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

2026-03-10

AI Summary

This study challenges the hyper-individualized epistemologies of the technological age by fostering embodied experiences that enable participants to viscerally apprehend the symbiotic interconnectivity of plants through mycorrhizal networks. To this end, we developed a co-located, multi-user mixed reality system in which participants, wearing custom MR headsets, embody forest plants and trigger the visual fusion of their individual augmented umwelten through physical hand contact—metaphorically enacting the exchange of resources and information in mycorrhizal networks. This design constitutes the first translation of mycorrhizal symbiosis into a tactile, embodied interaction ritual, proposing a “fungal epistemology” as a post-anthropocentric paradigm for perception and ethics. Empirical findings indicate that the experience effectively facilitates cross-individual perceptual integration, vividly conveying the aesthetic and ethical dimensions of symbiosis and prompting critical reflection on technological individualism.

Technology Category

• Humans and AI: Interaction Techniques and Devices
• Intelligent Robots: Embodied AI
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Social Cognition And Interaction

Application Category

• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Incentives in network design for Web infrastructures and ecosystems
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics for personalization

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.

Problem

• mycorrhizal networks
• symbiotic relationality
• mixed reality
• embodied perception
• more-than-human epistemology

Innovation

• mixed reality
• somaesthetic interaction
• mycorrhizal networks
• umwelt entanglement
• fungal epistemics