"Empathy is literally hard-coded into our DNA," says White as I brush my hair out of the way of the electrodes. "We’ve never been content with living one life, because we either want to share ours, or feel somebody else’s. And we’ve never been able to." This is exactly what virtual reality, according to many people, is supposed to allow. Chris Milk, head of VR film studio Vrse, has called virtual reality "the last medium," the first art form to place viewers truly inside a story. But to White, that’s not enough.

"So imagine you’re trying to watch your old Christmas home movies," he says, by way of example. "With a headset, you can maybe see exactly what you saw back then, but you’re never going to feel the same way — that excitement of going downstairs and opening up the first present. There’s always going to be a wall between the person you are now and the one you’re pretending to be. And this is the first time you can stop pretending."

Obviously, though, nobody recorded emotions along with our Christmas home movies. For most of the Wavelength’s "tracks," PathoGlyph developers construct and place different feelings at key places in the story, the way a film editor might layer audio cues. Nor are these feelings a precise translation of real human experience. They’re electrochemical cocktails that produce generic sensations — approximations of sadness, joy, or even complex concepts like jealousy, which White describes as the combination of anger, anxiety, despair, and desire.

"There's always going to be a wall between the person you are now and the one you're pretending to be."

The centerpiece of PathoGlyph’s demo is a companion track to Henry, Oculus Story Studio’s second animated film. Even without the Wavelength, Henry does its best to push your emotional buttons: it’s about a lonely, big-eyed hedgehog in search of a friend. When I first watched the short last year, though, I was charmed but not particularly moved. This time, as Henry sighs at the sight of his empty birthday party, something clenches in my chest. I’m seized with an overwhelming connection to this little creature, and I catch myself blinking away tears, noticing suddenly that the Gear VR’s fuzzy mask is lined with black gaff tape — less absorbent and easier to clean.

These clearly aren’t real emotions. The sadness comes on too strong and too suddenly, and the happiness that follows is a little… giddy, perhaps. But then, it’s hard to say what "real" emotions even are. The Wavelength’s artificiality oscillates between the feelings of alcoholic magnanimity, major depressive episode, and crying at a montage set to Leonard Cohen’s "Hallelujah" — all those times where your conscious mind can’t stop your body from expressing something it knows is false.

Even if you can identify the feelings, their origins remain mysterious. Some things make intuitive sense: stimulating adrenaline production, says White, triggers a "fight or flight" response. But others are so arcane that it’s not clear even PathoGlyph understands how they work. "Everything doctors do with the brain is 90 percent trial and error," says White. "If you go to a psychiatrist, they’re going to give you something that you know, maybe worked for another person who felt sort of the same as you, and if that doesn’t do it, they’ll run down a list until something does. It’s a black box, and we’re as qualified as anybody to run with it."