Entangling Like Mycorrhizae: Mixing Realities Through Touch in "FungiSync"
Botao Amber Hu, Danlin Huang, Yilan Elan Tao, Xiaobo Aaron Hu, Rem RunGu Lin

TL;DR
FungiSync is a mixed reality experience that embodies mycorrhizal networks, allowing participants to physically feel interconnectedness and resource exchange in a forest-inspired digital-physical hybrid environment.
Contribution
This work introduces a novel mixed reality ritual that visualizes and embodies mycorrhizal interdependence through touch and shared digital overlays.
Findings
Participants experience visual merging of digital worlds through touch.
The system fosters a sense of interconnectedness and ecological awareness.
FungiSync offers a new form of embodied understanding of symbiotic relationships.
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…
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Taxonomy
TopicsPlant and Biological Electrophysiology Studies · Psychedelics and Drug Studies · Slime Mold and Myxomycetes Research
