

Radix Motion is creating a trippy, asynchronous communication platform called MEU that starts to play with our experience of embodiment. CEO Sarah Haskhes is a cognitive neuroscientist who previously studied psychedelics through the lens of a predictive coding model of the brain where there’s a fusion of our prior experiences that have a direct interaction in shaping our current perceptions of the world. There are error codes between our expectations and our sensory experiences which shape our experience, but also provide a sense of novelty within the experience. Haskhes is applying these types of cognitive neuroscience insights to your sense of embodiment within a virtual reality experience in order to give a slightly trippy and psychedelic experience of our embodied interactions.

I was also joined by CTO Matthew Hoe, who talked about the desire for creating an asynchronous communication platform since both Hashkes’ and his family is overseas in a different time zone that doesn’t always make synchronous communication feasible. He talks about recording an embodied ritual that he used to do with his mother, and then her reaction in receiving it. But he also thinks that people are going to eventually move away from using emojis or reaction GIFS in order to record their own embodied dances and rituals that are communicate their feelings in the moment, very much in a similar way that people use selfies in order to communicate their current emotional state.

We talk about embodiment, what they were doing to create this slightly psychedelic trippy feeling to their experience, the risks of invoking body dysphoria if people are aware of creating mismatches between the body schemas stored in the cerebellum, motor cortex, and sensory cortex, creating technological interactions and user experiences that are body-centric, and how they hope that embodied communication can help us to escape the social media void that we find ourselves within in today’s society. Definitely keep an eye out for where MEU goes next as they’re really onto something that’s super compelling.

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https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/d1icj85yqthyoq.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Voices-of-VR-780-Sarah-Hashkes-Matthew-Hoe.mp3

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Music: Fatality