What we call "reality" is not a direct copy of the external world inside the brain. It emerges anew each time, through interactions among our senses and bodies, our cognitive states, our environment, the people around us, and the technologies we use without giving them much thought.
We reframe reality not as something the brain produces on its own (autopoiesis), but as something generated together with the body, the environment, technology, and other people (sympoiesis). We call this perspective "Sympoietic Reality." Our goal is to uncover the mechanisms through which the self and reality arise, and, building on these insights, to establish technologies and methodologies that help people live better lives. The self, in this view, is not a finished entity either. It is an open network sustained by a wide range of allostatic processes, from metabolism and immunity to sensation and movement, cognition, social relationships, and the narratives woven over time, all influencing one another. We call this the "Sympoietic Self."
As core technologies for intervening in, observing, and designing the processes through which reality emerges, we work primarily with virtual reality and augmented reality. These technologies allow us to change what people see, what they touch, and how their own bodies appear to them, under controlled conditions. By examining how people's perceptions and behaviors change as a result, we can investigate how reality is constructed.
Our research on cross-modal interfaces has examined how reality emerges from interactions among the senses. Our research on Ghost Engineering has examined how embodying an avatar, a new body, transforms the self. These are not separate themes but different expressions of the same question: what do we generate reality with? Today, AI is joining the partners in this question. When people think, decide, and act together with AI agents, how can they keep the sense that they are thinking and choosing for themselves? We aim to understand how reality is created jointly between people and technology, and among people themselves, and to design better ways for this to happen.