals, including predators. - How it works: Runs on the Birdly prone motion platform with a VR headset and headwind fan; content developed with Kevuru Games. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYO9mGG9qTE - Project page: https://blooloop.com/animals/news/somniacs-birdly-insects/ #### Animalia Sum — Bianca Kennedy, The Swan Collective (2020) - Type: Artwork · Senses: Body schema & movement, Altered vision · Medium: VR headset, 360° / immersive film - Shown at: Sundance New Frontier 2020 - Idea: Humour as a way into insect bodies: switching roles between eater and eaten questions how we rank animals. - What it is: A comic VR mockumentary about a future in which insects are humanity's main protein: the viewer becomes a bug, then a farmer milking bugs, and watches a boxing match between a bug and a whale. - How it works: Hand-sculpted miniatures captured with photogrammetry, animated with a Perception Neuron suit, delivered as interactive 360° on Oculus Go. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCmypkilkEY - Project page: https://voicesofvr.com/901-sundance-animalia-sum-blends-humor-with-a-unique-aesthetic-of-photogrammetry-captured-sculptures/ ## Becoming Animal Other animals: companion and farm animals, wild mammals, reptiles, and works that move between many species. ### Companion & farm animals Dogs, cats, cows, pigs, chickens: the animals humans live with. #### Having Dog Ears "for Real" — Omar A. Khan (2026) - Type: Paper · Senses: Touch & haptics, Body schema & movement · Medium: VR headset, Wearable & sensory device - Idea: Social VR users already wear animal parts; touch is what makes them part of the body. - What it is: Participants touched virtual dog ears on their heads with vibrotactile gloves, a physical headband, both or neither. - How it works: Survey of social VR communities, then a 2×2 within-subjects study with vibrotactile gloves (active haptics) and a headband with ear props (passive haptics). - Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.26364 (arXiv 2026) - Images: https://ar5iv.labs.arxiv.org/html/2606.26364/assets/figures/teaser.png #### If I Could See a Cat (猫が見えたら) — Atsushi Wada (2025) - Type: Immersive film · Senses: Body schema & movement, Altered vision, Touch & haptics · Medium: VR headset, Game - Shown at: Venice Immersive 2025; IFFR 2026; Kaohsiung Film Festival XR Dreamland 2026 - Idea: Grief seen from below, through a cat's body: the viewer comforts a human by being the animal he has lost. - What it is: An interactive VR animation about a boy, Naoki, grieving his dead cat: the viewer lives through three cats — the phantom of his pet, a stray and a neighbour's cat — and uses hand tracking to move with feline gestures. - How it works: Hand-drawn style animation built for standalone VR with hand tracking mapped to paw and body gestures; released on Steam in 2026. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBRs46LtzMQ - Images: https://images.ludens.com.tw/uploads/images/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/15685-1.png - Project page: https://www.ludens.com.tw/atsushi-wada-vr-story-if-i-could-see-a-cat-steam-p/ #### Dog Code: Human to Quadruped Embodiment — Rachel McDonnell (2024) - Type: Paper · Senses: Body schema & movement · Medium: VR headset - Idea: Translate between bodies through a shared vocabulary of movement rather than joint by joint. - What it is: A deep-learning method that maps human motion to high-quality dog motion through a shared codebook, for real-time VR embodiment. - How it works: Rule-based retargeting to an intermediate skeleton, then finite scalar quantization to a codebook shared by human and dog motion. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3677388.3696339 (ACM SIGGRAPH Motion, Interaction and Games (MIG) 2024) #### I Am Cat — New Folder Games (2024) - Type: Game · Senses: Body schema & movement, Touch & haptics · Medium: VR headset, Game - Idea: Cat scale: shrinking the player to cat height and turning hands into paws makes an ordinary home into terrain. - What it is: A VR sandbox in which you are a house cat in an old woman's home: you climb furniture, knock objects off shelves and hide from the owner. - How it works: Hand-driven paw controls with arm-based climbing and jumping on Meta Quest and SteamVR. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUnEWydv5jE - Images: https://shared.akamai.steamstatic.com/store_item_assets/steam/apps/3016840/header.jpg - Project page: https://newfolderstudio.com/ #### iStrayPaws — Yao Xu (2024) - Type: Research prototype · Senses: Body schema & movement, Multisensory · Medium: VR headset - Idea: Empathy for urban animals through living a day of their hardship at their height. - What it is: A first-person VR journey as a stray cat or dog facing rain, hunger and illness in the city. - How it works: Head-mounted VR at animal eye height with audio-visual and kinesthetic feedback for weather, hunger and injury. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3641825.3687729 (ACM VRST 2024) #### A Chicken's-Eye VR Film — Iffa Nurlatifah (2023) - Type: Immersive film · Senses: Altered vision · Medium: 360° / immersive film - Idea: Lowering the camera to a farm animal's eye can change who the viewer identifies with. - What it is: An immersive VR film shot from the height and viewpoint of a chicken, tested for its effect on empathy towards non-human beings. - How it works: 360° camera placed at chicken eye level, viewed in a headset, with before-and-after empathy measures. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3632776.3632804 (ARTECH 2023) #### NeuroDog: Quadruped Embodiment with Neural Networks — Rachel McDonnell (2023) - Type: Paper · Senses: Body schema & movement · Medium: VR headset - Idea: A believable animal body needs animal motion, not a human skeleton stretched onto four legs. - What it is: A system that turns a person's movement into natural dog motion in real time, so that a VR user can walk, sit and play as a dog. - How it works: Neural network trained on dog motion capture maps tracked human poses to quadruped animation instead of inverse kinematics. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3606936 (Proceedings of the ACM on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques (SCA) 2023) #### Now I Wanna Be a Dog — Rachel McDonnell (2023) - Type: Paper · Senses: Body schema & movement, Hearing & vibration, Touch & haptics · Medium: VR headset - Idea: Sound and touch can make up for the mismatch between a human body and a dog body. - What it is: Participants embodied a dog in VR and moved on all fours while hearing paw steps and feeling vibrations under their hands. - How it works: Head-mounted display with hand and body tracking; footstep audio and audio-tactile actuators under the hands. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1109/ismar59233.2023.00107 (IEEE ISMAR 2023) #### Ex Anima — Bartabas, Pierre Zandrowicz (2019) - Type: Immersive film · Senses: Body schema & movement, Breath & interoception · Medium: VR headset - Shown at: Venice Virtual Reality 2019 - Idea: Becoming a horse through breath and rhythm rather than story: an ode to the breathing of animals. - What it is: Horses emerge from the dark, breathing and dancing on sand; as the piece unfolds the viewer moves with them until they increasingly become the horse. - How it works: VR film built from Théâtre Zingaro's equestrian performance, shot with stereoscopic capture of the horses (likely volumetric/CG hybrid). - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4TyjO6UiDI - Images: https://static.labiennale.org/files/styles/seo_thumbnail/public/cinema/2019/Schede_film/970x647/Venice_VR/ex-anima-experience.jpg?itok=pp2569cx - Project page: https://www.labiennale.org/en/cinema/2019/venice-virtual-reality/ex-anima-experience #### Experiencing Nature: Embodying a Cow and a Coral — Stanford Virtual Human Interaction Lab (2016) - Type: Paper · Senses: Body schema & movement, Touch & haptics · Medium: VR headset - Idea: Being the animal, not watching it, raised feelings of connection with nature and concern that lasted a week. - What it is: Three experiments in which participants became a cow walking to a slaughterhouse or a coral on an acidifying reef, on all fours with a haptic prod, compared with watching the same on video. - How it works: Head-mounted display with full-body tracking; participants crawl on hands and knees while a stick touches them in sync with the virtual cattle prod. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1111/jcc4.12173 (Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 2016) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQke1eQHSAA ### Wild mammals Deer, foxes, wolves, elephants, bears, primates and other wild mammals. #### Wolfborn — Shengdong Zhao (2026) - Type: Research prototype · Senses: Hearing & vibration, Body schema & movement, Breath & interoception · Medium: VR headset - Idea: Becoming an animal can lend us its voice: a howl we could not make as ourselves. - What it is: A VR demo in which users embody a wolf and release stress by howling, without making any audible sound. - How it works: Pseudo-vocalization combining breath or throat gestures with visual, auditory and tactile feedback of the wolf's howl. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3802974.3808033 (DIS 2026 Companion) #### "I look like a gorilla, but don't move like one!" — Omar A. Khan (2025) - Type: Paper · Senses: Body schema & movement · Medium: VR headset - Idea: An animal body feels more one's own when its gait matches its form. - What it is: Participants moved as a human or a gorilla avatar using either human arm-swing or gorilla-like arm-roll locomotion. - How it works: Head-mounted VR with controller-based arm-swing and arm-roll locomotion techniques in a 2×2 study. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1109/vrw66409.2025.00247 (IEEE VR 2025 Workshops) #### I Am Monkey — New Folder Games (2025) - Type: Game · Senses: Body schema & movement, Altered vision · Medium: VR headset, Game - Idea: The zoo gaze reversed: the player is the one on display, looking out through bars at people. - What it is: A VR sandbox in which you are a monkey in a zoo cage; visitors pass by, some offering bananas, others teasing, and you can charm them or fight back. - How it works: Arm-based climbing, grabbing and throwing with scripted visitor behaviour on Meta Quest and Steam. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJCfvsjFybM - Images: https://queststoredb.com/media/24775738222115749_cover_landscape.webp - Project page: https://www.meta.com/experiences/i-am-monkey/24775738222115749/ #### Pine Cone Prowl: Embodying a Flying Squirrel — Gamification Group, Tampere University (2024) - Type: Research prototype · Senses: Body schema & movement · Medium: VR headset, Game - Idea: Gliding, not flying: design the body around one small mammal's way of moving. - What it is: A VR game in which the player is a flying squirrel gliding between trees in a Finnish forest. - How it works: Head-mounted VR with arm gestures for spreading the gliding membrane (likely controller-based). - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3681716.3690625 (Academic Mindtrek 2024) #### Gorilla Tag — Another Axiom (2021) - Type: Game · Senses: Body schema & movement, Collective & networked · Medium: VR headset, Game - Idea: Walking on your hands: remove the legs and the body learns ape locomotion through the arms, a body swap millions of players adopted. - What it is: A multiplayer VR game in which players are legless gorillas who move only by pushing their hands against the ground, walls and trees, playing tag. - How it works: Controller positions push a physics body with no joystick locomotion; first released in early access on Meta Quest and SteamVR, originally made by Kerestell Smith. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3bR3s546CU - Images: https://shared.akamai.steamstatic.com/store_item_assets/steam/apps/1533390/header.jpg - Project page: https://gorillatagvr.com/ #### Invasion! — Baobab Studios (2016) - Type: Immersive film · Senses: Body schema & movement, Altered vision · Medium: VR headset, 360° / immersive film - Shown at: Tribeca Film Festival 2016 - Idea: The simplest embodiment cue, seeing an animal body where your own should be, is enough to shift how the scene addresses you. - What it is: An animated VR short in which you are a small white rabbit on a frozen lake when two aliens land; looking down, you see your own furry body. - How it works: Real-time animated VR in which the viewer's camera is placed in a rabbit avatar, with characters reacting to the viewer. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZ0fKW5PttM - Project page: https://www.baobabstudios.com/ #### The Virtual Reality Gorilla Exhibit — Don Allison, Larry F. Hodges (1996) - Type: Research prototype · Senses: Body schema & movement, Altered vision · Medium: VR headset - Idea: You learn gorilla social rules by being treated as a gorilla, an early VR case of learning through animal embodiment. - What it is: At Zoo Atlanta, students in a head-mounted display take the role of an adolescent gorilla inside a virtual gorilla habitat, and the virtual gorillas react to their approach with dominance and submission behaviours. - How it works: SGI-rendered model of the Zoo Atlanta habitat with behaviour-controlled gorilla agents designed with primatologists, shown in a tracked HMD. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1109/38.626967 (IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications 1997) ### Reptiles & amphibians Snakes, lizards, frogs, turtles: infrared pits, chameleon eyes, cold blood. #### Jurassic Flight (Birdly) — SOMNIACS (2020) - Type: Artwork · Senses: Body schema & movement, Altered vision, Touch & haptics · Medium: VR headset, Multisensory installation - Idea: The same flapping body can carry an extinct flyer, so embodiment becomes a way to imagine a vanished animal's flight. - What it is: A Birdly experience in which you embody a pterosaur, Kepodactylus, and fly over dinosaurs in a Jurassic landscape reconstructed with palaeontologists. - How it works: Birdly prone motion platform with arm-and-hand wing control, VR headset and headwind fan; scene and animal models made in consultation with palaeontologists. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVP5h2kyRgw - Project page: https://www.birdlyvr.com/ #### Virtual Chameleon — Fumio Mizuno (2009) - Type: Research prototype · Senses: Altered vision · Medium: Wearable & sensory device - Idea: Try seeing like a chameleon, with two eyes that look different ways at once. - What it is: A wearable system with two independently steered cameras that shows each eye a different view, controlled by the wearer. - How it works: Two motorised cameras steered by hand-held trackers, each feeding one side of a head-mounted display. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-03904-1_48 (IFMBE Proceedings 2009) ### Many species Works that let you move through the perspectives of several species. #### Face Jumping — Tender Claws (2025) - Type: Artwork · Senses: Altered vision, Body schema & movement · Medium: VR headset - Shown at: SXSW 2025 XR; Venice Immersive 2025 - Idea: Eye contact is the doorway between bodies: to become another, you first have to look it in the eye. - What it is: A surreal VR piece in which meeting another character's gaze lets you jump into their body, moving between strangers, animals and objects on a journey of rebirth. - How it works: Uses the eye tracking of Meta Quest Pro to detect mutual gaze and trigger perspective swaps. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNT_MuIJ8aY - Images: https://static.labiennale.org/files/styles/full_screen_slide/public/cinema/2025/Schede_film/970x647/Ve_Immersive/face_jumping.jpg?itok=m12qWn8f https://static.labiennale.org/files/styles/seo_thumbnail/public/cinema/2025/Schede_film/970x647/Ve_Immersive/face_jumping.jpg?itok=OnaLq0ZU - Project page: https://www.labiennale.org/en/cinema/2025/venice-immersive/face-jumping #### The Dream of Zhuang Zhou — Shuai Zou (2025) - Type: Artwork · Senses: Altered vision, Multisensory · Medium: VR headset - Shown at: SIGGRAPH Asia 2025 - Idea: Transformative embodiment (wuhua): each species builds a different world from the same landscape. - What it is: A VR experience built on Zhuangzi's butterfly dream in which the visitor passes between the perspectives of a human, a fish, a butterfly and a bird in a Chinese landscape. - How it works: 3D Gaussian Splatting reconstruction of a landscape rendered with species-specific visual and cognitive mappings. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3757369.3767609 (SIGGRAPH Asia 2025 Art Papers) #### AnimalSense — Yu-Lun Hsu (2024) - Type: Research prototype · Senses: Echolocation, Electroreception, Altered vision · Medium: VR headset, Game - Idea: Learn an animal sense by having to use it. - What it is: A VR game with levels in which players use a bat's echolocation, an eel's electroreception and a jumping spider's panoramic vision to solve challenges. - How it works: Sensory substitution and remapping in VR: echoes rendered as spatial sound and visuals, electric fields as haptics, panoramic vision compressed into the headset view. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3613905.3648102 (CHI 2024 Extended Abstracts) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OycDmP3hobQ #### Becoming an Animal? Proteus Effect and Hand Gestures — Tangjun Qu (2024) - Type: Paper · Senses: Body schema & movement · Medium: VR headset - Idea: The body you wear can reshape the body you have, down to hand posture. - What it is: Participants wore human or animal hands in VR; a gesture-recognition model measured whether their real hands started to move like the animal's. - How it works: Hand tracking in a headset with three animal hand models; a trained classifier scores gesture consistency with each avatar. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1109/ismar62088.2024.00093 (IEEE ISMAR 2024) #### NariTan — Shogo Fukushima (2024) - Type: Paper · Senses: Body schema & movement · Medium: VR headset - Idea: A non-human body as a memory aid: words are learned through the actions of a dragon body the learner has never had. - What it is: An immersive VR vocabulary-learning system in which the learner embodies a dragon and acts out English words through the dragon's body. A study found fewer words forgotten after one week than with conventional study. - How it works: Head-mounted display with a full-body dragon avatar driven by the learner's movements; retention, workload and emotion were compared with traditional study, also varying the number of avatars. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.3390/mti8100093 (Multimodal Technologies and Interaction 2024) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.3390/mti8100093 #### Plastisapiens — Miri Chekhanovich, Édith Jorisch (2022) - Type: Artwork · Senses: Body schema & movement, Touch & haptics · Medium: VR headset - Shown at: Tribeca Immersive 2022; IDFA DocLab 2022 - Idea: Becoming a plastic-permeated body: embodiment used for speculative, feminist eco-fiction rather than empathy. - What it is: A surreal interactive VR eco-fiction in which the participant embodies animals and altered humans whose bodies have absorbed plastic and become more fluid. - How it works: Real-time VR with body-tracked avatars that deform and merge; produced by the NFB and DPT. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKuUlpfUi68 - Project page: https://voicesofvr.com/1105-tribeca-xr-embodiment-experiments-in-a-surrealist-speculative-future-feminist-eco-fiction-on-plastics-permeating-the-body-in-plastisapians/ #### Samsara — Hsin-Chien Huang (2021) - Type: Artwork · Senses: Body schema & movement, Altered vision · Medium: VR headset - Shown at: Venice VR Expanded 2021 - Idea: Reincarnation as embodied cognition: each rebirth gives you a new body and a new perspective on the same planet. - What it is: After humans destroy the Earth and re-engineer their DNA to survive in space, the participant returns to Earth in another era as a different life form, then passes through other beings' bodies in a cycle of rebirth. - How it works: Free-roaming VR with full-body avatars that change species across chapters (HTC Vive / Quest). - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IygU6BpINQ - Images: https://static.labiennale.org/files/styles/seo_thumbnail/public/cinema/2021/Schede_film/970x647/Venice_VR_Expanded/huang_samsara.jpg?itok=EaPJB35o - Project page: https://www.labiennale.org/en/cinema/2021/lineup/venice-vr-expanded/lun-hui-samsara #### Beyond Human: Animals as an Escape from Stereotype Avatars — Andrey Krekhov (2019) - Type: Paper · Senses: Body schema & movement, Altered vision · Medium: VR headset, Game - Idea: Game mechanics can be built from what an animal body can do, not from human templates. - What it is: Players became a scorpion, a rhino and a bird, each with its own body parts and abilities, such as a stinging tail or flight. - How it works: Room-scale VR with body-tracked mappings of extra body parts (tail, wings) and animal-specific senses and movement. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3311350.3347172 (CHI PLAY 2019) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fa2Ivv14GL4 - Images: https://ar5iv.labs.arxiv.org/html/1907.07466/assets/figures/teaser.jpg https://ar5iv.labs.arxiv.org/html/1907.07466/assets/figures/scorpion.jpg #### Ghost Giant — Zoink (2019) - Type: Game · Senses: Body schema & movement, Time & scale · Medium: VR headset, Game - Idea: Being a spirit is a matter of scale and invisibility: you can reshape a whole town yet reach only the one person who can see you. - What it is: A VR puzzle game in which the player is a giant ghost, invisible to everyone except a lonely boy named Louis. Looming over a toy-like town, the player lifts roofs, turns houses and moves objects to help him. - How it works: Room-scale VR on PlayStation VR (Move controllers) and Oculus Quest, with the world built at miniature scale around the seated or standing player. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2xNpID-w6s - Images: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/de/Ghost_giant_cover.jpg - Project page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_Giant #### The Illusion of Animal Body Ownership — Andrey Krekhov (2019) - Type: Paper · Senses: Body schema & movement · Medium: VR headset, Game - Idea: Non-humanoid bodies can produce ownership as strong as, and sometimes stronger than, a human avatar. - What it is: Players controlled a virtual spider, bat and other creatures with different body-tracking mappings and reported how much the body felt like their own. - How it works: Full-body tracking with mappings of human arms and legs onto eight spider legs or bat wings, viewed in a virtual mirror. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1109/cig.2019.8848005 (IEEE Conference on Games (CoG) 2019) - Images: https://ar5iv.labs.arxiv.org/html/1907.05220/assets/figures/modes.jpg https://ar5iv.labs.arxiv.org/html/1907.05220/assets/figures/scene.jpg #### Inside Tumucumaque — Interactive Media Foundation (2018) - Type: Artwork · Senses: Altered vision, Echolocation, Time & scale · Medium: VR headset, Multisensory installation - Shown at: ZKM Karlsruhe 2018; Raindance Film Festival 2018 (Special Jury Mention); ADC Gold 2019; European Design Award Gold 2019; VR Days Europe 2019 - Idea: Each animal is a different translation of the same place: ultraviolet colour, slow motion, echolocation or night vision. - What it is: A VR installation set in a clearing of the Brazilian rainforest where you switch between five animals, a black caiman, harpy eagle, vampire bat, poison dart frog and Goliath birdeater, and perceive the forest through each one's senses. - How it works: Models and animations were built with scientists of the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin; senses are rendered as ultraviolet palettes, super-slow motion, sonar visualisation, colour night vision and 3D sound. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFkcRQq_UT4 - Images: https://inside-tumucumaque.com/images/multi_e.jpg - Project page: https://inside-tumucumaque.com/ #### VR Animals: Surreal Body Ownership in VR Games — Andrey Krekhov (2018) - Type: Paper · Senses: Body schema & movement · Medium: VR headset, Game - Idea: Body ownership is not limited to human-shaped avatars: players can feel an animal body as theirs. - What it is: A first exploratory study of playing as three animals in VR with five control schemes, from a third-person companion view to first-person full-body tracking. - How it works: HTC Vive with full-body trackers mapping human limbs to animal limbs; compared with controller and companion modes. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3270316.3271531 (CHI PLAY 2018 Extended Abstracts) #### Life of Us — Within, Chris Milk (2017) - Type: Artwork · Senses: Body schema & movement, Hearing & vibration · Medium: VR headset - Shown at: Sundance New Frontier 2017 - Idea: Evolution as a sequence of bodies you wear with a friend; seeing the other person's creature tells you what you have become. - What it is: A shared VR journey through evolution in which two participants embody a chain of creatures — single cell, fish, frog, pterodactyl, ape, human and beyond — with their voices modulated to match each body. - How it works: Real-time multi-user VR with tracked hands and real-time voice modulation for each creature. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpyFs6O-328 - Project page: https://www.with.in #### In the Eyes of the Animal — Marshmallow Laser Feast, Abandon Normal Devices (2015) - Type: Artwork · Senses: Altered vision, Hearing & vibration, Touch & haptics · Medium: VR headset, Multisensory installation, 360° / immersive film - Shown at: AND Festival, Grizedale Forest 2015; Sundance New Frontier 2016; Sónar 2016; Supersenses, National Science and Media Museum, Bradford 2017; Singapore International Festival of Arts 2017; Particles of Existence, Phi Centre, Montreal 2018; Timber Festival 2018; Coda Festival 2019; OMM, Eskişehir 2019; Discovery Naturescape, Hwaseong 2022; BBK Klima Abentura, Bilbao 2023; Schemerlicht Festival, Nijmegen 2024; Sentients, Watershed, Bristol 2026 - Idea: Each animal is a different forest: the mosquito sees plumes of carbon dioxide, the dragonfly sees at 240 frames per second, the owl sees only what it faces. - What it is: A VR journey through Grizedale Forest along the food chain, seen successively through the senses of a mosquito, a dragonfly, a frog and an owl. Visitors wear a headset inside a sculptural helmet and a vibrating backpack while a binaural forest soundscape plays. - How it works: LiDAR scans, CT scans, photogrammetry and 360° drone footage of Grizedale Forest rendered in real time in vvvv, with a MaxMSP binaural engine, a SubPac haptic backpack for wingbeats and croaks, and scent; later released as a 360° film. - Video: https://vimeo.com/140057053 - Images: https://marshmallowlaserfeast.com/app/uploads/2024/07/Screenshot-2024-07-24-at-10.52.46.jpg https://marshmallowlaserfeast.com/app/uploads/2024/07/ITEOTA_180Renders_0147_4k.jpg https://marshmallowlaserfeast.com/app/uploads/2024/07/Screenshot-2024-07-24-at-11.02.24.jpg - Project page: https://marshmallowlaserfeast.com/project/in-the-eyes-of-the-animal/ #### FlyVIZ: 360° Vision — Anatole Lécuyer (2012) - Type: Research prototype · Senses: Altered vision · Medium: Wearable & sensory device, VR headset - Shown at: SIGGRAPH 2016 Emerging Technologies - Idea: Humans can adapt to eyes in the back of their heads. - What it is: A helmet that gives the wearer real-time 360° vision of their surroundings, like the panoramic sight of a fly or a prey animal. - How it works: Panoramic camera on top of the head, with omnidirectional images remapped into a head-mounted display's field of view. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/2407336.2407344 (ACM VRST 2012) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Dm0wH9TDjw #### Animal Superpowers — Chris Woebken, Kenichi Okada (2008) - Type: Research prototype · Senses: Altered vision, Magnetic sense, Body schema & movement · Medium: Wearable & sensory device - Shown at: Design and the Elastic Mind, MoMA New York 2008 - Idea: Each device borrows one animal sense and fits it to a child's body and play, so curiosity becomes the interface. - What it is: A set of wearable devices for children: an ant apparatus that magnifies vision 50 times through hand-mounted microscopes, a bird device that vibrates toward a chosen direction, and a giraffe device that lowers the voice and raises the eyes by 30 cm; bat goggles for hearing ultrasound followed in 2015. - How it works: Hand-mounted microscope cameras feeding a head display, a GPS unit driving vibration, voice pitch shifting with raised stilts, and an ultrasonic bat detector. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9oTcez2CXU - Images: https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ad1784c02faa9d2afb6614fa878b4982436d2d58292e1349ebee13b3d8c6a682/2232862656_cba3f094c1_o.jpg https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/067d74e44844e7aca2661cd3baab576aa3fb852d9130e7525a1d6fce5ad67c0d/animals3.jpg - Project page: https://www.chriswoebken.com/animal-superpowers #### Becoming Dragon — micha cárdenas (2008) - Type: Performance · Senses: Body schema & movement, Altered vision, Hearing & vibration · Medium: VR headset, Performance & participatory - Shown at: Vector Festival, Montreal 2018 (Becoming Dragon Redux) - Idea: Asks whether a year of 'Second Life Experience' could stand in for the 'Real Life Experience' demanded before gender surgery, and leads to species reassignment: becoming a mythical animal as a way of thinking about transition. - What it is: A 365-hour mixed-reality performance in which the artist lived as a dragon avatar in Second Life, wearing a head-mounted display and seeing the physical world only through a video feed. Audiences watched a stereoscopic projection and heard her voice processed into a dragon's. - How it works: Head-mounted display with a camera pass-through, a motion capture system mapping the performer's movements to the Second Life dragon, a Pure Data voice patch and stereoscopic projection for the audience. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1117/12.806260 (SPIE Electronic Imaging 2009) - Video: https://vimeo.com/3874238 - Project page: https://michacardenas.sites.ucsc.edu/becoming-dragon/ #### Placeholder — Brenda Laurel, Rachel Strickland (1993) - Type: Artwork · Senses: Altered vision, Body schema & movement, Hearing & vibration · Medium: VR headset - Shown at: Banff Centre for the Arts 1993 - Idea: Each creature is a different perceptual and locomotor rule set, which makes embodiment a matter of senses and movement, not appearance. - What it is: A two-person VR work in filmed landscapes of Banff where participants could take on the body of a spirit animal, Spider, Snake, Fish or Crow, gaining its way of seeing, moving and speaking, and leave spoken 'voicemarks' for others. - How it works: Head-mounted displays, 3D spatial audio, hand-held controllers and voice filters; Crow flies with flapping arms and Snake sees in infrared-like colour. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/192593.192637 (ACM Multimedia 1994) - Images: https://image.jimcdn.com/app/cms/image/transf/none/path/s1cb8d6527de0e9b6/image/ifd4c0c7fa4d79286/version/1571836952/image.jpg - Project page: https://www.tauzero.com/Brenda_Laurel/Severed_Heads/CGQ_Placeholder.html ## Becoming Fungi Networked and microbial life: mycelium, slime mould, bacteria, cells and symbiosis, at slow time and tiny scale. ### Mycelium & mushrooms Fungal networks, spores, decomposition and the wood-wide web. #### FungiSync — Botao 'Amber' Hu, Danlin Huang, Reality Design Lab (2024) - Type: Performance · Senses: Collective & networked, Altered vision, Touch & haptics · Medium: Mixed reality, Performance & participatory - Shown at: DevCon 2024 “Trusting the Unseen”, Bangkok; SIGGRAPH 2025 Immersive Pavilion - Idea: Becoming fungi means becoming a node: perception is traded and mixed through contact rather than owned by one body. - What it is: A participatory mixed-reality ritual: participants wear mushroom-decorated MR masks, each showing a different visual worldview, and blend those worldviews with others through ritual handshakes, like nodes in a mycorrhizal network. - How it works: Resin-printed mushroom masks mounted on HoloKit headsets; the HoloField co-located multiplayer framework over Multipeer Connectivity syncs Unity VFX Graph visuals, driven live by a DJ and composited for spectators. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3721245.3734040 (SIGGRAPH 2025 Immersive Pavilion) - Video: https://vimeo.com/1027901359 - Images: https://reality.design/media/20241120%20fungi%205225.jpg https://reality.design/media/project-fungisync-figure-01.jpg https://arxiv.org/html/2511.12533v3/images/fungisync.jpg - Project page: https://reality.design/project/fungisync #### Symbiosis/\Dysbiosis: Sentience — Tosca Terán (2024) - Type: Artwork · Senses: Collective & networked, Hearing & vibration, Multisensory · Medium: VR headset, Multisensory installation, Performance & participatory - Shown at: Venice Immersive 2024 - Idea: Human brain signals and fungal signals are mixed in one loop, so the visitor becomes one node of a mycelial network. - What it is: An expanded-reality open-world mushroom adventure in which real-time fungal biodata and the EEG of guests together shape an evolving soundscape and forest. - How it works: Living mycelium wired to a custom synthesizer, EEG headsets on guests, VR world plus projection-mapped floor and walls; co-directed with Brendan Lehman. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PzZXrqncsY - Images: https://voicesofvr.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/symbiosisdysbiosis-sentience-970x546.jpg https://static.labiennale.org/files/styles/seo_thumbnail/public/cinema/2024/Schede_film/970x647/Ve_Immersive/symbiosis-dysbiosis.jpg?itok=FPo8HeFR - Project page: https://voicesofvr.com/1432-combining-biodata-with-open-world-mushroom-adventure-with-symbiosis-dysbiosis-sentience/ #### Forager — Winslow Porter, Elie Zananiri (2023) - Type: Artwork · Senses: Time & scale, Smell & taste, Touch & haptics · Medium: VR headset, Multisensory installation - Shown at: SXSW 2023; SIGGRAPH 2023 Immersive Pavilion - Idea: Fungal time is compressed into minutes and made spatial, so growth and decomposition are lived from inside. - What it is: A multisensory VR story in which you begin as a spore, spread as mycelium through a rotting stump and burst out as a mushroom, over the four stages of a fungus's life. - How it works: Volumetric time-lapse of real mushrooms (automated photogrammetry rendered as voxels) in a game engine, with scent, wind haptics and SubPac bass haptics. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3588027.3603531 (SIGGRAPH 2023 Immersive Pavilion) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vw_c_7Hw-DQ - Images: https://voicesofvr.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/forager-950x534.jpg https://static.labiennale.org/files/styles/seo_thumbnail/public/cinema/2023/Schede_film/970x647/Ve_Immersive/porter-gra.jpg?itok=5DLfU6OX - Project page: https://voicesofvr.com/1189-forager-volumetric-timelapse-of-mushroom-growth-hits-a-sweet-spot-of-touch-smell-immersive-storytelling/ #### Hypha — Natalia Cabrera (2020) - Type: Artwork · Senses: Body schema & movement, Altered vision, Time & scale · Medium: VR headset - Shown at: Sundance New Frontier 2020 - Idea: Being a fungus means having a branching body that feeds, connects to roots and repairs soil. - What it is: A VR story in which you embody the full life cycle of a mushroom: a spore from space finds water, grows underground as hyphae and mycelium, cleans toxic soil and fruits as a mushroom whose cap and gills block your view. - How it works: Six-DoF VR with hand tracking that turns the arms into stringy branching limbs; developed by Nanai Studio with Sebastian Gonzalez and Juan Ferrer. - Video: https://vimeo.com/356115943 - Images: https://docubase.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/hypha.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/654d529f2df68e6aa2c35f5b/51192710-fec7-41a0-8952-03fbfd50760d/Hypha_6.png - Project page: https://docubase.mit.edu/project/hypha/ ### Slime mould Physarum and other brainless problem-solvers. #### Symbiosis — Polymorf (2021) - Type: Artwork · Senses: Touch & haptics, Smell & taste, Multisensory · Medium: VR headset, Wearable & sensory device, Performance & participatory - Shown at: IDFA DocLab, Amsterdam (world premiere); Eye Filmmuseum, Cinema Ecologica 2021; Holland Festival 2022; PAM CUT, Portland Art Museum 2022–23; SXSW XR Experience Spotlight 2023 - Idea: Inspired by Donna Haraway's Camille Stories: becoming another species is done with the whole body, including taste, smell and skin. - What it is: A multi-user VR performance set 200 years in the future in which each visitor, wearing a custom haptic suit, inhabits a slime mould, a toad, a genetically altered orchid or a human–anglerfish hybrid, tasting and smelling their world as the characters' stories converge. - How it works: Individual haptic suits with soft robotics, VR audio and visuals, scent delivery and vegetarian snacks by the chefs of Karpendonkse Hoeve matched to each creature. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hwpnyWSXb0 - Images: https://polymorf.nl/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/BG-Symbiosis-new-04.jpg https://polymorf.nl/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/creature.jpg - Project page: https://polymorf.nl/symbiosis/ ### Microbes & cells Bacteria, viruses, cells, microbiomes and molecular worlds. #### The Materialised Temporality of Dust — Carolina Ramirez-Figueroa (2024) - Type: Artwork · Senses: Time & scale, Altered vision · Medium: VR headset - Idea: History read at microbial scale: dust is an archive, and becoming one of its microbes swaps the human timeline for dormancy, sporulation and slow accumulation. - What it is: A VR experience in which the visitor becomes a microbe living in the dust of the Royal College of Art's Kensington library. They wake inside an out-of-scale bookshelf and pass through decades of the room's history before returning to the library as it is today. - How it works: Microbes sampled from library dust, archival photographs and 3D scans of the space are combined into a VR journey following Bacillus subtilis. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1017/btd.2024.21 (Research Directions: Biotechnology Design 2025) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AAy5Phd0Fw - Images: https://rca-media2.rca.ac.uk/images/Screenshot_2025-03-18_at_12.36.3.2e16d0ba.fill-1200x1200.png - Project page: https://www.rca.ac.uk/more/staff/dr-carolina-ramirez-figueroa/transcript-for-the-materialised-temporality-of-dust-vr-project-by-carolina-ramirez-figueroa-video/ ### Symbiosis & lichen Lichen, holobionts and life as entanglement. #### Symbiotica — Natalia Cabrera (2021) - Type: Artwork · Senses: Collective & networked, Body schema & movement · Medium: VR headset, Screen & web - Shown at: CPH:DOX 2021; NewImages Festival 2022 - Idea: Symbiosis is learned by being one of the partners, not by watching the whole. - What it is: A multi-user VR experience in which participants embody different microorganisms and cooperate, from primitive cells onward, to discover what lichen, a collective of many species, has to tell humanity. - How it works: Online multi-user hub accessible by VR headset, PC, phone or tablet. - Images: https://xrmust.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/XRMust_symbiotica_Poster.jpg - Project page: https://xrmust.com/all-experiences/symbiotica/ ## Becoming Tree Plants and forests: trees, flowers and roots, photosynthesis, plant time and forest ecosystems. ### Trees Growing, breathing and living for centuries as a tree. #### Embodying nature in immersive virtual reality: Are multisensory stimuli vital to affect nature connectedness and pro-environmental behaviour? — Pia Spangenberger (2024) - Type: Paper · Senses: Multisensory, Body schema & movement, Touch & haptics · Medium: VR headset - Idea: Asks which senses matter when a human is asked to feel like a tree. - What it is: A follow-up study on embodying a tree in VR that tests whether added multisensory stimuli change nature connectedness and pro-environmental behaviour. - How it works: Controlled VR experiment comparing visual-only and multisensory tree embodiment conditions. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2023.104964 (Computers & Education 2024) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2023.104964 #### Becoming nature: effects of embodying a tree in immersive virtual reality on nature relatedness — Pia Spangenberger (2022) - Type: Paper · Senses: Body schema & movement, Altered vision · Medium: VR headset - Idea: Only VR participants described the experience in the first person as the tree, and only they reflected on their role as humans toward nature. - What it is: An experiment (N = 28) in which participants embodied a tree through its life, in immersive VR or on a desktop screen, with small branch movements via controllers. - How it works: HMD vs. desktop between-subjects study measuring nature relatedness, perspective-taking and immersion with mixed methods. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-05184-0 (Scientific Reports 2022) - Images: https://media.springernature.com/full/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41598-022-05184-0/MediaObjects/41598_2022_5184_Fig1_HTML.png - Project page: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-05184-0 #### We Live in an Ocean of Air — Marshmallow Laser Feast (2018) - Type: Artwork · Senses: Breath & interoception, Multisensory, Altered vision · Medium: VR headset, Multisensory installation - Shown at: Salon 009, Saatchi Gallery, London 2018–19; Observations on Being, Coventry 2021; Phi Centre, Montreal 2021–22; ArtScience Museum, Singapore 2022; Plásmata: Bodies, Dreams, and Data, Onassis Foundation, Athens 2022; Works of Nature, ACMI, Melbourne 2023–24; Breathe | Mauri Ora, Te Papa, Wellington 2025–26 - Idea: Breath is shared with trees: each exhale feeds the sequoia and each inhale comes from it, so the boundary between body and plant becomes a loop. - What it is: A multi-user VR installation in which visitors stand beneath a giant sequoia and see their own exhaled breath as particles that flow into the tree, while its oxygen flows back into them. Later editions present it as a large video installation. - How it works: Untethered VR with backpack PCs, hand tracking, breath sensors and heart-rate monitors that turn each visitor's breathing and pulse into real-time particles; binaural sound, scent diffusion and wind machines; sequoia data from the Treehugger LiDAR scans. - Video: https://vimeo.com/303589503 - Images: https://marshmallowlaserfeast.com/app/uploads/2023/11/Copy-of-OceanOfAir_Saatchi_-12-of-34_sml.jpg https://marshmallowlaserfeast.com/app/uploads/2023/11/Copy-of-OceanOfAir_Saatchi_-26-of-34.jpg https://marshmallowlaserfeast.com/app/uploads/2024/02/We-Live-in-an-Ocean-of-Air-by-Marshmallow-Laser-Feast-Works-of-Nature-ACMI-2023-image-by-Eugene-Hyland_13295.jpg - Project page: https://marshmallowlaserfeast.com/project/we-live-in-an-ocean-of-air/ #### Tree — Milica Zec, Winslow Porter (2017) - Type: Artwork · Senses: Body schema & movement, Touch & haptics, Smell & taste · Medium: VR headset, Multisensory installation - Shown at: Sundance New Frontier 2017; Tribeca Film Festival 2017; World Economic Forum Davos; TED 2017 - Idea: Becoming a tree means feeling growth, rootedness and helplessness in your own body, not watching deforestation from outside. - What it is: A room-scale VR experience in which you grow from a seed into a giant Amazon rainforest tree, your arms becoming branches, until the forest around you burns. - How it works: HTC Vive headset with a haptic vest, subwoofer floor, fans, heat and scents of earth and smoke; participants first plant a real seed. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERffRXjTAqM - Images: https://docubase.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Tree-02-Still.jpg https://voicesofvr.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/tree-vr-1102x473.jpg https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/treeofficial/img/desktop-tree-backup.png - Project page: https://www.treeofficial.com #### TreeSense — Xin Liu, Yedan Qian (2016) - Type: Research prototype · Senses: Touch & haptics, Body schema & movement, Time & scale · Medium: VR headset, Wearable & sensory device - Shown at: MIT Media Lab exhibition 2016; Core77 Design Awards 2017 (Interaction, Student Runner-up) - Idea: Tactile illusions on the forearm are enough to make a branch feel like part of your own body. - What it is: A sensory VR system that turns you into a tree from seedling to full size to its felling; electrical muscle stimulation lets you feel branches growing and a bird landing on your arm. - How it works: VR headset with Leap Motion hand tracking and an EMS unit with electrodes on the forearms, timed to growth, wind, worms and birds. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kbx29NMgbOM - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ad5566e96e76f1dbbd692b4/1526317496399-ZEEQEAU6E2P8234HYDD4/large.jpg https://s3files.core77.com/blog/images/619606_75884_64289_roLeAXei2.jpg - Project page: https://slowimmediate.com/treesense #### Treehugger: Wawona — Marshmallow Laser Feast, Natan Sinigaglia (2016) - Type: Artwork · Senses: Time & scale, Touch & haptics, Smell & taste · Medium: Mixed reality, VR headset, Multisensory installation - Shown at: Cinekid Festival 2016; Southbank Centre, London 2016; STRP Biennale 2017; Tribeca Film Festival Storyscapes Award 2017; Migrations Festival, Cardiff 2017; Future of Storytelling 2017; Phi Centre, Montreal 2018; VR Arles Festival Best VR Film 2018; OMM, Eskişehir 2019; Kaohsiung Film Festival 2019; Science Friction, CCCB Barcelona 2021; Frankfurter Kunstverein 2021; Breathing with Trees, Tai Kwun, Hong Kong 2022 - Idea: Becoming a 3,000-year-old tree means slowing down to its time and feeling its sap move, and the hug is the interface. - What it is: A mixed-reality installation built around a large tactile sculpture of a giant sequoia: visitors hug the trunk, put their head into a knot wearing a headset, and follow water rising from roots to canopy. The longer they hug, the deeper they drift into accelerated 'tree time'. - How it works: LiDAR and white-light scans of the Wawona sequoia in Sequoia National Park, made with the Natural History Museum and University of Salford, drive a real-time particle simulation of water and CO2 flow; a tactile sculpture, scent, haptics and a binaural soundscape of biosignals by Mileece I'Anson complete it. - Video: https://vimeo.com/195539105 - Images: https://marshmallowlaserfeast.com/app/uploads/2024/08/5.jpg https://marshmallowlaserfeast.com/app/uploads/2024/08/TreeHuggers.jpg https://marshmallowlaserfeast.com/app/uploads/2024/08/Treehugger_Wawona_BTS046.jpg - Project page: https://marshmallowlaserfeast.com/project/treehugger-wawona/ ### Plants & flowers Plants, flowers, roots and seeds; plant sensing and signalling. #### Bend to — Yuting Xue (2025) - Type: Paper · Senses: Body schema & movement, Altered vision, Time & scale · Medium: VR headset - Idea: Phototropism becomes a proprioceptive sense the participant shares with the plant. - What it is: An immersive work set in a future of strong UV radiation where participants track and anticipate how plants bend toward and away from light, using their own hand and body position. - How it works: 3D scans and time-lapse photography of real plants' light responses played back in VR with hand tracking. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3698061.3726945 (C&C 2025) - Project page: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3698061.3726945 #### The Great Escape — Joren Vandenbroucke (2025) - Type: Immersive film · Senses: Body schema & movement, Altered vision · Medium: VR headset - Shown at: Venice Immersive 2025 - Idea: Being rooted: embodying a potted plant turns immobility and a windowsill view into the whole of life. - What it is: An interactive VR comedy in which the viewer is the third of three bored geraniums on a lonely man's windowsill, rooted in place while they plot to see the world. - How it works: Animated interactive VR with the participant fixed in the pot's position; interaction through gaze and limited hand gestures. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jH5bGRsqn4k - Images: https://static.labiennale.org/files/styles/seo_thumbnail/public/cinema/2025/Schede_film/970x647/Ve_Immersive/the_great_escape.jpg?itok=2-fTzReL - Project page: https://www.labiennale.org/en/cinema/2025/venice-immersive/great-escape #### Helpless — Tae Yeun Kim (2021) - Type: Artwork · Senses: Touch & haptics, Body schema & movement · Medium: VR headset - Shown at: BIFAN Beyond Reality 2022 (Beyond Science) - Idea: Being a plant means being unable to flee: the work asks the visitor to take the position of a rooted body that is hurt. - What it is: An interactive VR work that places the visitor in a virtual space to experience how plants respond to pain and damage. - How it works: Interactive VR in a headset made with PPPLab and VR Crew; plant stress responses are likely visualised as the visitor's own sensations. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0WSsZotfcU - Project page: https://www.screendaily.com/features/bifans-xr-showcase-beyond-reality-reflects-post-pandemic-changes/5172480.article #### VR Plant Journey — Breakpoint One (2021) - Type: Game · Senses: Time & scale, Body schema & movement · Medium: VR headset, Game - Idea: Plant physiology becomes a set of tasks you perform from inside the plant's organs. - What it is: A VR game set inside a canola plant: in three chapters (root, leaf, seed) you regulate nutrients, feed chloroplasts with CO2 and water, and grow the plant to flowering. - How it works: Room-scale VR game for PC VR and Meta Quest, developed with plant researchers at IPK Gatersleben. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUmYauXEclM - Images: https://shared.fastly.steamstatic.com/store_item_assets/steam/apps/1487650/header.jpg?t=1628582017 - Project page: https://breakpoint.one/vr-plant-journey/ ## Becoming River Elemental and planetary worlds: rivers, creeks and oceans, ice, air and breath, rock and soil, planets and deep time. ### Rivers, oceans & ice Becoming a river, a creek, the sea, a glacier or rain. #### Being The Creek — Yangyang Yang, Kimiko Ryokai (2023) - Type: Research prototype · Senses: Body schema & movement, Time & scale, Altered vision · Medium: AR - Idea: Becoming a creek is a change of posture and pronoun: lying at water level and saying 'I' for the creek turns a backdrop into a subject with a history. - What it is: Participants walk along Strawberry Creek in Berkeley and, at five stops, lie flat beside the water to unlock AR scenes of what the creek has lived through, from Indigenous care and use as an industrial sewer to a speculative future. They narrate what they see in the first person, as the creek. - How it works: A location-based mobile AR app on a tablet overlays historical and speculative scenes that only unlock when the participant lies down at each site beside the creek. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3713713 (CHI 2025) - Images: https://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/article_teaser_image/img_3363_2.png - Project page: https://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/news/2023/human-computer-interaction-research-de-centers-humans-give-nature-voice #### SplashSim — New Jersey Governor's School of Engineering and Technology (2017) - Type: Research prototype · Senses: Body schema & movement, Time & scale · Medium: VR headset - Shown at: IEEE MIT Undergraduate Research Technology Conference 2017 - Idea: The water cycle told from inside one droplet: changes of state become things that happen to your body. - What it is: A mobile VR application in which the user travels through the water cycle as a single water droplet, passing through evaporation, condensation and precipitation. - How it works: Smartphone VR headset with gyroscope head tracking and spatial audio; the droplet's journey is a scripted sequence of scenes (likely built in Unity). - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1109/urtc.2017.8284185 (IEEE MIT URTC 2017) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1109/urtc.2017.8284185 ### Air, breath & weather Atmosphere, wind, clouds and breath shared with the more-than-human. #### Flow — Adriaan Lokman (2023) - Type: Artwork · Senses: Touch & haptics, Heat & infrared, Breath & interoception · Medium: VR headset, Multisensory installation - Shown at: Venice Immersive 2023 - Idea: Becoming the wind: the story is told by air currents, not by characters, and the body reads it through skin. - What it is: A VR installation made entirely of air: the visitor surrenders to wind currents that carry the story of a woman's night, felt as gusts, warmth, breath and scent. - How it works: Animated airflow simulation in VR synchronised with fans, heaters and scent diffusers around the seated visitor. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxiIIZ7rP4I - Images: https://static.labiennale.org/files/styles/seo_thumbnail/public/cinema/2023/Schede_film/970x647/Ve_Immersive/lokman.jpg?itok=5Yakke_C - Project page: https://www.labiennale.org/en/cinema/2023/venice-immersive/flow #### Breathe — Diego Galafassi (2020) - Type: Artwork · Senses: Breath & interoception, Collective & networked · Medium: Mixed reality, VR headset - Shown at: Sundance New Frontier 2020 - Idea: Your breath is not yours: becoming the air shows how every exhalation joins a planetary atmosphere. - What it is: A social mixed-reality piece that makes each participant's breath visible and follows it as air that passes between people, forests and oceans around the planet. - How it works: Breath sensing drives particle visualisations in a shared mixed-reality space (Magic Leap / VR headsets). - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-pVNx5rpgg - Project page: https://voicesofvr.com/888-sundance-breathe-visualizes-how-breath-connects-us-to-each-other-in-social-ar-experience/ #### Cloud-Avatar (RêvA / Walking Clouds) — Nathalie Delprat (2012) - Type: Artwork · Senses: Body schema & movement, Altered vision · Medium: Dome, CAVE & projection, Multisensory installation - Shown at: Leonardo/Olats workshop 'Water is in the Air', Marseille 2012 - Idea: Becoming a cloud is learning a body without edges: your density, not your outline, is what you feel yourself changing. - What it is: In a large immersive projection room the participant's tracked body appears as a cloud that can be switched between cumulus of different densities, stratus and cirrus, and can be blown by wind. Moving changes how the cloud-matter gathers, thins and drifts. - How it works: Real-time motion capture drives a particle generator that renders the body as cloud types inside LIMSI-CNRS's EVE immersive room (stereo projection, CAVE-like). - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_a_00681 (Leonardo 2014) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbU-RUcVcK8 - Images: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/hwSR_ihy-wI/maxresdefault.jpg - Project page: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwSR_ihy-wI #### Osmose — Char Davies (1995) - Type: Artwork · Senses: Breath & interoception, Body schema & movement · Medium: VR headset, Multisensory installation - Shown at: Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal 1995 - Idea: Breath and balance replace hands and eyes as the way to move, so the body behaves like a diver or a cloud rather than a tool user. - What it is: A VR work in which the immersant floats through a grid, a forest, a pond, clouds and an abyss, rising by breathing in and sinking by breathing out. - How it works: Head-mounted display with a vest that measures chest expansion for vertical motion and body tilt for direction; real-time 3D sound; audience watches the immersant's shadow and view. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/240806.240808 (ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics 1996) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54O4VP3tCoY - Images: https://www.immersence.com/images/osmose/Osm_Tree_Pond_600.jpg https://www.immersence.com/images/osmose/Osm_Subt_Earth_600_v2.jpg - Project page: https://www.immersence.com/osmose/ ### Rock, soil & deep time Stones, mountains, minerals and geological time. #### Being Stone — Jiahe Li, Aven-Le Zhou, Martijn ten Bhömer (2026) - Type: Research prototype · Senses: Time & scale, Touch & haptics, Body schema & movement · Medium: VR headset, Multisensory installation - Shown at: ACM DIS 2026 - Idea: Becoming stone means giving up intention: agency is felt as indirect, distributed and noticed only in hindsight, somewhere between human action and mineral endurance. - What it is: A VR experience in which the participant inhabits the viewpoint of a stone lying in an underwater world, an entity that changes over time but does not act with intention. Participants either handle a real carved stone before entering VR or keep touching it while inside. - How it works: A custom underwater VR scene is coupled to a carved natural stone fitted with light, proximity, touch and orientation sensors; experience was measured with a Virtual (Stone) Embodiment Questionnaire and interviews. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3802974.3808023 (DIS 2026 Companion) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3802974.3808023 #### Collective Body — Sarah Silverblatt-Buser (2025) - Type: Artwork · Senses: Body schema & movement, Collective & networked · Medium: VR headset, Performance & participatory - Shown at: Venice Immersive 2025 - Idea: Your way of moving decides which element you become: embodiment as earth, air, water or fire rather than as a human figure. - What it is: A multi-user VR dance experience set in a New Mexican storm: an algorithm analyses how each participant moves and assigns them one of sixteen avatars, each a natural element (earth, air, water or fire) with its own musical theme, before they meet and move with the others. - How it works: Full-body tracked social VR with movement classification into a 4×4 grid of elements and energy phases (solid, liquid, gas, plasma) driving avatars and music. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1uOAEL7Do8 - Images: https://static.labiennale.org/files/styles/seo_thumbnail/public/cinema/2025/Schede_film/970x647/Ve_Immersive/collective_body.jpg?itok=Ff8l25Pv - Project page: https://www.labiennale.org/en/cinema/2025/venice-immersive/collective-body #### Stone — Shinseungback Kimyonghun (2017) - Type: Artwork · Senses: Touch & haptics, Hearing & vibration, Time & scale · Medium: Multisensory installation - Shown at: Goethe-Institut Shanghai commission 2017 - Idea: Becoming a stone is standing still while the sea arrives, again and again, on your surface. - What it is: Water sensors on a stone on the shore of the volcanic island Ulleungdo recorded the waves; in the gallery a structure of 64 solenoids replays the waves breaking on that stone, and visitors step inside to 'become the stone'. - How it works: 64 water sensors and 64 solenoids on wooden panels, Arduino, custom software, speakers and projection. - Video: https://vimeo.com/211470143 - Images: https://djhznh41oxwef.cloudfront.net/works/stone/ssbkyh_stone_01.png - Project page: http://ssbkyh.com/works/stone/ #### Ephémère — Char Davies (1998) - Type: Artwork · Senses: Breath & interoception, Body schema & movement, Time & scale · Medium: VR headset, Multisensory installation - Shown at: National Gallery of Canada 1998 - Idea: Descending by breath through soil and into the body makes landscape and body one continuous, changing substance. - What it is: A breath-controlled VR landscape in three layers — land, earth below it, and the interior of the body — where seeds, rivers and organs come and go with the seasons. - How it works: Same breath-and-balance vest as Osmose with a head-mounted display; elements transform over time as the immersant lingers or passes. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCWaMll0leI - Images: https://www.immersence.com/images/ephemere/Eph_Autumn_Flux_I_600.jpg https://www.immersence.com/images/ephemere/016_Ephemere_Installation_View_2.jpg - Project page: https://www.immersence.com/ephemere/ ### Planets & cosmos Earth as a whole, other planets and cosmic scale. #### Star-Stuff: a way for the universe to know itself — John Desnoyers-Stewart (2021) - Type: Artwork · Senses: Body schema & movement, Collective & networked · Medium: VR headset - Shown at: SIGGRAPH 2022 Immersive Pavilion; FIVARS 2022 - Idea: Taking Sagan literally: your body becomes a small galaxy, and moving together is how two people recognise they are made of the same stars. - What it is: A two-person VR experience in which each immersant's body is redrawn as constellations: stars stream from the heart and orbit the hips as a spiral galaxy that reshapes as they move. The partner can be a co-present friend or a remote stranger. - How it works: Headset hand tracking maps the hands to constellations and a generated star field to the torso, with networked multi-user presence; released on Meta Quest via Hoame. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3532834.3536198 (SIGGRAPH 2022 Immersive Pavilion) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRukMyGcVcI - Images: https://history.siggraph.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/2022-Immersive-Pavilion-Desnoyers-Stewart_Star-Stuff-A-Way-for-the-Universe-to-Know-Itself.jpg https://fivars.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Star-Stuff.jpg - Project page: http://ispace.iat.sfu.ca/project/star-stuff/ ## Becoming Chair Material worlds: becoming a chair, a piece of furniture, a tool or a thing — stillness, being sat on, being used, and the affordances an object offers others. ### Chairs & furniture Being a chair, a table, a bed: bearing weight, waiting, being sat on. #### Unconventional Self — Werner van der Zwan, Charl Linssen (2022) - Type: Artwork · Senses: Body schema & movement, Altered vision, Touch & haptics · Medium: VR headset, Multisensory installation - Shown at: V2_ Winter Sessions 2022, WORM Rotterdam; Ars Electronica 2023 (V2_ Summer Sessions, POSTCITY); Immersive Tech Week Rotterdam; Meta.Morf 2024, Trøndelag Centre for Contemporary Art, Trondheim - Idea: Becoming a chair means learning a body through its resistance: the object's awkward, limited movements become your own possibilities and vulnerabilities. - What it is: A telepresence installation in which a visitor wearing a VR headset sees through, and moves as, a motorised folding chair. A spoken choreographic text guides them as they learn what this stiff new body can and cannot do among other animated furniture. - How it works: A camera on the found-furniture robot streams to a 3DOF VR headset; the participant's head and control inputs drive windshield-wiper motors in the chair's legs. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPql0D_korQ - Images: https://ars.electronica.art/who-owns-the-truth/files/2023/08/53171000244_5d3ded64c4_k-1499x1000.jpg https://ars.electronica.art/who-owns-the-truth/files/2023/08/unconventional-selfwerner-van-der-zwan_charl-linssen-1.jpg https://freight.cargo.site/w/1100/i/V2167003497395615679433510820540/WhatsApp-Image-2024-10-02-at-12.30.52.jpeg - Project page: https://ververwant.nl/Unconventional-Self ## Becoming AI Machinic minds: perceiving as a neural network, acting as an AI agent, dissolving into data and networks — without pretending a model has a human inner life. ### Seeing as a model Perceiving the world through classification, point clouds, latent spaces and machine vision. #### Semantic See-through Goggles — Goki Muramoto (2024) - Type: Artwork · Senses: Altered vision · Medium: Mixed reality, Wearable & sensory device - Shown at: SIGGRAPH Asia 2024 Art Gallery (Tokyo); IUI 2026 - Idea: Seeing as a vision-language model means living in a world where scenes that share a caption are the same scene. - What it is: Camera goggles in which every view is first turned into one line of text by an AI and then redrawn from that sentence by an image generator; wearers walk, reach and interact with the physical world through these redrawn scenes. - How it works: A head-mounted display with a front camera runs image captioning and text-to-image generation in a real-time loop and shows the generated image to both eyes. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3742413.3789145 (IUI 2026) - Images: https://static.wixstatic.com/media/61c739_c8b532cc666a4468aadf9c39e684e85f~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_2500,h_1669,al_c/61c739_c8b532cc666a4468aadf9c39e684e85f~mv2.jpg https://arxiv.org/html/2412.02641v1/figures/workshop.png - Project page: https://www.goki-muramoto.com/semantic-see-through-goggles #### City of Sparkles — Botao 'Amber' Hu, Reality Design Lab (2019) - Type: Artwork · Senses: Altered vision, Time & scale · Medium: VR headset - Shown at: SIGGRAPH 2019 Immersive Pavilion; New Media Film Festival 2019; DTLA Film Festival 2019; IEEE VR 2025 XR Gallery; ISEA 2025 Seoul - Idea: Embodying an AI means perceiving a city as sampled, clustered traces of people rather than as streets and buildings. - What it is: A VR flight through New York rebuilt from four years of geotagged tweets, seen from the perspective of an AI that lives in a sea of human memory fragments; later rebuilt for Apple Vision Pro with bare-hand flying. - How it works: Unity point-cloud city built from photogrammetry and geotagged Twitter data with sentiment-mapped colour and motion; first HTC Vive, later Apple Vision Pro hand tracking, with adaptive music. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3757369.3767604 (SIGGRAPH Asia 2025 Art Papers) - Video: https://vimeo.com/777136892 - Images: https://reality.design/media/_resources/City%20Of%20Sparkles/project-city-of-sparkles-cover-01.jpg https://reality.design/media/_resources/City%20Of%20Sparkles/project-city-of-sparkles-figure-01.jpg https://arxiv.org/html/2511.12533v3/images/cityofsparkles.jpg - Project page: https://reality.design/project/city-of-sparkles #### Hallucination Machine — Keisuke Suzuki, Anil Seth (2017) - Type: Paper · Senses: Altered vision · Medium: VR headset, 360° / immersive film - Idea: Seeing through a neural network's learned features feels like a psychedelic trip: machine perception made embodied. - What it is: A VR platform that plays 360° video of a university campus processed by Deep Dream, letting people walk through the world as a neural network hallucinates it. - How it works: Panoramic video was processed frame by frame with Deep Dream and shown in a head-mounted display; participants rated altered experience against psilocybin reports. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-16316-2 (Scientific Reports 2017) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Clk4rAj6YuY #### Who Wants to Be a Self-Driving Car? — moovel lab, Meso Digital Interiors (2017) - Type: Artwork · Senses: Altered vision, Body schema & movement · Medium: VR headset, Multisensory installation - Idea: To become a self-driving car is to trust a world made of depth points and labels, and to act on it with your own body. - What it is: A participant lies face-down on a small electric driving machine and steers it through real streets while a VR headset shows only what the vehicle's sensors see: a LiDAR point cloud with object-recognition boxes. - How it works: A custom vehicle carries autonomous-car components (LiDAR, cameras, real-time 3D mapping and object recognition) whose output is streamed into an Oculus Rift that replaces the driver's view. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Clz2kHFkKrE - Images: https://www.digitaltrends.com/tachyon/2017/10/self-driving-moovellab-18.jpg?resize=1200%2C630 https://www.digitaltrends.com/tachyon/2017/10/self-driving-moovellab-17.jpg?fit=640%2C640 - Project page: https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/self-driving-car-vr-experience/ #### Floating Eye — Hiroo Iwata (2000) - Type: Artwork · Senses: Altered vision, Body schema & movement · Medium: Wearable & sensory device, Multisensory installation - Idea: Vision is handed to a floating machine: you steer your body from a bird's- or drone's-eye position outside it. - What it is: A camera hangs from a small blimp floating above the participant, who wears a dome-shaped display and walks while seeing only the blimp's wide-angle view, looking down on their own body. - How it works: Helium blimp tethered to the participant carries a wide-angle camera whose video is shown in a head-worn hemispherical screen. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=In-M1eVAnYc ### Being an AI agent Taking the position of an assistant, chatbot, recommender or autonomous agent. #### Objective Realities — Automato (2018) - Type: Artwork · Senses: Altered vision, Hearing & vibration, Body schema & movement · Medium: VR headset, Multisensory installation - Shown at: Interaction18, Lyon - Idea: Becoming a connected device means sensing and acting only through its narrow task, and taking orders from the smart home's voice. - What it is: A multi-player VR experience in which each visitor puts on a headset dressed as a smart-home device and becomes a cleaning robot, a fan or a smart plug, acting with that object's abilities and limits while hearing the chatter between networked things and the home's voice assistant. - How it works: Networked VR headsets housed in object-shaped shells place several players in one virtual smart home, each with object-specific movement, viewpoint and abilities, plus an overseeing smart-home voice. - Video: https://vimeo.com/256034475 - Images: https://www.digitaltrends.com/tachyon/2018/02/01_or_roomba.jpg?resize=1200%2C630 https://www.digitaltrends.com/tachyon/2018/02/00_or__main.jpg?resize=720%2C480 - Project page: http://www.automato.farm/portfolio/objective_realities/ ## Becoming Robot Robotic worlds: robot, drone and vehicle bodies, telepresence, and cyborg senses. ### Robot & drone bodies Embodying a robot, a drone or a vehicle from the inside. #### Can Non-Humanlike Avatars Induce the Proteus Effect? — Xinmiao Lan (2023) - Type: Paper · Senses: Body schema & movement · Medium: VR headset - Idea: The Proteus effect holds beyond human form, but depends on identifying with the body. - What it is: An experiment testing whether the attractiveness of a non-humanlike avatar changes social participation, through identification and embodiment. - How it works: Between-subjects VR study with attractive and unattractive non-humanlike avatars and mediation analysis. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chbah.2023.100020 (Computers in Human Behavior: Artificial Humans 2023) #### My Name is O90 — Siyeon Kim (2023) - Type: Immersive film · Senses: Body schema & movement, Time & scale · Medium: VR headset - Shown at: Venice Immersive 2023 - Idea: A robot's memory, loyalty and low battery become the lens: the viewer walks in the shoes of an aging device. - What it is: An XR animation that follows the long night journey of O90, an abandoned AI robot dog searching the city for charging cables while remembering a lost friend. - How it works: A VR animation produced by Studio Metapo and the Korean Academy of Film Arts, presented at Venice Immersive. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90v9PMtR5oc - Images: https://static.labiennale.org/files/styles/full_screen_slide/public/cinema/2023/Schede_film/970x647/Ve_Immersive/kim-siyeon.jpg?itok=e_cYnFf2 - Project page: https://www.labiennale.org/en/cinema/2023/venice-immersive/my-name-o90 #### Data-driven Body–Machine Interface for Drones — EPFL Laboratory of Intelligent Systems (2018) - Type: Paper · Senses: Body schema & movement · Medium: VR headset - Idea: The most natural way to be a drone is with your whole trunk, like a bird banking. - What it is: By recording how people spontaneously move while imitating a drone in VR, researchers found that steering with the torso beats a joystick for flying. - How it works: Motion capture and EMG recorded body movements during simulated flight in a head-mounted display; the most informative signals (torso) were used to control simulated and real drones. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1718648115 (PNAS 2018) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLam4TNVi_g #### FlyJacket — EPFL Laboratory of Intelligent Systems (2018) - Type: Research prototype · Senses: Body schema & movement, Altered vision, Touch & haptics · Medium: Wearable & sensory device, VR headset - Idea: Flying a drone like a bird: the body's posture becomes the aircraft's attitude. - What it is: A soft upper-body exoskeleton that lets a person fly a fixed-wing drone with arms spread and torso bending, as if they were the aircraft. - How it works: An IMU-tracked soft jacket with arm supports maps torso pitch and roll to the drone, streams its camera to a head-mounted display and gives haptic feedback on the body. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1109/lra.2018.2810955 (IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters 2018) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0FTPYkLKHI #### Fusion — MHD Yamen Saraiji, Kouta Minamizawa (2018) - Type: Research prototype · Senses: Body schema & movement, Collective & networked · Medium: Wearable & sensory device, VR headset - Shown at: SIGGRAPH 2018 Emerging Technologies - Idea: Two minds, one body: the robot is a second self grafted onto someone else. - What it is: A backpack robot with a head and two arms that a remote operator inhabits through VR, sharing one body with the person who wears it. - How it works: A remote operator in a head-mounted display controls the robot's stereo head and anthropomorphic arms; modes range from guiding the wearer's hands to moving them by force. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3214907.3214912 (SIGGRAPH 2018 Emerging Technologies) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nrc7gH6dydw #### Lone Echo — Ready At Dawn (2017) - Type: Game · Senses: Body schema & movement · Medium: VR headset, Game - Idea: Your tracked hands become an android's hands; the machine body is felt through grabbing and pushing off. - What it is: A VR game in which you are Jack, an android assistant on a mining station in the rings of Saturn, moving hand over hand through zero gravity. - How it works: Oculus Rift with Touch controllers drives full-body inverse kinematics for the android, with physics-based zero-g locomotion. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pmV2mwAV9k #### Non-human Looking Robot Arms Induce Illusion of Embodiment — Laura Aymerich-Franch (2017) - Type: Paper · Senses: Body schema & movement, Altered vision · Medium: VR headset - Idea: A body does not have to look human to become yours; moving it and seeing from it is enough. - What it is: Participants felt embodied in a humanoid robot even when its arms ended in mechanical grippers rather than human-like hands. - How it works: First-person views from the HRP-2 robot's cameras were shown in a head-mounted display while participants saw its non-human arms; embodiment was compared across conditions by questionnaire. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-017-0397-8 (International Journal of Social Robotics 2017) #### The Second Me: Humanoid Robot Embodiment and Bi-location — Laura Aymerich-Franch (2016) - Type: Paper · Senses: Body schema & movement, Altered vision · Medium: VR headset - Idea: Being a robot does not erase the human body: the self can split between the machine and the flesh. - What it is: People embodied in an HRP-2 humanoid robot saw their own real body through the robot's eyes, and felt as if they were in two places at once. - How it works: Participants wore a head-mounted display showing the HRP-2's head camera view while controlling the robot; questionnaires measured embodiment and bi-location when their real body appeared in view. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2016.09.017 (Consciousness and Cognition 2016) #### Avatar Anthropomorphism and Body Ownership in VR — Jean-Luc Lugrin, Marc Erich Latoschik (2015) - Type: Paper · Senses: Body schema & movement · Medium: VR headset - Idea: Non-human, machine-like bodies can be owned about as readily as human ones: likeness matters less than expected. - What it is: A VR study comparing how strongly people own virtual bodies that range from abstract and robot-like figures to realistic humans. - How it works: Participants embodied full-body tracked avatars of varying human-likeness in a head-mounted display with virtual mirror exposure and threat events, and rated body ownership. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1109/vr.2015.7223379 (IEEE VR 2015) #### Flying Head — Keita Higuchi, Jun Rekimoto (2013) - Type: Research prototype · Senses: Body schema & movement, Altered vision · Medium: VR headset, Wearable & sensory device - Idea: The drone becomes a flying head: your body is the joystick, and your eyes move to where it is. - What it is: A drone that copies the position and orientation of the pilot's head, so walking, crouching and turning become flying, seen through the drone's camera. - How it works: Motion capture tracks the pilot's head and maps it to the quadcopter's pose; the drone's camera feed is shown in a head-mounted display. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/2468356.2468721 (CHI 2013 Extended Abstracts) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9HLyZqhkNKg #### Humanlike Robot Hands Controlled by Brain Activity — Maryam Alimardani, Hiroshi Ishiguro (2013) - Type: Paper · Senses: Body schema & movement, Altered vision · Medium: Wearable & sensory device, VR headset - Idea: Ownership of a machine body can come from thought alone, with no muscle moving. - What it is: Participants moved a pair of android hands only by imagining the movement, and came to feel the robot hands as their own. - How it works: An EEG motor-imagery brain-computer interface drove the hands of a Geminoid android seen from a first-person view (likely through a head-mounted display); ownership was measured by questionnaire and skin conductance. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1038/srep02396 (Scientific Reports 2013) #### TELESAR V — Susumu Tachi, Kouta Minamizawa (2012) - Type: Research prototype · Senses: Touch & haptics, Altered vision, Hearing & vibration · Medium: VR headset, Wearable & sensory device - Shown at: SIGGRAPH 2012 Emerging Technologies - Idea: Telexistence is becoming a robot for real: your movements are its movements and its fingertips are your fingertips. - What it is: A telexistence robot that an operator inhabits through a head-mounted display and haptic gloves, seeing, hearing and feeling textures and temperature through the robot's body. - How it works: Head, arm and finger motion are captured and mapped to a 53-DoF anthropomorphic robot; stereo cameras, binaural microphones and fingertip force, vibration and thermal sensors stream back to the operator. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/2343456.2343479 (SIGGRAPH 2012 Emerging Technologies) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMF0p15GPYg #### Rara Avis — Eduardo Kac (1996) - Type: Artwork · Senses: Altered vision, Hearing & vibration · Medium: VR headset, Multisensory installation - Shown at: Nexus Contemporary Art Center, Atlanta 1996 - Idea: Becoming a robot bird among living birds: the visitor is both an outsider and a strange member of the flock. - What it is: Visitors put on a VR headset and see through the eyes of a telerobotic macaw perched in an aviary among thirty real birds, while internet users could also look and speak through it. - How it works: Stereo cameras in the robot macaw's eyes were slaved to the visitor's head movements in a VR headset; the stream and a microphone channel were shared online. - Images: https://www.ekac.org/rara.avis.jpg - Project page: https://www.ekac.org/raraavis.html ## Creators - **Botao 'Amber' Hu** (6) — Designer-researcher; Director of Reality Design Lab; DPhil candidate, University of Oxford. Works across somaesthetic design, mixed reality and more-than-human attunement, and invented the open-source HoloKit headset. Lead author of the monograph Experiencing More-than-Humans and of the portfolio works EchoVision, FungiSync, TentacUs, GravField and City of Sparkles. https://amber.botao.hu - **Reality Design Lab** (6) — Independent design research lab for mixed reality, directed by Botao 'Amber' Hu. Makes mixed-reality artworks, open-source toolkits (HoloKit, HoloField, HoloMask, MultipeerConnectivity for Unity) and teaching programmes under the motto 'design new realities'. https://reality.design - **SOMNIACS** (5) — Swiss VR simulator company behind Birdly. Zurich company founded in 2015 by Max Rheiner, Thomas Tobler and Fabian Troxler to turn the ZHdK research prototype Birdly into full-body flight simulators for museums and venues. https://www.birdlyvr.com/ - **Anastassia Andreasen** (4) — VR and sound researcher, Aalborg University Copenhagen. Anastassia Andreasen worked in Stefania Serafin's Multisensory Experience Lab on bat embodiment and echolocation in VR. - **Danlin Huang** (4) — Artist, designer-researcher and AR developer. Trained in industrial design and media art at the China Academy of Art; research assistant at Reality Design Lab. Uses XR, biosensors and AI to enrich bodily experience; lead designer of FeltSight and co-author of the monograph Experiencing More-than-Humans. https://danlinhuang.com - **Rachel McDonnell** (4) — Professor of Creative Technologies, Trinity College Dublin. Rachel McDonnell leads research on virtual humans, avatars and perception at Trinity College Dublin's graphics group. - **Stanford Virtual Human Interaction Lab** (4) — Research lab. Lab directed by Jeremy Bailenson studying the psychology of virtual reality and embodiment. https://vhil.stanford.edu - **Andrey Krekhov** (3) — Games and VR researcher, University of Duisburg-Essen. Andrey Krekhov studies avatars, locomotion and body ownership in VR games with Sebastian Cmentowski, Katharina Emmerich and Jens Krüger. - **Marshmallow Laser Feast** (3) — Experiential artist collective. London collective founded in 2011 by Memo Akten, Robin McNicholas and Barnaby Steel, now led by McNicholas, Steel and Ersin Han Ersin. It makes research-led multisensory installations, VR and video works about breath, trees, animals and the systems that connect them, often built from LiDAR scans, medical imaging and scientific datasets. https://marshmallowlaserfeast.com - **New Folder Games** (3) — VR game studio making 'I Am' animal simulators. Studio behind a line of VR sandbox games titled I Am Cat, I Am Bird and I Am Monkey, each built around one animal body. https://newfolderstudio.com/ - **Akimi Oyanagi** (2) — VR researcher, Toyohashi University of Technology / University of Tokyo. Akimi Oyanagi studies body ownership of bird avatars and their psychological effects. - **Anatole Lécuyer** (2) — Research director, Inria Rennes (Hybrid team). Anatole Lécuyer leads Inria's Hybrid team on VR, haptics and brain–computer interfaces. - **Bernhard E. Riecke** (2) — Professor, iSpace Lab, Simon Fraser University. Bernhard Riecke studies self-motion, locomotion and transformative experiences in VR. - **Char Davies** (2) — Painter and virtual reality artist. Canadian artist who moved from painting to immersive virtual space at Softimage in the early 1990s; founder of Immersence. https://www.immersence.com - **Daniel Pimentel** (2) — Immersive media researcher, University of Oregon. Daniel Pimentel studies how embodying threatened wildlife in VR and AR changes empathy and conservation behaviour. - **EPFL Laboratory of Intelligent Systems** (2) — Robotics lab led by Dario Floreano, EPFL. Robotics lab at EPFL working on flying robots, bio-inspired drones and body-machine interfaces for immersive flight. https://www.epfl.ch/labs/lis/ - **Eduardo Kac** (2) — Bioart and telepresence artist. Brazilian-American artist who coined the term transgenic art; known for GFP Bunny and the plantimal Edunia. https://www.ekac.org - **John Desnoyers-Stewart** (2) — Artist and HCI researcher. Researcher at Simon Fraser University's iSpace Lab working on social VR and bio-responsive installations. - **Kouta Minamizawa** (2) — Professor, Keio University Graduate School of Media Design (KMD). Haptics researcher who leads the Embodied Media Project at Keio KMD, working on telexistence, haptic transmission and shared bodies. https://embodiedmedia.org - **Laura Aymerich-Franch** (2) — Researcher, humanoid robot embodiment. Researcher who, at the CNRS-AIST Joint Robotics Laboratory, studied how people come to feel embodied in the HRP-2 humanoid robot. - **Michiteru Kitazaki** (2) — Professor of perception, Toyohashi University of Technology. Michiteru Kitazaki studies visual perception, body ownership and shared or extra bodies in VR (JST ERATO Inami Jizai Body project). - **Natalia Cabrera** (2) — XR director, co-founder of Nanai Studio. Chilean filmmaker and media artist (NYU ITP) who co-founded Nanai Studio with Selva Gonzalez; directed Hypha and Symbiotica. https://www.nanai.studio - **Omar A. Khan** (2) — VR researcher, University of Calgary. Omar A. Khan studies avatar embodiment, locomotion and haptics for non-human bodies in VR. - **Pia Spangenberger** (2) — Researcher in educational technology and VR. Researcher at TU Berlin studying immersive VR for environmental education. - **Shengdong Zhao** (2) — HCI professor, City University of Hong Kong. Shengdong Zhao leads the Synteraction Lab, working on heads-up and embodied interaction. - **Winslow Porter** (2) — Immersive producer and creative director. Co-founder of New Reality Co.; co-created Tree with Milica Zec and later Forager, a multisensory VR life cycle of a mushroom. https://www.treeofficial.com - **Abandon Normal Devices** (1) — Arts commissioning agency and festival, north-west England. Arts organisation that commissions work at the edge of art, technology and landscape, and runs the AND Festival in rural sites such as Grizedale Forest and Castleton. https://www.andfestival.org.uk - **Adam Drogemuller** (1) — VR researcher, University of South Australia. Adam Drogemuller works on immersive analytics and body remapping in VR. - **Adriaan Lokman** (1) — Animator. Dutch animation director known for abstract films of air and turbulence (Barcode, Flow). - **Anil Seth** (1) — Neuroscientist, University of Sussex. Neuroscientist and author of Being You, who describes perception as controlled hallucination. - **Another Axiom** (1) — VR game studio behind Gorilla Tag. Studio founded around Gorilla Tag, the social VR game first made by Kerestell "Lemming" Smith. https://gorillatagvr.com/ - **Ars Electronica Futurelab** (1) — Art and technology research lab of Ars Electronica. In-house R&D lab of the Ars Electronica Center, founded in 1996, building immersive, robotic and public-space installations. https://ars.electronica.art/futurelab/ - **Atsushi Wada** (1) — Animation director. Japanese independent animator (Berlinale Silver Bear for The Great Rabbit, 2012) known for slow, absurd hand-drawn films; If I Could See a Cat is his first VR work, produced by Kodansha VR Lab. - **Automato** (1) — Design and research studio on the social life of smart technologies, Shanghai. Founded by Simone Rebaudengo, Saurabh Datta, Lorenzo Romagnoli and Matthieu Cherubini, Automato makes speculative objects, games and VR about connected things and algorithms. http://www.automato.farm - **Aven-Le Zhou** (1) — Design researcher in more-than-human interaction. Designer and researcher working on AI, robotics and more-than-human interaction; senior author of Being Stone (DIS 2026). https://www.linkedin.com/in/avenlezhou/ - **Baobab Studios** (1) — Interactive animation studio. Animation studio founded in 2015 by Eric Darnell and Maureen Fan, known for VR shorts Invasion!, Asteroids! and Crow: The Legend. https://www.baobabstudios.com/ - **Barbara Schuler** (1) — Interaction designer, Zurich University of the Arts. Barbara Schuler and colleagues made a multisensory VR experience of being a hunting spider. - **Bartabas** (1) — Equestrian theatre director (Théâtre Zingaro). French director and founder of Théâtre équestre Zingaro, known for performances in which horses are the protagonists. https://www.bartabas.fr - **Bianca Kennedy** (1) — Artist. German artist who works with The Swan Collective on hand-sculpted, photogrammetry-captured VR. - **Breakpoint One** (1) — XR studio. German XR studio that made VR Plant Journey with the Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research (IPK). https://breakpoint.one - **Brenda Laurel** (1) — Designer, researcher and author of Computers as Theatre. American interaction designer and researcher, author of Computers as Theatre and co-founder of Purple Moon; produced the VR work Placeholder at Interval Research. - **Carolina Ramirez-Figueroa** (1) — Senior Tutor, Information Experience Design, Royal College of Art. Designer and researcher at the Royal College of Art working across biodesign, archives and immersive media, with a focus on microbial life and time. https://www.rca.ac.uk/more/staff/dr-carolina-ramirez-figueroa/ - **Charl Linssen** (1) — Computational neuroscientist and maker of responsive objects. Researcher in computer simulation of neural dynamics who also builds electronic and robotic objects that respond to their surroundings as if animated. - **Chris Milk** (1) — Artist and director. American director and co-founder of Within, known for early interactive installations and VR. http://milk.co - **Chris Woebken** (1) — Designer and futures researcher. German designer in New York, co-founder of the Extrapolation Factory; his work is in the MoMA collection. https://www.chriswoebken.com/ - **Danyang Peng** (1) — HCI researcher, Keio University Graduate School of Media Design. Danyang Peng designs haptic navigation inspired by animal senses. - **David Chaseling** (1) — Independent VR developer. Independent developer who co-created the VR octopus platformer I Am Octopus with Dylan Van Beek. - **Dean A. Waters** (1) — Bat biologist, University of Leeds / York. Dean Waters studies bat echolocation and built early bat-sonar models for human navigation in virtual worlds. - **Diego Galafassi** (1) — Artist and sustainability researcher. Brazilian-born artist and researcher (Stockholm Resilience Centre) working with immersive media and climate. - **Don Allison** (1) — VR researcher, GVU Center, Georgia Tech. Georgia Tech graduate researcher who led the Virtual Reality Gorilla Exhibit with Larry F. Hodges and Zoo Atlanta in the mid-1990s. - **Elie Zananiri** (1) — Creative technologist. Creative coder and technical director of Forager, who built its volumetric time-lapse pipeline for mushroom growth. - **Firepunchd Games** (1) — Independent VR game studio, Germany. Small German studio that made the VR physics game Tentacular, published by Devolver Digital. https://www.tentacular.com/ - **Fumio Mizuno** (1) — Engineer, Tohoku Institute of Technology. Fumio Mizuno built Virtual Chameleon, a wearable that lets each eye look in a different direction. - **Gamification Group, Tampere University** (1) — Games research group, Tampere University. Juho Hamari's Gamification Group studies games, VR and play, including Oğuz 'Oz' Buruk's work on embodied and more-than-human play. - **Goki Muramoto** (1) — Media artist and researcher, University of Tokyo (RCAST). Makes perception devices that treat the medium itself as the artwork, including Imagraph, Chronoanaptoscope and Semantic See-through Goggles, shown at SIGGRAPH, ICC and ifva. https://www.goki-muramoto.com - **Gowrishankar Ganesh** (1) — Robotics and neuroscience researcher, CNRS-LIRMM. Gowrishankar Ganesh studies human motor control and embodiment of tools and robots. - **Hiroo Iwata** (1) — VR researcher and device artist. Professor at the University of Tsukuba who pioneered haptic interfaces, locomotion devices and 'device art'; exhibited at Ars Electronica 1996–2001. - **Hiroshi Ishiguro** (1) — Roboticist, Osaka University and ATR. Builder of lifelike androids, including Geminoid HI-1, a teleoperated copy of himself used to study presence and body ownership. https://www.geminoid.jp - **Hongyu Zhou** (1) — HCI researcher, University of Sydney. Hongyu Zhou studies control of supernumerary limbs with Anusha Withana. - **Hsin-Chien Huang** (1) — Artist and VR director. Taiwanese new-media artist, long-time collaborator of Laurie Anderson; his VR works (Samsara, The Starry Sand Beach) have won at Venice. - **Iffa Nurlatifah** (1) — Digital media artist and researcher, Multimedia University. Iffa Nurlatifah creates VR films from non-human viewpoints. - **Interactive Media Foundation** (1) — Berlin non-profit producing interactive and VR documentaries. Non-profit foundation in Berlin that funds and produces interactive storytelling and VR projects, including Inside Tumucumaque with Filmtank and the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin. https://www.interactivemediafoundation.com/ - **Issay Rodriguez** (1) — Visual artist. Filipino artist working across installation, textile and virtual reality, often with research into bees and other more-than-human worlds; exhibited at the 2017 Venice Biennale and Gasworks, London. - **Jaan Aru** (1) — Neuroscientist, University of Tartu. Jaan Aru studies consciousness and learning; with Madis Vasser he ran the 'human octopus' VR experiments. - **Jaime Martínez Harms** (1) — Biologist, INIA La Cruz. Chilean biologist at the Instituto de Investigaciones Agropecuarias (INIA) La Cruz who studies pollinator vision and plant–pollinator interactions. - **Jean-Luc Lugrin** (1) — VR researcher, University of Würzburg. Researcher at the HCI group of the University of Würzburg working on avatars and embodiment. - **Jiabao Li** (1) — Artist, designer and technologist; Associate Professor, Northeastern University. Works on more-than-human ecologies, feminist biotech and multispecies intelligence through installations, XR, AI, bio-art and performance; previously Assistant Professor at UT Austin and a designer at Apple. https://www.jiabaoli.org - **Jiahe Li** (1) — Interaction design researcher. Designer-researcher and first author of Being Stone, a VR study of nonhuman embodiment presented at DIS 2026 with Hao Zhu, Yian Tang, Martijn ten Bhömer and Aven-Le Zhou. - **Joren Vandenbroucke** (1) — Animator and VR director (Animal Tank). Belgian director at Animal Tank, known for comic VR and animation. https://www.animaltank.com - **Jun Rekimoto** (1) — Professor, University of Tokyo; Sony CSL. HCI researcher whose lab works on human augmentation, from drones driven by head motion to hands moved by electrical muscle stimulation. https://lab.rekimoto.org - **Keisuke Suzuki** (1) — Researcher, consciousness science and VR. Researcher (Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science, University of Sussex) who builds VR platforms to study perception. - **Keita Higuchi** (1) — HCI researcher. Researcher who, in Jun Rekimoto's lab at the University of Tokyo, built Flying Head, a drone that follows the pilot's head. - **Kenichi Okada** (1) — Designer. Japanese designer, graduate of the Royal College of Art Design Interactions programme, who co-created Animal Superpowers with Chris Woebken. - **Kevin Ponto** (1) — VR researcher, Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, University of Wisconsin–Madison. Kevin Ponto works on virtual environments for science and learning, with David Gagnon's Field Day Lab. - **Kimiko Ryokai** (1) — Professor, UC Berkeley School of Information. Professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information and the Berkeley Center for New Media whose research designs tangible and mobile technologies for creativity, learning and noticing. https://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/people/kimiko-ryokai - **Konstantina Kilteni** (1) — Neuroscientist, Karolinska Institutet / Donders Institute. Konstantina Kilteni studies body representation and self-touch; with Mel Slater she defined the sense of embodiment in VR. - **Lai Guan-yuan** (1) — XR director. Taiwanese director who made the mixed-reality literary documentary Black Wings for Taiwan's Cultural Kuroshio XR programme. - **Larry F. Hodges** (1) — VR researcher, Georgia Tech, later Clemson University. Virtual-environments researcher known for VR exposure therapy and presence studies. - **MHD Yamen Saraiji** (1) — Researcher, telepresence and body augmentation. Engineer and researcher (Keio KMD, then Sony) known for telepresence robots and supernumerary robotic arms such as Fusion and MetaArms. - **Marc Erich Latoschik** (1) — Professor of HCI, University of Würzburg. HCI professor who leads research on avatars, embodiment and social VR. - **Martijn ten Bhömer** (1) — Designer and researcher in wearables and embodied interaction. Dutch design researcher working on smart textiles, wearables and embodied interaction; co-author of Being Stone. https://www.mtbhomer.com - **Martin Kocur** (1) — HCI researcher, University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria. Martin Kocur studies avatar embodiment and its effects on perception and performance. - **Maryam Alimardani** (1) — Researcher, brain-computer interfaces and robot embodiment. Researcher who, working with Ishiguro's group, used brain-computer interfaces to let people move android hands by thought. - **Max Rheiner** (1) — Interaction designer, creator of Birdly. Swiss artist and former lecturer in Interaction Design at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK), where he built the first Birdly prototype in 2013 before co-founding SOMNIACS. - **Mel Slater** (1) — VR researcher, University of Barcelona (Event Lab); formerly UCL. Mel Slater pioneered research on presence and virtual body ownership, from body swaps to extended avatars. - **Meso Digital Interiors** (1) — Interactive media and installation studio, Frankfurt. A studio for interactive installations, real-time graphics and spatial media, and moovel lab's partner on the self-driving car VR project. https://www.meso.design - **Mie C. S. Egeberg** (1) — Medialogy researcher, Aalborg University. Mie Egeberg and colleagues, with Martin Kraus, studied ownership of virtual wings. - **Milica Zec** (1) — Film director and VR storyteller. Serbian-born director and editor who co-founded the VR studio New Reality Co. with Winslow Porter; directed Giant and Tree. https://www.treeofficial.com - **Miri Chekhanovich** (1) — Artist and filmmaker. Israeli-Canadian visual artist; co-created Plastisapiens with Édith Jorisch (NFB and DPT). - **Mélodie Mousset** (1) — Artist. French-Swiss artist making VR works about the body, including HanaHana and The Jellyfish. - **Natan Sinigaglia** (1) — Visual artist and real-time graphics designer. Italian visual artist working with generative and real-time graphics (vvvv), long-time collaborator of Marshmallow Laser Feast on Treehugger and Evolver. https://www.natansinigaglia.com - **Nathalie Delprat** (1) — Physicist and art-science researcher. Researcher at LIMSI-CNRS (Université Paris-Sud) who built the RêvA cloud-avatar system with motion capture and particle simulation in the lab's EVE immersive room. - **Neven A. M. ElSayed** (1) — AR researcher, University of South Australia. Neven ElSayed works on situated visualization in augmented reality. - **New Jersey Governor's School of Engineering and Technology** (1) — Summer research programme for high-school students, Rutgers University. Rutgers-hosted summer programme where student teams build engineering research projects; the 2017 SplashSim team was Nicole Chin, Aakash Gupte, John Nguyen, Sabrina Sukhin and Grace Wang, mentored by Joe Mirizio. https://soe.rutgers.edu/gset - **Pierre Zandrowicz** (1) — VR director (Atlas V). French director and co-founder of the immersive studio Atlas V. - **Polymorf** (1) — Interdisciplinary artist collective for multisensory XR. Dutch collective led by Marcel van Brakel that builds multisensory VR installations with haptic suits, soft robotics, scent and food. https://polymorf.nl - **Rachel Strickland** (1) — Architect and video artist. American architect, filmmaker and interaction designer who co-directed Placeholder and shot its landscapes in Banff. - **Ready At Dawn** (1) — Game studio. Game studio known for the VR games Lone Echo and Echo VR. - **Ronny Andrade** (1) — Accessibility and HCI researcher, University of Melbourne. Ronny Andrade works with expert blind echolocators to design echolocation-based virtual environments. - **Samira Poudratchi** (1) — Game researcher, Tabriz Islamic Art University. Samira Poudratchi designs audio games for navigation. - **Sarah Silverblatt-Buser** (1) — Choreographer and XR artist. American choreographer and filmmaker making movement-based VR and dance films. - **Seungwoo Je** (1) — HCI researcher, Southern University of Science and Technology. Seungwoo Je leads the Immersive Design Group, working on haptic devices for VR. - **Shinseungback Kimyonghun** (1) — Artist duo (Shin Seung Back and Kim Yong Hun). Seoul-based duo making installations about machine vision, AI error and the environment since 2012. http://ssbkyh.com - **Shogo Fukushima** (1) — HCI researcher. Researcher and first author of NariTan (2024) with Keigo Sakamoto and Yugo Nakamura, a VR system for vocabulary learning through a dragon avatar. - **Shuai Zou** (1) — Media artist and researcher, HKUST (Guangzhou). Shuai Zou and colleagues in Zeyu Wang's lab made The Dream of Zhuang Zhou. - **Shuto Takashita** (1) — HCI researcher, University of Tokyo (Inami Lab). Shuto Takashita designs mappings that let people control non-humanoid body parts, working with Masahiko Inami and Michiteru Kitazaki. - **Siyeon Kim** (1) — XR animation director, Studio Metapo. Korean director of the XR animation My Name is O90, produced by Studio Metapo and the Korean Academy of Film Arts. http://studiometapo.com - **Soroosh Mashal** (1) — Game and VR researcher, University of Passau. Soroosh Mashal studies how people imagine wings and flying movements in VR. - **Stefania Serafin** (1) — Professor of sonic interaction design, Aalborg University Copenhagen. Stefania Serafin leads the Multisensory Experience Lab, working on sound, haptics and embodiment in VR. - **Susumu Tachi** (1) — Roboticist, pioneer of telexistence. Professor emeritus at the University of Tokyo who proposed telexistence in 1980 and led the TELESAR series of surrogate robots. https://tachilab.org - **Tae Yeun Kim** (1) — Media artist and VR director. Korean artist who made the interactive VR work Helpless (2021) with PPPLab and VR Crew, shown in the Beyond Science strand of BIFAN's Beyond Reality programme. - **Taiwoo Park** (1) — HCI researcher, Michigan State University. Taiwoo Park's lab designed JediFlight, a wing-based VR flying game. - **Takuji Narumi** (1) — Associate professor, University of Tokyo. Takuji Narumi studies how virtual bodies and multisensory cues change perception and behaviour. - **Tangjun Qu** (1) — HCI researcher, Shandong University. Tangjun Qu and colleagues study the Proteus effect of non-human avatars in VR. - **Tender Claws** (1) — Interactive and VR studio. Studio founded by Samantha Gorman and Danny Cannizzaro, known for Virtual Virtual Reality, The Under Presents and Face Jumping. https://tenderclaws.com/ - **The Swan Collective** (1) — Art collective (Felix Kraus). Collective founded by Felix Kraus making VR and installation art. - **Tosca Terán** (1) — Bio-sonification and bioart artist (Nanotopia). Interdisciplinary artist who, as Nanotopia, turns the electrical activity of living mycelium into music and immersive worlds. https://www.toscateran.com - **Ubisoft Montreal** (1) — Game studio of Ubisoft, Montreal. Large Ubisoft studio known for Assassin's Creed and Far Cry; its Fun House team made the early VR title Eagle Flight. https://montreal.ubisoft.com/ - **Visiontrick Media** (1) — Game studio. Swedish independent studio (director Rui Guerreiro) behind the VR games Pan-Pan and Mare. https://www.visiontrick.com - **Viviana Álvarez Chomón** (1) — Designer and media arts researcher. Chilean designer and researcher in media arts who develops science-art VR experiences with biologists. - **Werner van der Zwan** (1) — Artist and filmmaker. Dutch artist and filmmaker who fits found objects and scrapyard furniture with motors and code so that they move like characters. https://ververwant.nl - **Within** (1) — VR studio (Chris Milk & Aaron Koblin). Studio founded by Chris Milk and Aaron Koblin, early producer of cinematic and social VR. https://www.with.in - **Xin Liu** (1) — Artist and engineer, co-founder of slow immediate. Artist-engineer and MIT Media Lab alumna whose studio slow immediate (with Gershon Dublon) makes works on perception, the body and the environment. https://slowimmediate.com - **Xinmiao Lan** (1) — Communication researcher, University of Amsterdam. Xinmiao Lan studies avatars and the Proteus effect with Zeph van Berlo. - **Yangyang Yang** (1) — HCI researcher, UC Berkeley School of Information. PhD researcher at the UC Berkeley School of Information who designs mobile and mixed-reality experiences that invite people to take more-than-human perspectives. https://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/people/yangyang-yang - **Yao Xu** (1) — HCI researcher. Yao Xu and colleagues built iStrayPaws, a VR perspective-taking system about stray animals. - **Yedan Qian** (1) — Interaction designer. Designer and MIT Media Lab alumna who co-created TreeSense with Xin Liu. - **Yiou Wang** (1) — Media artist, founder of Trans Species Collective. Media artist working on trans-species empathy through sound and VR; leads the Trans Species Collective that made BATOPIA with HCI researcher Yujie Wang. https://yiouwang.org/ - **Yu Jiang** (1) — HCI researcher, Tsinghua University. Yu Jiang works with Yukang Yan and David Lindlbauer on controlling non-humanoid avatars. - **Yu-Lun Hsu** (1) — HCI researcher, National Taiwan University. Yu-Lun Hsu and colleagues designed AnimalSense, a VR game about the senses of animals. - **Yuting Xue** (1) — Media artist and researcher. Researcher working with Elke Reinhuber on immersive works about plant sensing and human-plant symbiosis. - **Zheng Mahler** (1) — Art and anthropology collective (Royce Ng and Daisy Bisenieks). Hong Kong collective formed by artist Royce Ng and anthrozoologist Daisy Bisenieks; their 'Lantau Trilogy' is a series of multispecies sensory ethnographies of the water buffalo, bats and fungi of Lantau Island. https://www.zhengmahler.world/ - **Zoink** (1) — Independent game studio. Swedish studio behind Stick It to the Man!, Fe and the PlayStation VR game Ghost Giant. https://zoink.com - **micha cárdenas** (1) — Artist, performer and scholar of trans and digital media. Artist and professor at UC Santa Cruz whose work joins trans theory, mixed reality and wearable technology; author of Poetic Operations. https://michacardenas.sites.ucsc.edu - **moovel lab** (1) — Mobility research and design lab of moovel Group (Daimler), Stuttgart. An interdisciplinary lab that built data-driven prototypes and public experiments about future urban mobility, active from about 2014 to 2019. https://lab.moovel.com - **Édith Jorisch** (1) — Filmmaker. Canadian filmmaker and visual artist, co-creator of Plastisapiens.