Till Holzapfel
I study how people perceive, inhabit, and shape shared worlds. I am now a PhD candidate in mixed-ability human–swarm interaction. My approach, Combinatorial Swarmability, asks how people with different abilities can act through a shared, changing system and negotiate how their contributions matter. This grows out of my work with embodied perception, biofeedback, and luminous, porous virtual bodies.
Based in the Inclusive Technology and Collective Engagement group, University of Duisburg-Essen / RC Trust.
A shared interface does not have to give everyone the same controls. One person might shape a swarm's direction, another its rhythm or density, and another the rules by which it responds. The research question is how those contributions can become understandable, negotiable, and meaningful to the people making them.
Combinatorial Swarmability is the focus of my PhD in mixed-ability human–swarm interaction, in Prof. Giulia Barbareschi's group. I plan to develop it through participatory design, shared virtual environments, and studies of how people coordinate and repair interaction. Swarms are a medium to explore; more equitable collaboration is a question to investigate, not an automatic result.
One direction is a dynamic reflection of a group's meeting: a system whose behaviour helps participants discuss what is happening between them. Its meanings would have to be defined and revised with the group. This is an early research proposal, not a tool that can already measure inclusion or infer how people feel.
Read the research direction and its foundationsMy earlier work asks how a person interfaces with the world: how perception, expectation, and belief shape experience, and how an interface can change the felt boundary of the body. The new work carries those questions into the space between people.
Viscereality brings breath and physiological feedback into changing visual systems. It is a practical meeting point for my interests in dynamical systems and neuroaesthetics: how the behaviour of a visual environment relates to bodily experience.
Plasmatic Multitudes develops porous, particle-based bodies. My avatar work at the Intangible Realities Lab grew within its Isness work and collaboration with aNUma, in the wider context of numadelic aesthetics and shared embodiment.
Rusty Morphospace is the open-source infrastructure thread: making immersive systems easier to build, operate, and inspect. Extending this work toward robotic systems, including Reachy Mini, is a planned next step.
Projects
Working systems sit alongside essays on perception and embodiment. These remain active interests and foundations for the new research.
Across the work: tune the condition, preserve agency, record what changed, and keep mechanisms and claims separate.
Local Linux workstation for Meta Quest
A Termux-powered interactive Linux desktop presented through a native Quest app in both Horizon window and Spatial SDK panel modes. The current showcase runs Codex with ray, right-click, keyboard, and microphone input.
XR research system
A Quest-based bioresponsive VR research system. The participant runtime links breath, cardiac rhythm, oscillator visuals, and visual state changes; the operator side handles launch, monitoring, study-shell control, and session evidence.
Research overview Project site Quest companion tools Docs & downloads
Meta Quest operator tooling
Windows and Android utilities for operating Meta Quest research builds from outside the headset: install, launch, cast, monitor, capture proof, and export diagnostics without rebuilding the same operator workflow for every project.
Computational morphology platform
An AGPL-first Rust platform for computational matter, situated relations, command and media authority, LSL compatibility, renderer-neutral inspection, operator tooling, and native Quest integration. The current platform baseline is 0.1.0; the separate public contributor environment is at 0.4.0. Legacy compatibility and lab/reference repos keep their existing license lanes.
Bioelectric atlas and morphogenesis model
A source-bounded planarian line across Rusty Morphospace and Planarian Regeneration XR: educational surface-field models, a WebXR atlas, PlanformDB-derived review records, and an observed posterior-muscle geometry overlay kept separate from simulation claims.
Biofeedback sensor integration
Public Polar H10 work across minimal signal packages, Quest data contracts, broker streams, Windows capture, Android phone diagnostics, Unity Quest integration, and Viscereality research tooling. The focus is clear stream ownership, inspectable routing, and reusable biosignal contracts.
Depth inversion research instrument
Depth-inversion experiments need stimulus controls that survive renderer changes. Hollow Face Lab connects hollow-face research with WebGL, WebXR, texture upload, XR implementation choices, asset provenance, and design rationale.
Live citizen-science web collaboration
A CIRCE-led citizen-science survey for anonymous altered-state reports. The page explains how the public survey, multilingual questionnaires, feedback, scoring, privacy boundaries, research exports, and collaborator workflow fit together.
Embodiment and design research
A vocabulary for bodies that soften, distribute, glow, swarm, or become collective while remaining readable as bodies. The design rule is simple: center stable, periphery negotiable.
Writing and conceptual synthesis
A four-part framework for experiences that cannot be explained by body practice, tool design, narrative, or feedback loops alone. It asks what each layer contributes before joining them.
Tulpas, thoughtforms, and inner agency
A careful reference guide to modern tulpamancy language, cultivated inner companions, thoughtforms, headmates, imposition, plurality, and related agency vocabularies without turning them into one lineage.
Research overview Evidence Prophantasia Phenomenological Control
Knowledge-art and research method
A dream bureau, scientific-looking journal, diagram, or experimental machine becomes surrealist here when it changes what counts as an observation. The page keeps apparatus, art history, and pseudoscience separate.
Altered perception and induced vision
A design and research project about how rhythmic light, recursive visual structure, sound, breath, and expectation can shape non-drug state shifts. It is about tunable experience design, not clinical treatment or psychedelic substitution.
Strobotorch remains separate Android tooling for visual signal encoding, visual signal decoding, and flashlight-safety boundaries.
Independent Android signal tooling
An Android flashlight signaling and diagnostics tool. It uses torch and camera APIs for visible-light signal experiments, device-behavior logging, and safety documentation.
Interactive visual-cortex simulator
A Rust/browser implementation and article for Bressloff-style V1 planforms, retino-cortical mapping, orientation contours, branch-selection controls, named paper presets, Rule flicker diagnostics, and generated MacKay, Bolelli, and Nicks driven-field reports. The page keeps each model family inspectable without reusing private paper figures.
Simulated psychedelic vision
An account of DeepDream, hallucination-machine methods, community replication culture, and the narrow conditions under which simulated DeepDream fits inside the wider history of psychedelic visual simulation.
Static motion and perceptual mechanics
A mechanism-first account of peripheral drift, Rotating Snakes, and adjacent static motion illusions, kept close to eye-movement, luminance, and filter-design evidence.
Imagery, suggestion, and mechanism
A synthesis of imagery variation, absorption, expectancy, hypnotic suggestibility, and how subjective variation meets physiology, lesion evidence, and newer shared-code findings.
Projected imagery and field mapping
A guide to reports of internally generated imagery that seems external, overlaid on the world, or located outside the ordinary mind's eye. It keeps measurement, community practice, and safety signals separate.
Retinal stimulation and patterned light
A bounded account of the Russian fractal-phototherapy line and its retinal, ophthalmic, lighting, and comparator literatures. Fractal structure is treated as stimulus, not vibe.
Code and prototypes
Public repositories include Rusty Morphospace, Quest companion tooling, Polar H10 routing and capture work, Strobotorch, browser prototypes, simulation tools, and shareable research infrastructure. Licenses vary by repo: Morphospace-owned source is AGPL-first, while some compatibility, lab, and tool repositories remain MIT.
GitHub profile Rusty Morphospace Polar H10 work Quest companion tools Strobotorch Bressloff V1 code AXP access guide
Selected outputs across immersive systems, psychophysics, breath interaction, and XR communication.
I am a cognitive scientist, researcher, and developer working across HCI, psychophysics, immersive media, and artistic research. Much of my work has concerned the relationship between perception and interpretation: how attention, expectation, imagery, and belief affect the world we experience. The essays on mental imagery, phenomenological control, and scientific surrealism develop that strand.
Building interactive systems gives these questions a material form. My work has included avatar development and public engagement at the Intangible Realities Lab, bioresponsive VR through Viscereality, and citizen-science infrastructure through the Altered Xperience Project. Open tools make the apparatus easier to inspect and adapt, while research writing makes its assumptions and limits available for discussion.
My PhD shifts the emphasis toward collective interaction: who can act, how actions combine, and how people negotiate the rules of a shared environment. The earlier questions about perception and embodiment remain, now joined by questions about access, interdependence, and shared authorship.
I welcome conversations about mixed-ability collaboration, human–swarm interaction, shared embodiment, and open research tools, as well as connections to perception, biofeedback, and artistic research.
