I’m writing a paper about my near-death experience, which is what has underpinned a lot of my aesthetic over these last years. This video illustrates how I perceived my body – as a pulsing light. The light intensity grew with each inhale, and diminished with each exhale. Overall, the amplitude envelope was decreasing. I knew that at the moment it was extinguished, I would begin resting. In another dimension. It seems it wasn’t the time.

Here’s a demo video from ‘Gaussian Fields’, a new physics art C++ real-time simulation code I have been working on. It’s a generative framework, so you never know exactly what patterns will emerge once you set the dynamics in motion. It’s cool to see intricate and varied complexity evolve from such simple initial conditions….

She has dark eyes. More soon!

Intangible Realities Laboratory (IRL) headquarters has moved to the CiTIUS | Centro Singular de Investigación en Tecnoloxías Intelixentes in Santiago de Compostela. To celebrate the incarnation of IRL 2.0, we have a shiny new website!

www.intangiblerealitieslab.org

To read more, check out the article “Group VR experiences can produce ego attenuation and connectedness comparable to psychedelics” available open access at www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-12637-z

Green Tara in progress… Tārā is a buddha manifestation embodying the qualities of feminine energy within the universe. She offers warmth, compassion, and relief from suffering. Like a mother for her children, she engenders, nourishes, and smiles at the vitality of creation. In her Green form, Tārā offers protection from the variety of unfortunate circumstances encountered by beings trapped in cyclic existence. She is characterized by wind energy, enabling her to act quickly to ease the suffering of her children.

This White Tara was painted as a lockdown meditation during Jan – April 2021.

Read all about our latest work working with a global network of citizen scientists to investigate the use of VR to elicit distributed mystical-type experiences which are comparable to pyschedelics! https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.07796

Excited about the publication of a recent paper showing how our open source interactive molecular dynamics in virtual reality (iMD-VR) program Narupa can be used to investigate proteins which are relevant to the ongoing COVID pandemic. In the paper, we looked at the main protease (Mpro) of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which is one focus of drug development efforts for COVID-19. The paper shows that iMD-VR offers a useful and effective tool for creating Mpro complexes in a physically rigorous and flexible way. Applying the iMD-VR approach to both an Mpro inhibitor and an oligopeptide substrate, we show that iMD-VR gives models in agreement with experimentally observed (crystal) structures. The docked structures were tested in MD simulations and found to be stable.

We’ve just published a paper describing the use of interactive molecular dynamics in virtual reality (iMD-VR) for carrying out flexible protein-ligand docking, demonstrated through experiments carried out docking drug molecules into the binding pockets of trypsin, neuraminidase, and HIV-1 protease.

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