Into the Mind: Virtual Reality and Psychedelics

Some time ago I was interviewed by Techradar UK about the intersection of virtual reality and psychedelic substances. Article here. They wound up using just a few excerpts, but gave me permission to share the full unedited interview.

When did you start getting into doing drugs with VR?

The persistent theme in my use of psychedelics has been that of inward exploration. Of the mind obviously, but also in every other respect. I have tripped underwater once prior in a diving apparatus of my own design.

I have tripped many times deep underground. Tripping in VR seemed like the next logical step.Inward exploration excites me because it subverts our instincts. Every living thing’s instincts tell it to explore outward to the limits of its environment, then try to move up to the highest accessible point.

Put a beetle in a jar, or a bee, or a frog, or a mouse and that’s what it will do. But reality is infinite in scale. There should be just as much cool shit down under our feet as there is above in the sky, if you look closely enough. That’s not to say that humanity’s instinct driven pursuit of spaceflight is the wrong way to go, by any means.

There is no wrong direction to explore in.I personally choose to explore underground, underwater and into the mind because if there’s still anything mysterious or remarkable that an average person like me has the means to uncover (which hasn’t already been), that’s probably where it’s waiting to be found.

Can you talk a bit about the drugs you use with it and the experiences you've done?

Mushrooms, LSD, NBOMES (mostly i,c,b and d). I have tried DMT but not in VR, that would be silly. I don’t really feel like I can explain in the space provided what sort of experiences I’ve had with each, that could fill many books. This article is a good place to start.

Which are your favourite games and experiences with tripping in VR, and why?

Not the ones I was expecting! I thought I’d want to look at beautiful abstract shapes. Nebuland for cardboard is gorgeous and creative, albeit criminally short. I didn’t get as much out of it as I expected. I did very much feel on the same wavelength as the studio behind it while playing though.

The other stuff I expected to be good was “fly around and blast shit” games set in space or something. There’s certainly no shortage of these, but except for your cockpit there isn’t enough close up to see stuff like texture creep or other effects on.

VR isn’t just about “experiences” and honestly that is a gimmicky buzzword that needs to die. It’s code for a low effort noninteractive flythrough of a 3D environment made in Unity, sold for the price of a game. It isn’t about “stuff that seems like it would be fun in VR” either.

The most fun I had was with games I would have also enjoyed on my PC or a console, like Cityscape Repairman. As I sent my cute little nondescript repairman creature to his death for the hundredth time because even while sober I cannot operate a jetpack, I realized VR truly isn’t a gimmick. It’s just another entertainment platform.

I am probably preaching to the converted but I was unsure and anxious for a while whether or not it’s back to stay, as for me growing up, VR is one of those cool future technologies I always hoped for, and the 1990s VR crash was devastating. Probably how it felt for the prior generation to see men walk on the moon with a ten year cold start only to fuck around in low earth orbit, the mother's basement of outer space, for the next half century.

But no, VR is here to stay this time. It's for real. VR isn’t a gimmick, forever pigeonholed as a dumping ground for “woah dude” space blasters or “experiences”. It’s simply a new platform for entertainment. Which sort of makes us sound like hedonistic wizards, conjuring upon various floating platforms all manner of amusements play out upon such as men fighting tigers, women romancing men, bears romancing other, cooler bears and probably all kinds of stuff I cannot in good conscience describe here because you just know wizards would be into some nasty wizard shit

You might think “Well if it offers the same kinds of games I can play elsewhere, why do I want VR?” The answer is because it’s better. It is literally just a better display. There is nothing about making a digital display (apparently) larger, three dimensional and all-enveloping via head tracking which isn’t objectively an improvement over a flat panel.

You might say what about 3D TV, which also requires you to wear something silly on your face. But it does not offer nearly as much reward for it, and polarized or shutterglass 3D has a lot of issues with ghosting that are solved when you give each eyeball its own separate, dedicated display.

You will enjoy the exact same games, but much more, in VR. Just being in VR improves the experience, something a lot of developers are leaning on really hard to carry otherwise mediocre games.I really hate to say this because I love Adventure Time, but it’s a good example.

The Adventure Time platformer on Gear VR really let me down during a recent trip. Not because it’s bad (just looking around the environments was cool) but because it should have been better.Like many VR games it’s coasting on the novelty factor of being in VR at all. But aside from that, as an Adventure Time game with relatively simple gameplay, it also has humorous writing to lean on.

So you’d think they would make sure it’s consistently funny, right? Most of it is phoned in. “You don’t gnome me” only made me laugh because I pictured Finn’s voice actor being told that was a real joke that would be in the final game, and that he’ll need to be able to say it without laughing or sounding as disappointed as I was in this game’s writing.As a platformer it checks off all the boxes.

You can run, you can jump and attack. You have a slam attack. Left trigger is a chute, right trigger is a long distance grapple for crossing gaps. The problem is that’s all there is to the gameplay. The chute and grapple thing isn’t for one or two levels, that’s all there is. Although technically there's really only two distinct environments in the game anyway. It is very, very short.

Again, simplistic gameplay is excusable if you have other big selling points like funny writing and VR to lean on. But the writing has to be really funny, and the fact that it’s in VR shouldn’t be an excuse to put in less effort and less content but charge what, for a mobile phone game, is a relatively high price.

I fear this trend will get a lot worse before it gets better, a sort of lazy developer's feeding frenzy on people just getting into VR.If I had to pick one I have zero complaints about, it’d be InCell. It’s a really strange beautiful environment within the human cell, the music is alien and soothing. It’s a very simple game to play, but it’s also free. I felt very welcome in that game, if that makes any sense.

Any anecdotes of particularly interesting experiences you've had? Would be great if you could add detail here.

Smash Hit was a good decision. It’s free last time I checked but so much fun I wanted to find out the author’s email address so I could ask how I can give money to him/her.

I learned by failing. First by running out of balls, then by hitting something. In some cases, failure to tell the player what they need to do is bad game design. But not in this case as it doesn’t snag you anywhere, unable to proceed.

Rather, it’s about the most minimalist tutorial possible. My dad taught me a lot of things this way, by letting me try on my own and fail first before explaining why that happened and what to do differently.

I was grooving to Smash Hit, colors pulsing, when I experienced this sudden feeling of separation that is hard to describe. I became aware of my own first person perspective as it’s own “thing”, independent of my body. I could intimately feel every nerve ending in my body of course, I could feel my ears to either side of my field of view.

I think what triggered it is taking notice that the field of view within the Gear VR I was using that day is close to the same shape as the human field of view. Which made me realize that, although I was looking at a false reality assembled by a small computer and then fed into my eyes, it is not perceived directly but then deconstructed and interpreted by another, biological computer. One machine lying to another, but even with the headset off what I’m seeing doesn’t get to me until it’s been heavily processed.

That got me thinking to how differently we all see the same reality. The day may come when everybody wears some sort of artificial reality mediator, like HoloLens, so that everybody sees only what they want to and nothing they don’t. But part of me thinks we don’t need the help, that’s the way we already are.

Have you had any bad experiences so far, and if so, what were they?

Yeah, I was playing Dread Halls (an excellent game) when I realized that the sounds weren’t supposed to be coming out so distorted. I have a bone anchored hearing implant that, besides fixing my busted left ear, lets me pipe audio directly into my skull over bluetooth.

For some reason it does not play well with Gear VR. I didn’t notice it right away because it drastically slows down and distorts sound in a way that is right at home in a horror game, like mournful ghost voices.

Sure enough, when I switched over to Darknet, the normal overlord voice transformed into another jive ass ghost, fucking haunting my mortal ass with its jazzy but still mournful ghost ballads. I don’t know what the cause of this is, but it was a letdown. Somebody at Samsung should have a look at what’s going on with bluetooth while the phone’s in headset mode.

The other letdown is the face padding and the optics. I mean I understand the Japanese engineers figured Americans are larger around the waist, we must have fatter faces too. But the Gear VR seems to have been designed for somebody with the facial proportions of Pac Man. The default padding lets light in the edges because it’s too wide and isn’t substantial enough for comfort.

I had a VR One GX before this and have tried a wide range of other Cardboard compatible plastic viewers. Very few are any good, but some of them like the VR One and SnailVR arguably have better lenses than what’s in the Gear headset. Wider field of view using the same phone without sacrificing clarity, a wider sweet spot, and less fogging.

Though maybe that was less to do with the lenses and more that the VR One is properly ventilated in a way that doesn’t let light in and the Gear isn’t.Gear owners don’t react well to this because often it’s all they’ve tried and they assume that Gear is the best because it costs the most.

And no contest, the low persistence mode, the vastly more precise head tracking and buttery framerates have spoiled me, I can never go back to cardboard. I just wish it had better lenses so I could honestly say it is in every way an improvement, but it’s not.

I dunno what the answer is. It’s “good enough”, but this is a Samsung product for use with their flagship phones. You can tell me that Carl Zeiss makes the VR One so of course the lenses are better, that’s reflected in the $120 cost of their unit vs. the $99 Gear VR, but nothing prevented Samsung from buying their lenses.

When I am high, the visual quality matters more to me, not less. I am in a sort of hyper aware mindset where I notice every little thing, and the brain is already very picky about what we see and how it’s delivered to our eyes, hence why it’s been such a long and tedious road of solving one nausea inducing show stopper after another just to get to the point where VR is good enough for long enough durations that it’s consumer ready.

What I want in this state of mind is BIG lenses. I want to take it all in. I want 100-110 degrees. Freefly advertises 120 but having directly compared it to the 100 degree fov viewers it looks identical to me, save for lenses with a much narrower, less forgiving sweet spot.I want those lenses to be crystal clear. Glass, not plastic. They must be properly ventilated so they don’t fog up. This is possible to do without letting light in, just put a thin layer of light blocking foam over the air inlets on the inner surface.

The last thing is, I wanted to see the ingame stuff undergo the same sort of breathing, evolutionary self-animation effects as real world objects. My brain wasn’t having it. It will register texture shift on flat ingame surfaces!

That’s a step up, I couldn’t get that to happen in cardboard. Something about the improvements between cardboard and Gear were enough to fool my brain at least that much, but every time stuff starts to get too nuts it snaps back to normal when I remember I’m looking at a display in front of my eyes. For me, that sort of sudden self consciousness has a halting effect on the more severe visual distortions psychedelics usually cause.

I’m pretty practiced at forcibly interrupting my thought process in that fashion for the disruption of bad trips. If you just keep thinking about something upsetting or scary, that just compounds on itself, like a microphone left too near the loudspeaker it’s connected to. But the same goes for positive thoughts, the trick is switching abruptly from one to the other, like tearing off a band aid. Then you stubbornly focus on whatever happy thought you chose and let it lift you out of that pit.

So if ever you are plagued by the mournful yet sassy and honestly genre defying musical stylings of a ghost chorus while playing Dread Halls in VR, do not let the fear (or the rhythm) take you. Instead, go to your happy place. Wizard porn if you want. I am not here to pass judgement on you, friend.