Presence VR
Rendering Reality is an immersive VR experience designed to take apart, step by step, the fundamental assumptions that shape how you perceive the world. It draws on neuroscience, quantum physics, Buddhism, lucid dreaming, and perennial philosophy. It’s the result of five years of work by a team spanning immersive art, AI, XR, and medicine.
Rendering Reality begins with a scan of your own space, so the experience starts in your actual living room. From there, it takes you on a guided journey through a series of immersive environments.
Questions such as the existence of a unified self, the reality of time and space, the observer effect and the hard problem of consciousness are addressed in an engaging and experiential way.
Same world. Different perception.
For as long as people have asked what’s real, they’ve had two ways in. The outside path: books, lectures, philosophy, physics. The inner path: years of contemplative practice. Both take time.
Rendering Reality offers another way: purely experiential and immediate. Familiar labels and habitual viewpoints become a starting point for inquiry. Participants will experience loosening their grip on beliefs they’ve held all their lives.
Whereas most VR products change WHAT you see, Rendering Reality changes HOW you see.
“So beautiful and mind-bending! I was transported to another world, and this one will never be the same.”
Inside the experience
Peeling away illusions, one chapter at a time.
Each chapter is an immersive experience designed to shift how you see, feel, and create reality.
CHAPTER 1
What do you actually see when the familiar labels fall away? A hand, a sound, a face: each stops being named and starts being seen, maybe for the first time since childhood. Colors and sounds become more vivid and the body relaxes into the flow of experience without resistance to what arises.
CHAPTER 2
What would you see if you weren’t looking out from somewhere behind your eyes? On the beach, your point of view is free to move: out of the small “self” you’re used to, into other perspectives, and outward into a wider view. When you can hold many points of view at once, your own preferences start to loosen their grip. Astronauts who have seen Earth from space describe a similar shift, called the overview effect: the parts give way to the whole.
CHAPTER 3in production
What happens when you can reshape your experience while you’re still inside it? Shift from being a tiny part of a vast world into the master creator of your experience. This chapter will let you reconstruct reality intentionally in real time using generative AI with voice prompts, allowing the world to morph at your command.
TESTIMONIALS
Here’s some of what early participants have said, in their own words.
I found a completely new perspective which I missed in spite of a lifetime of therapy and being a therapist myself.”
I was really surprised how much my brain was willing to go along with unfamiliar ways of seeing the world. I was able to let go and it was very relaxing.”
It lets me go down into what I’ve lived, and find what’s buried there.”
rendering reality is
Why this exists
Freedom. Compassion. Creativity. The relief of suffering. These are just a few of the reasons why Rendering Reality exists: to explore the same questions that have called seekers, scientists, artists and seers alike since there have been humans around to ask them.
WHAT WE’RE LEARNING…
Show me the (neuro) science.
Using 19-lead EEG recordings, our research study is looking at how the brain responds to the experience. It’s early, and the first results are intriguing.
The book
Rendering Reality grew out of a lifetime of passionate questioning by Loren Eskenazi, MD, the author of the upcoming autobiographical book, All Reality Is Virtual. Its opening line, “Things are not as they seem,” is the premise you get to test.
Presence Park is a space built for this work in Sausalito. It’s where every experience is created, and where we bring together people from all disciplines who are searching for the truth. The architecture is part of the story: a permanent commitment to the study of perception, and everything we can learn from it.
The search that brought you here today continues the moment you put on the headset. Apply to join the preview now and help shape what comes next:
