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Escape from the Horror of 2017 by Becoming a Tree

“Is it possible to experience being another lifeform?”

That’s the foundational question asked by Tree, an unusually immersive VR app developed at MIT Media Lab’s Fluid Interfaces Group. Featured on Prosthetic Knowledge, the short experience places you inside the bark of a tree in the Peruvian rainforest. But you don’t just get a view of the forest around you. You feel it, too.

Because of a suite of technologies, as you rise from the dirt, sprouting from seedling into a full-grown tree, a fan blows wind over your skin, like the passing breeze, as a smell machine pipes in what I can only assume is the fragrant green funk of a forest canopy after the rain.

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