Entangling Like Mycorrhizae: Mixing Realities Through Touch in "FungiSync"

AI summary

Overview

Research area: Human-Computer Interaction — specifically mixed reality (MR) art and performance, soma design, ritual interaction design, and more-than-human/ecological HCI.

Technical level: Intermediate. The paper is a design-oriented art and HCI contribution rather than a systems-performance paper; it describes an MR interaction system (hardware, tracking, shaders) at a conceptual level but does not report controlled experiments or quantitative evaluations.

One-sentence scope: FungiSync is a multi-person, co-located mixed reality participatory ritual in which participants embody forest plants through masquerade-style MR masks, and whose individually distinct augmented "umwelten" merge and exchange visual elements when participants touch hands, modeling mycorrhizal resource exchange.

What This Paper Is About

Mycorrhizal networks — underground fungal systems that connect plant roots and exchange carbohydrates, minerals, water, and biochemical signals — are a vivid ecological model of interdependence, but they are invisible and hard to grasp intellectually. The authors ask what it would feel like to be a plant inside such a network, and they build an MR experience that answers through the body rather than through explanation. The goal is to let participants feel entanglement directly by reprogramming the human handshake into a metaphor for hyphal fusion, so that distinct perceptual worlds become mutually consequential without collapsing into one another.

Key Contributions

1. An MR art performance system that embodies mycorrhizal relationality. FungiSync uses accessible smartphone-based MR hardware (HoloKit X) inside custom masquerade masks to let co-located participants enact plant-with-fungi embodiment, with each participant assigned a unique, audio-reactive "cyberdelic" augmented overlay representing their individual umwelt (nitrogen, phosphorus, sugar, signals, or water).

2. A touch-driven perceptual entanglement mechanic. Physical hand proximity (within approximately 10 centimeters) triggers a gradual, asymmetric blending of one participant's visual layer into another's view, with transferred elements fading over approximately thirty seconds after release — modeling mycorrhizal exchange and its consumption over time.

3. A design framework mapping mycorrhizal biology onto interaction. The paper formalizes a five-step correspondence between fungal dynamics (rhizosphere, hyphosphere, mycorrhizosphere zones; anastomosis; resource depletion) and participant experience, translating mutualism into a somaesthetic ritual.

4. A ritual performance investigating entangled-yet-non-homogenized "digital umwelten." The work positions this as a more-than-human alternative grounded in symbiotic relationality, offered as a critique of accelerated individualism in technology-mediated posthuman life.

Main Findings

• Embodied understanding emerged from participation. Post-experience conversations at the exhibition revealed that many participants gained their first visceral understanding of how mycorrhizal networks function to balance resources in forests. No quantitative measures, sample sizes, or formal study instruments are reported.

• Touch was the central draw. Participants expressed strong curiosity about touching each other's hands to experience other realities, and often creatively experimented with different body parts to explore the system's responses.

• Asymmetry and decay were designed in. The blending depends on each participant's position and orientation, producing slightly different experiences of the "shared" content; the authors state this models the biological reality that mycorrhizal exchange is not perfectly reciprocal. Transferred elements fade over approximately thirty seconds without continued contact.

• Connection carried an incentive structure. Participants who engaged in frequent, sustained touches with multiple partners found their visual worlds richly layered with traces of many encounters, while those who remained isolated experienced a sparser umwelt — an embodied incentive for connection and a felt consequence for isolation.

• Ambient interdependence preceded touch. Because each overlay is audio-reactive (microphone input driving visual parameters through a spectrum analyzer), a clap or a spoken word makes all participants' overlays ripple in their own characteristic ways.

• Interdisciplinary reception. The installation attracted participants from diverse backgrounds — visual artists, technologists, ecologists, computer scientists, and sociologists — and a musician improvised in real time in response to environmental changes and participant interactions.

• External reflection. The author of Exploring MycoFi (Emmett, 2024), after experiencing FungiSync, described its resonance with decentralized, fluid networks as a form of "underground socialism."

Methodology in Plain English

The authors built an artwork rather than running a study. They started from biological accounts of mycorrhizal networks and from somaesthetics and soma design, which treat bodily sensation as a primary site of knowledge. They mapped each biological element onto an interaction: plants became participants; roots became masks; hyphae became visual layers; anastomosis became hand touch; resource flow became the leaking and swapping of visual elements; resource consumption became visual decay.

For hardware they used HoloKit X, an open-source toolkit that turns an iPhone into an affordable optical see-through AR headset via a stereoscopic visor and lens system. Each device was encased in a hand-crafted masquerade mask with bark texture, mushroom caps, and a 3D-printed resin handle painted to look like a gnarled twig — the handle allows one-handed grip, leaving the other hand free to touch others.

For the software, they implemented visual layers in Unity's Visual Effect Graph with custom shaders. The iPhone's LiDAR sensor supplies a real-time 3D mesh of the environment for occlusion and surface attachment. Apple ARKit's Semantic Person Segmentation identifies nearby human forms and tracks hand positions, and proximity under roughly 10 centimeters initiates a connection state in which each participant's shader receives data about the other's visual layer. Multi-user spatial alignment builds on Hu et al.'s (2023) framework for collocated multiplayer MR.

The experience was staged as an open-ended, walk-in/walk-out performance: up to six participants at once, each with a mask; a central "Substrate Tower" shaped like a tree stump serves as charging dock and ritual focal point; a large screen shows a split view of all active perspectives. It debuted as a commissioned artwork at a public conference in an art gallery setting.

Why This Matters

Impact on research: The paper contributes a worked example of how ecological and more-than-human concepts can be translated into embodied interaction mechanics rather than explained discursively. It sits at the intersection of soma design, ritual interaction design, intercorporeal XR, and the "fungal turn" in the humanities, and it extends prior intercorporeal XR works (such as Body RemiXer, Cell Space, and Machine to Be Another) by grounding exchange in a specific ecological metaphor.

Real-world applications:

• Museums, galleries, and science communication: an installation format that lets visitors feel ecological interdependence rather than read about it.
• Environmental and ecology education: a way to make invisible underground networks tangible for audiences who would not engage with the science textually.
• Social XR and networked experiences: a design pattern where digital systems reward connection across difference instead of isolating users in personalized bubbles.
• Wellbeing and social connection contexts: the paper's framing of isolation as producing a sparser perceptual world and connection as enriching it points toward experiences designed around felt interdependence.

Industry relevance: The system is built on commodity hardware — an iPhone, an open-source headset kit, Unity, and ARKit — which lowers the barrier to staging such experiences. For XR developers, the touch-triggered, asymmetric blending and decay mechanic offers a reusable interaction primitive for multi-user shared-space applications, and the paper's critique of personalization-as-isolation is directly relevant to platform designers debating the trajectory of immersive media.

Future Directions

1. Formal evaluation. The paper reports post-experience conversations but no controlled study, metrics, or participant counts; rigorous assessment of whether embodied ritual actually produces durable shifts in ecological understanding or relational attitudes remains open.

2. Scaling beyond six concurrent participants. With up to six masks and one-on-one touch detection, it is unclear how the entanglement mechanic, spatial alignment, and social dynamics would behave at larger scales.

3. Transferring the mechanic beyond mycorrhizae. Whether the same touch-triggered blending-and-decay primitive can carry other ecological or social metaphors — and whether the metaphor or the mechanic drives the felt effect — is unresolved.

4. Longer-term and comparative study. Questions remain about how the asymmetric blending, the approximately thirty-second decay, and the public split-screen display each contribute to the experience, and whether effects persist after participants leave the installation.

Target Audience

This paper benefits HCI and interaction design researchers working on mixed reality, soma design, and ritual or performance-based interaction; XR artists and curators interested in multi-person, co-located installations; scholars in the environmental humanities, mycoaesthetics, and more-than-human studies looking for concrete design instantiations; and museum or festival practitioners seeking participatory formats for ecological themes. Readers looking for quantitative user-study results or benchmark comparisons will not find them here — the contribution is design-led and conceptual.

Authors’ abstract

Mycorrhizal networks -- often called nature's ``wood-wide web'' -- are vast underground mycelial systems that connect individual plants through countless hyphae of mycorrhizal fungi joining with plant roots. Through these hyphal webs, resources and signals -- carbohydrates, minerals, and biochemical cues -- are mutualistically exchanged and redistributed across plants, sustaining forests as relational symbiotic ecologies rather than isolated individuals. What is it like to be a plant within the wood-wide web? We present \emph{FungiSync}, a multi-person, co-located mixed reality (MR) experience that translates mycorrhizal interdependence into a felt, somaesthetic participatory ritual. Participants embody different forest plants by holding masquerade-style MR headset masks with wood-branch-like handles decorated with mushrooms. In MR, each participant perceives a distinct, audio-reactive psychedelic augmented reality overlay -- composed of resource-representing visual elements -- layered atop a shared physical terrain, symbolizing an individualized digital \emph{umwelt} (perceptual world). FungiSync reprograms human hand touch into a metaphorical mycorrhizal exchange. When participants touch hands, their digital \emph{umwelten} begin to entangle: visual elements leak, mix, and merge across perspectives, as if hyphae were forging new connections and carrying resources between hosts within a larger mycelial network. By making mycorrhizal interdependence perceptible through embodied contact, FungiSync invites participants to feel with \emph{fungal epistemics} -- a more-than-human alternative way of knowing grounded in symbiotic relationality as both an aesthetic experience and an ethical orientation -- offering a critique of the accelerated individualism characterizing our technology-mediated posthuman era.