Till Holzapfel
Mesmer Prism is Till Holzapfel's public interface for altered-perception design: XR systems, citizen-science tools, visual instruments, and essays that make breath, light, imagery, and body boundaries inspectable. The design philosophy is bounded transformation: let experience change, but keep agency, apparatus, variables, sources, and limits visible.
Start with live systems, perception tools, embodiment essays, research maps, or publications.
Projects
Systems, tools, essays, and references sit together here so the reader can move by use, topic, or artifact.
Across the work: tune the condition, preserve agency, record what changed, and keep mechanisms and claims separate.
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.
Rust for XR and Quest experiments
A public Rust workspace for reusable XR contracts, schemas, diagnostics, Quest examples, broker models, camera and depth utilities, hand and particle primitives, strobe safety descriptors, and companion-app interfaces.
Biofeedback sensor integration
Public Polar H10 work across minimal signal packages, Rusty XR data contracts, Quest 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.
Project overview Signal packages Pipeline docs Windows capture
Depth inversion research instrument
Depth-inversion experiments need stimulus controls that survive renderer changes. Hollow Face Lab connects hollow-face research with WebGL, WebXR, Rusty XR, 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 XR, Rusty XR Companion Apps, Polar H10 routing and capture work, Strobotorch, browser prototypes, simulation tools, and shareable research infrastructure. Study-bound runtimes are summarized through documented interfaces, papers, and public references.
GitHub profile Rusty-XR Polar H10 work Rusty-XR Companion Apps Strobotorch Bressloff V1 code AXP access guide
Selected outputs across immersive systems, psychophysics, breath interaction, and XR communication.
My background moves between cognitive science, HCI, psychophysics, media theory, and research writing. The essays name concepts, lineages, and source limits before carrying those questions into XR systems, browser simulations, physiological sensing, and embodied prototypes.
Across Plasmatic Multitudes, SANE, Tulpas, Scientific Surrealism, Rusty XR, Polar H10 Work, Quest Companion Tools, Hollow Face Lab, Altered Xperience Project, Brain Candy, Strobotorch, Bressloff V1 Form Constants, Deep Dream, Optical Movement Illusions, Phenomenological Control, Prophantasia, and Fractal Optics, the recurring terrain is altered perception, weakly bounded bodies, phenomenological variation, and the practical conditions that make strange experience legible without flattening it.
If you are building something across XR, altered perception, embodiment, research tooling, or interdisciplinary writing and design, contact me here.