idea : VR for consciousness hacking

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

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

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

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