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

TL;DR

FungiSync is a multi-person, co-located mixed reality (MR) experience that translates mycorrhizal interdependence into a felt, somaesthetic participatory ritual, offering a critique of the accelerated individualism characterizing the authors' technology-mediated posthuman era.

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.

Figures (8)

• Figure 1: Conceptual framework mapping mycorrhizal network dynamics onto FungiSync's mixed reality interaction design. Center: The mycorrhizal network connecting forest plants (European Beech, Norway Spruce) through underground fungal hyphae, illustrating the rhizosphere, hyphosphere, and mycorrhizosphere zones. Sequence (1-5): The corresponding participant experience—(1) individual entering with isolated umwelt; (2) two participants with distinct perceptual worlds (nitrogen/phosphorus as visual elements); (3) physical hand touch mixing overlapping umwelten, triggering resource/signal exchange; (4) post-contact state showing transferred visual elements between participants; (5) enriched individual umwelten can continue to share elements with others, though elements gradually decay over time. The framework translates mycorrhizal mutualism—where plants exchange nutrients through fungal intermediaries—into a somaesthetic ritual where touch catalyzes perceptual entanglement, making invisible ecological interdependence viscerally felt.
• Figure 2: FungiSync mask design: a custom masquerade-style enclosure for the HoloKit X headset, featuring bark texture and mushroom caps to evoke a forest spirit colonized by fungi.
• Figure 3: The Design of FungiSync Mask
• Figure 4: Hand touch between participants triggers the mixing of cyberdelic MR overlays, simulating mycorrhizal resource exchange through fungal hyphae.
• Figure 5: The cyberdelic MR visuals mix between participants when hand touch triggers connection, simulating resource exchange through mycorrhizal networks.