Yilan Elan Tao

Botao Amber Hu, Danlin Huang, Yilan Elan Tao et al.

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.

Botao Amber Hu, Yilan Elan Tao, Bernhard Riecke et al.

Mixed reality systems support shared anchors and co-located interaction, yet they lack a socially legible protocol for entering another person's mixed reality in public settings. We frame this as a protocol problem: co-located MR sharing requires a staged sequence -- Discover, Consent, Confirm, Allow, Spatial Colocation, Sync Objects, Permission Management -- each demanding user understanding and agreement. Using AirDrop and Apple Vision Pro SharePlay as a baseline, we show that MR encounter complexity far exceeds file transfer, yet must feel equally effortless. We present TouchPort, an embodied sharing protocol that collapses this multi-stage sequence into a single gesture: a handshake and pull that simultaneously signals intent, negotiates consent, and initiates a temporary shared encounter layer between otherwise separate mixed realities. Through three implied scenarios, we demonstrate the protocol's expressive range in the transition from isolated to spontaneously shared realities. We discuss how embodied gestures can address the consent problem in ubiquitous MR and examine the ethical tensions of encounter protocols for MR futures.