The Reality Helmet: Transforming the Experience of Being-in-the-world

The Reality Helmet is a wearable device providing a novel form of interactive experience, in which the user’s vision and hearing is completely shielded off from the world. Video and sounds are sampled by the Helmet from the surrounding environment, but through computer processing sounds are presented to the wearer as vision and sights are turned into a soundscape. The result is a radical transformation of the nature of being in the world, an extreme form of artificial synaesthesia. The Reality Helmet leads its wearer to question the relationship between what is out there and what is sensed. Conference participants will be invited to wear the Helmet and experience a different way of being in the world.