Developing Embodied Familiarity with Hyperphysical Phenomena (2019)

> more powerful ways of thinking

> The body itself now becomes a designable structure

This reminds me of a novel called "Diaspora" by Greg Egan. The virtual human-descended main characters were trying to communicate with an alien species extremely different from humans - different to the point where their very thought processes were incompatible with any shared method of information transmission.

As a workaround, they created a chain of copies of themselves, each one slightly more like the alien from the last, but similar enough to be able to communicate with its neighbors. In this way, they created a way to communicate with the aliens through the chain of proxy-entities.

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It's really interesting to see these kinds of ideas come up in experimental VR research. I do believe that that's the end-game of VR-style technology: not perfectly replicating reality and making the virtual world indistinguishable from the real world, but opening up the human mind to a broader set of senses/thoughts/experiences than are available through the corporeal human body.

> [...] designers will hamper themselves and their users by perpetuating old UI mechanics, turning VR etc into a rough simulacrum of the constrained physical world rather than the means for its transcendence.

I think that the human mind is an incredibly general thing and that it would be capable of existing in an environment completely separate from the body. I'm excited to see what kind of advancements we'll see in our lifetimes in the area of expanding consciousness through technology and moving past the previously insurmountable constraints of the human body within which we spend our lives.