If Braindances Were Real

Braindances in Cyberpunk 2077 are wild.

You put on a ring of electrodes called a wreath and you get what the person who recorded it saw, heard and felt, and what they were thinking at the time. People in the game call them BDs, and there's a whole industry selling them.

Cyberpunk didn't invent any of this. Philip K. Dick had people buying memories of holidays in 1966. Brainstorm (1983) had emotion on tape, and the military moving in on it. Gibson's simstim in Neuromancer (1984) lets you ride around in someone else's senses. Lenny Nero is the dealer in Strange Days (1995), whose pitch goes: "This is not 'like TV only better.' This is life. It's a piece of somebody's life." And Black Mirror has done it twice, with your own memories as an archive in The Entire History of You, and with someone else's body in Striking Vipers.

We're nowhere near any of this. But I build VR worlds for a living, and these are the questions I ask at the start of a project. What do people want to feel? What will they pay for it? Where would they go to do it?

So let's say braindances shipped this year, and see what happens.

Note: Everything here is as of 9 November 2026. The forecasts are my own and I've no way of testing them. A lot of the Cyberpunk lore comes from the fan wiki's copies of in-game text. Sources are at the bottom.

TL;DR

• By hours, I think most people would use braindances for company and calm. By money, adult content comes first.
• A recording can show you someone being glad to see someone. It can't be glad to see you. A lot of this post comes back to that.
• The recordings would mostly come from creators and paid contributors, and consent would be the hard part.
• Regions would split over data costs, over privacy law, and over whether a recording counts as the thing itself.
• We can't record feelings in VR, so we have to set up whatever causes them. We can also put other people in there with you.

What a Braindance Is

A BD records physical sensations, emotions and thoughts. Someone wears a recorder (an implant, in the game), and you play it back through interface plugs or a wreath.

Editors work with separate visual, audio and thermal layers. They can leave the recorded point of view and walk around the scene, and they can find details the person recording never consciously noticed. CD Projekt's developers say anything the recorder didn't capture fades into a dark, noisy background you can't explore. If you've ever walked off the edge of a Gaussian splat, you've seen something like it.

By 2077, corporations make and sell BDs, and performers get loose plot directions and improvise. There's a black market as well, and the police use BDs as evidence.

Judy Alvarez is the game's BD editor, and there are two bits of writing connected to her that I like. One is a note of ideas for future BDs, including a recording of childbirth (nobody's made one yet, and it would need a more expensive wreath) and a compilation of common dreams like flying, falling and turning up naked at work. The other is an editorial in a trade magazine, where she says editors have prized purity over naturalism and cleaned up everything around the main sensation. She wonders if the peripheral stuff was what made a braindance great in the first place.

How Far Off Are We?

A long way. Meta's Neural Band reads muscle signals at your wrist, and brain implants can now act as an input device on an iPad, which Synchron showed in August 2025. Those both read what you're trying to do. The best language decoding without surgery, from the University of Texas in 2023, gets the gist of what someone's hearing about half the time, and it needs an fMRI scanner and hours of training on that one person.

Writing to the brain is further behind. The best artificial touch gives edges and motion, through electrodes implanted in two people. Mood has been decoded as a coarse up-or-down in seven epilepsy patients who already had electrodes in their heads, and Lisa Feldman Barrett's camp argues that emotions have no fixed signature to decode at all. If they're right, your sadness and mine might not be the same pattern, and there may be nothing to play back.

As far as I can find, nobody has a method for recording a feeling and giving it to someone else.

The Rules for Pretending

Here's what I'm assuming. A wreath costs about the same as a mid-range phone and it's as easy to use. A recorder fits in a pair of glasses. Recordings are files you can copy, and they take in sight, sound, touch, smell, balance and emotion.

While it's playing you're still you, with your own memories and your own history. The grief section below depends on that one.

Would Anyone Plug In?

Robert Nozick asked this in 1974. If a machine could give you any experience you wanted, would you plug in for life? He said no, because we want to do things and be someone, and to be in contact with what's actually there.

People have tested it since, mostly on small groups of students, and the answers move around a lot. Dan Weijers found 84% refused Nozick's version, but 55% chose the machine for a stranger who'd already spent half her life in it. Felipe De Brigard told people they were already plugged in and asked if they'd leave. With no other information, 54% said yes. If their real life was a millionaire's in Monaco, about half did. If it was in prison, 13%. Frank Hindriks and Igor Douven found that calling it a pill took acceptance from 29% to 53%.

A braindance is an easier sell than any of those, because you're back in forty minutes.

What We'd Actually Use It For

Company and Calm

The films go for the extreme stuff. I think most of the hours would go somewhere duller.

Zach Choi, an ASMR food creator, had 32.6 million YouTube subscribers in May 2025, the most of any food channel. Li Ziqi, who cooks and farms in rural Sichuan, came back from a three-year break in 2024 and got 5 million views in a day. Twitch's Just Chatting category logged 275.8 million hours in March 2025, and watch time for IRL streams (people carrying a camera through their day) nearly tripled last year. One study found ASMR lowered heart rates by about 3 beats a minute, and a survey of mukbang viewers in Malaysia found loneliness was the strongest driver of obsessive watching.

Most of that is free to watch, so it tells us about attention and not about what anyone would pay. Still, I'd bet on a lot of people ending the day with dinner at a table with people who like each other, or a slow Sunday in someone's kitchen, or falling asleep next to someone.

There's a catch. Everyone at that table is glad to see the person who recorded it. You'd feel all that warmth, it would be aimed at somebody else, and you'd know, because you've still got your own memories. I've no idea what that does to someone after a few hundred nights.

Adult Content

This is where most of the money would go. OnlyFans alone took $7.22 billion in fan spending in 2024. Nobody knows the size of the whole adult industry, and the estimates run from $6 billion to a $97 billion figure with no surviving source.

On the biggest adult site, VR was only the 25th most searched category in 2025, and 87% of traffic came from phones. Part of that is how few people own headsets, but it's a warning that a better medium can lose to a more convenient one. Recorded BDs would also be up against synthetic ones from the start.

Consent is the hard part. The US Take It Down Act (2025) already says that agreeing to be recorded isn't agreeing to be published. An actor can fake pleasure on camera, and a wreath can't. If the feeling is in the file, the premium product is the one where the performer meant it, and what's for sale is that person's actual intimacy.

Front Row and Stage Side

The Eras Tour grossed over $2 billion. The Wizard of Oz at the Sphere has sold more than 4 million tickets for over $500 million, which by my maths is $125 to $133 a ticket, depending on when you measure. The top 100 concert tours averaged $132.62 in 2025. People are paying concert prices for a wraparound version of a film from 1939, although the Sphere's segment of the company still lost $268 million in 2025, so selling those tickets and making money are two different things.

The front-row seat is the easy product. I'd be more interested in the view from the stage, or scoring in a final inside the body of someone who trained for twenty years to do it. Cyberpunk's lore has celebrity day-in-the-life BDs doing well among the poor, and I believe that.

Things You Can't Afford

A permit to climb Everest from Nepal is $15,000 before you've paid for anything else, and Nepal issued 427 for spring 2025. A seat on Virgin Galactic is $750,000. Blue Origin paused tourist flights this year after flying 98 people. A night at Singita in the Kruger is about $3,000 per person. Most people will never do any of it, and I'd expect a good recording to sell to them, along with things very few people would try at all, like a wingsuit run.

Being Someone Else

Mel Slater's lab has made adults feel they have a child's body, which changed how they judged the size of things. Another study put 30 men in an Einstein avatar and found less bias against older people, and nobody's sure why. Judy's childbirth idea belongs here too.

Schools and companies would want an empathy BD. I doubt it would do what the brochure says, because twenty minutes in someone's body leaves out the part where you have to go on living in it. A body-swap product would also need strict age and content rules from day one.

Altered States

Oregon's regulated psilocybin sessions have a median price of about $1,900, with no insurance. Spravato, the ketamine-family nasal spray, made $584 million in the second quarter of 2026. Estimated demand for meditation apps has been falling for years. It looks like the money goes to guided, supervised sessions more than to apps you use alone.

I'd expect a market in recordings of very experienced meditators, where you get to feel what forty years of practice feels like for twenty minutes. I suspect you'd learn very little from it.

Healing

This one has trials. RelieVRx, a VR programme for chronic lower back pain, was tested on 1,067 people against a sham, and 47% got meaningful relief compared with 37%. It's a small effect (d=0.24), and the journal's editorial called the conclusions "too positive". VR exposure therapy for PTSD does well against a waitlist (g=0.62) and doesn't significantly beat other treatments. gameChange, for people with psychosis who've stopped leaving the house, worked best on the most severe cases and is allowed on the NHS while evidence is gathered. For palliative care there are 8 studies with 225 patients, rated "very low" quality.

If BDs behaved like VR does, health payers would buy them for a few severe conditions and argue about the rest. I'd watch elder care. Strange Days has a scene where a man who can't walk gets to run on a beach, and plenty of people in care homes would take that.

Grief

In 2020, the Korean broadcaster MBC used VR to reunite a mother with a digital reconstruction of a child she'd lost. One clip got 13 million views in about a week, and critics called it exploitation. In China, services that build AI avatars of the dead run from 199 to 20,000 yuan, and Cambridge ethicists have warned about bots of the dead being used to sell things.

With BDs you wouldn't have to fake anybody. If you knew you were dying, you'd spend an afternoon with your kids with the recorder on.

The recording I think people would keep above all others is a parent's point of view, looking at them when they were small. It's your mother's feeling about you, and you'd know exactly who she's looking at. It would take a generation before anyone had one. It also wouldn't always be nice to own, because the recorder doesn't know which afternoon you wanted, and it might be a day she was fed up with you.

You'd think that file would be worthless to anyone else, since to a stranger it's some woman and some child. But the wreath plays the feeling too. Someone who never had that could buy it and feel a stranger's love for a stranger's child, knowing it isn't theirs. I suspect there'd be buyers.

Your Own Life

People bought over 7 million pairs of Meta's smart glasses in 2025, so a fair number of us are halfway there. There's evidence that remembering something changes how it's stored, though the popular claim that every recall rewrites the memory goes further than the science. Nobody knows what replaying a full recording of your own wedding would do to your memory of it.

Work

Employers pay reliably. Walmart put 17,000 headsets into stores, trained over a million staff and reported test scores up 10 to 15%. PwC found managers learned soft skills about three times faster in VR, once you count setup. Those are both company numbers. Surgical training transferred to the operating theatre in three of four studies, which isn't many studies.

You could record a master welder at work. My hunch is you'd come out knowing what a good weld feels like, with all the practice still to do.

Danger

A third of US podcast listeners regularly listen to true crime, including 44% of women and 23% of men. I suspect a lot of that is people wanting to know what danger is like and whether they'd get through it, and a safe way to feel that would sell. Anything that relied on someone actually being harmed would be a crime, and I'll leave that there.

My Guess at the Charts

No number supports this. By revenue:

1. Adult content, mostly licensed or synthetic.
2. Live events and being famous for a while.
3. Travel and adventure.
4. Comfort and company, by subscription.
5. Training for work.
6. Reimbursed therapy, pain and elder care.
7. Guided altered states.
8. Grief and legacy.

By hours, I'd move comfort to the top.

Who's Buying

Someone home from a shift with forty minutes before bed, I think, ahead of anyone else. After them come fans, people who can't afford the trip, and people who can't leave the house.

Institutions would come in behind them: employers, health insurers, schools, armies and courts. The police in the game already use BDs as evidence, and I'd expect real courts to want them too.

Expect a heavy-user problem. Only 22% of Americans bet on sports, and 43% now say legal betting is bad for society, up from 34%. One study found bankruptcy filings up by as much as 25 to 30% four years after states legalised it online, though other researchers dispute that. It's on a phone and it's legal, and it kept growing while people turned against it.

Who's Recording

The films mostly skip this. I can see two kinds of supply.

The first is people who'd happily do it. OnlyFans creators and IRL streamers are already selling their lives on purpose, and some of them would do very well.

The second is gig work, and it's already started, for robots. Ego4D, the big academic first-person dataset, was 3,670 hours from 931 people. Now TechCrunch reports that one startup pays service workers in India a base rate of $1 an hour to wear camera caps and generate training footage for physical AI. Rivals reportedly pay more, and India's IT ministry is looking at how consent works there. Add feelings to that footage and the pay and the consent both get a lot more serious.

Then there's everyone else in the shot. In 2024, two Harvard students used Meta glasses and face search to identify strangers in public. A BD would have the strangers' faces and your feelings about them. If I record dinner with my family, does my sister get a say in whether you get to feel what I felt about her?

Where You'd Do It

Mostly on the couch. Some of it would go out of the house, though. Sandbox VR has passed $300 million in lifetime sales across more than 80 locations. Carne y Arena, Alejandro Iñárritu's Oscar-honoured VR piece about crossing the US border, takes your shoes off, puts you in a cold holding room, and has you walk barefoot on sand. Darkfield runs shows in shipping containers, in the dark, with binaural audio and no pictures.

I could see BD bars, clinics, chapels and a private suite at the funeral home. For the heavier recordings you'd want someone there to look after you, the way a guided retreat does.

Around the World

These are guesses, based on things already happening in each place. Plenty of people in each of these regions would want something else entirely.

Japan

Japan is first in the world for VRChat site visits and makes up 25% of its mobile downloads, by Sensor Tower's figures. Yano projected the VTuber market at ¥126 billion for 2025. People often explain all this through loneliness and an ageing population, but isolated older people aren't who's in VRChat. VRChat's peak of 158,192 concurrent users, on 8 March 2026, came during a Sanrio festival with concerts.

I'd guess fan events and time with characters who were never real people, which a camera can't capture. Article 175, Japan's obscenity law, would lead to some odd workarounds.

South Korea

Mukbang started here around 2008, and Meeting You was made here. In 2024, after a wave of deepfake abuse, Korea made it a crime just to view or possess sexual deepfakes, with up to three years in prison. If that rule carried over, every buyer of a dodgy BD would be committing an offence, and that would change the market more than any rule aimed at the makers.

China

Livestream commerce hit about 4.5 trillion yuan in 2024, so I'd expect first-person shopping to arrive before first-person fiction: feel the fabric, taste the sample. Rules from January 2026 require AI hosts to be labelled and to keep reminding viewers what they are, and minors' online gaming has been capped at three hours a week through real-name checks. A wreath there would be tied to your ID, and a recording would have to say what it was.

India

Darshan means seeing and being seen by the deity, and the 2025 Maha Kumbh planned ten VR stalls. A recording of darshan only gives you the first half, and that's a question for people who know the tradition.

Data prices fell sharply after Jio launched in 2016, and the 2025 IPL final set a JioHotstar viewing record, so match day is an easy guess. The Delhi High Court has become the go-to forum for personality rights, and it's protected film stars and a yoga guru from deepfakes. A recording of a star's day would end up there.

The Gulf and the Wider Muslim World

Saudi Arabia launched a Virtual Black Stone in 2021, billed as promoting Hajj and not replacing it. An official from Diyanet, Turkey's religious authority, ruled that a virtual Kaaba visit is permissible but never "a real worship". His words were: "People's feet should touch the ground." Indonesia's Ulema Council said much the same.

So pilgrimage recordings would probably be allowed as preparation, or for people too sick or poor to travel, and wouldn't count as the act.

The United States

Here's the other answer to that question. The VR Church has baptised people in VR as avatars. I'd expect worship BDs to be sold as products in the US long before anyone settles whether they count.

Meta streamed 52 NBA games in 180-degree VR in 2024-25, and BraveMind, the VR therapy for PTSD, runs at about 30 Veterans Affairs sites. Colorado and California treat neural data as sensitive, while the federal MIND Act only proposes a study. Most of the rules would come out of lawsuits.

Sub-Saharan Africa

I co-led the Africa XR Report with Judith Okonkwo and I live in Johannesburg, so I'm not neutral about this one.

One gigabyte of data averages 5.7% of monthly income in Africa, and often more than 7% in Sub-Saharan Africa, against the UN Broadband Commission's 2% target. Nobody's streaming braindances on that. But we've got a lot of practice at this kind of problem. Nigerian football viewing centres charged around ₦100 a match in 2021, and part of what you're paying for is the crowd. Afrinolly billed Nollywood films to phone airtime years ago, and Circuits launched pay-per-film in 2025. I'd expect a wreath here to be a rig in a shop, paid per session, with your friends waiting for their turn.

Then there's distance. Sub-Saharan Africa received $54 billion in remittances in 2023, and sending it cost 7.9%. Lagos says Detty December 2024 brought in 1.2 million visitors. A lot of people have left home and a lot of them want to go back for a while.

My guess is a recording that travels the other way from the money. A nurse in Manchester sends cash home, and home sends back Sunday lunch at her mother's, with the smell and the argument at the table. The upload is the expensive end, so it would happen at the shop with the decent connection, or the file would go on a card with whoever's flying next.

If the kit and the platforms belong to someone else, you can guess what gets recorded and sold abroad: safari, poverty, somebody's walk to work. In 2025 I designed and developed the official visitor app for the Cradle of Humankind with the Gauteng government, and I'd want the first recordings of places like that made by people who live near them.

The law's already relevant. South Africa's Film and Publication Board regulates online distributors, including user-generated content. POPIA, our privacy law, restricts processing data on health, sex life, beliefs and biometrics, which covers most of what's in a BD, and it limits sending that data abroad.

Latin America

Chile changed its constitution in 2021 to protect brain activity and the information that comes from it. In 2023 its Supreme Court ordered the neurotech firm Emotiv to delete a user's brain data. Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil has written neurorights into its state constitution, and nearly everyone online in Brazil uses WhatsApp.

Put those together and you've got a problem. I'd expect Carnival and football to spread as short clips on messaging apps, and every clip would hold the recorder's brain data. A court can order one company to delete a file. I don't know how you delete something that's been forwarded.

Europe

The EU AI Act has banned inferring emotions at work and in schools since February 2025, and regulators already treat neurodata as personal data. A wreath would run into both on day one.

Europe has also done a lot of careful thinking about how to show people the worst parts of its history. Museums and educators there already use VR, and they argue about how much to reconstruct, how to keep past and present clearly apart, and who gets to decide. A braindance would make all of that harder, because a witness's recording would have the feeling in it as well. I'd expect testimony recordings to stay in museums and schools, with the witness's consent as the main argument, and I'd expect some kinds of recording not to be allowed at all.

Across Borders

UNESCO adopted a recommendation on neurotechnology ethics in November 2025, but it isn't a treaty. Ofcom has fined 4chan £520,000 under the UK's Online Safety Act, and 4chan's lawyer had already said it wouldn't pay any penalty. An illegal operator would only need a company somewhere out of a regulator's reach.

What I Get Out of This as a VR Builder

The wreath is the only part of all this that doesn't exist. People already want these things, and imagining the perfect version shows me where a headset falls short.

It starts with my own rules, which made the wreath as easy as a phone. A Quest isn't. IDC has smart glasses at about 85% of XR shipments in the second quarter of 2026, with headsets around 548,000 and falling, and Reality Labs lost $4.13 billion last quarter. Nobody coming off a shift is going to charge a headset for an evening of ASMR when the phone's right there. Most of that list isn't a VR business today. These are the parts I'd use anyway.

Work Out What Causes the Feeling

We can't record emotion, so we have to set up the reasons for it. Who are you in this? What's at stake? Who's reacting to you? Mel Slater splits presence into two illusions: Place Illusion (I'm here) and Plausibility (this is really happening, and it's happening to me). A headset gets you a good way into the first one. The second is mostly down to us.

Cummings and Bailenson pooled 83 studies on what creates presence, and tracking, stereo vision and field of view beat image quality. Slater's child-body effect went away when the movement was out of sync. So I'd get head, hands and body working first and spend what's left on textures. (The same paper had tracking beating audio quality, so the line that "sound beats resolution" isn't what it says. For emotional effect I'd still put sound near the top, based on Darkfield and Notes on Blindness, but that's craft and not science.)

A scripted character turning to look at you helps with Plausibility. I'd expect a person in the world to help more, though I couldn't find a study that compares them. Fixed sequences can work too. Carne y Arena and Darkfield don't respond to you much at all, and Carne y Arena got a special Oscar.

Stage the Whole Visit

In an old post on planning VR projects, my list of questions about your audience ended with "Do they have shoes on?" Carne y Arena takes them off you and makes you wait in the cold first.

You can do a version of that in VRChat. Build a slow way in, and tell people the one rule before they get there. It's what I meant by selling the pilgrimage, at the scale of a single visit.

You can't afford every sense, so pick the one your peak depends on. Carne y Arena has sand, and Tree starts with planting a real seed. At home it might just mean asking people to sit on the floor. (That's from art practice. I couldn't find conclusive lab evidence.)

Then decide how long it runs. Meta says enjoyment drops in sessions under 15 to 20 minutes and plateaus after about 40, though it hasn't published the data. Carne y Arena takes about 20 minutes in all, with around 7 listed for the VR.

And give it a proper end, because most VR just stops. Jarrod Knibbe and colleagues found that leaving VR involves your sense of space, control, other people and time, and that people tend to leave mentally before they leave physically. You can slow the world down, bring the sound back in stages and show people their hands before they go.

Go Specific or Impossible

Li Ziqi is one woman in one valley. A VTuber's avatar is something nobody could ever film. Generative AI is going to give away the generic stuff in between, which I got into in my 360 video post. Judy's editorial applies here too. Plenty of over-polished VR demos have lost any sign that a person made them, so I'd leave the odd wrong detail in.

Sort Out Who's In It and Who Can Reach It

There are three parties: the person recorded, the people around them, and the person playing it back. Thomas Metzinger and Michael Madary argued in 2016 that VR consent should say plainly that there may be lasting effects, and that movement data is a kind of fingerprint. If a piece is built from someone's testimony, tell people what's been reconstructed.

Reach is the same conversation. If I were building for Nigeria, I'd start with a shared rig and someone running it. In the Gulf, I'd start by asking a scholar what the piece is allowed to claim.

Being Noticed

A braindance is a recording. By the time you play it, the person who lived it has moved on, and they can't see you. A live version like Gibson's simstim gets closer, but you're still riding along in someone else's body.

Being noticed isn't unique to VR, since a video call does that too. What a headset adds is that you've got a body, the other person's voice comes from where they're standing, and they can walk over. That's where a lot of VR's time and money already goes. Gorilla Tag has made over $100 million, Animal Company has passed a million monthly users, and VRChat's record was set during a festival with concerts.

Remember the table in the comfort section, where everyone was glad to see somebody else. In a world with people in it, somebody can be glad to see you.

I make worlds for VRChat, so I would say that.

If you could buy one braindance, what would it be? Let me know. I might try to build it.

Sources

The fiction:

• Braindance overview (fan wiki, quoting in-game text): https://cyberpunk.fandom.com/wiki/Braindance
• Braindance recorder: https://cyberpunk.fandom.com/wiki/Braindance_Recorder_(Cyberware)
• CD Projekt on the BD editor and cyberspace (SIGGRAPH): https://blog.siggraph.org/2021/08/cyberspaces-and-braindances-in-cyberpunk-2077.html/
• BD origin and lore: https://gamerant.com/cyberpunk-2077-braindance-lore-explained/ and https://gamingbolt.com/cyberpunk-2077-lore-everything-you-need-to-know-about-braindance
• Judy's concept note: https://cyberpunk.fandom.com/wiki/Braindances_-_concepts
• Judy's editorial: https://cyberpunk.fandom.com/wiki/Relive.it_-_Braindance_Quarterly
• BD as police evidence: https://cyberpunk.fandom.com/wiki/I_Fought_the_Law
• Strange Days dialogue: https://filmsite.org/strangedays.html
• We Can Remember It for You Wholesale: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Can_Remember_It_for_You_Wholesale
• Brainstorm: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainstorm_(1983_film)
• Simstim: https://www.litcharts.com/lit/neuromancer/terms/simstim
• The Entire History of You: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Entire_History_of_You
• Striking Vipers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Striking_Vipers

The science:

• Synchron and Apple's BCI HID: https://businesswire.com/news/home/20250804537175/en/Synchron-Debuts-First-Thought-Controlled-iPad-Experience-Using-Apples-New-BCI-Human-Interface-Device-Protocol
• Meta Ray-Ban Display and Neural Band: https://roadtovr.com/meta-ray-ban-display-int-launch-connect-2026/
• fMRI language decoding: https://news.utexas.edu/2023/05/01/brain-activity-decoder-can-reveal-stories-in-peoples-minds/
• Artificial touch: https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/creating-artificial-sense-touch
• Mood decoding: https://communities.springernature.com/posts/mood-variations-decoded-from-multi-site-intracranial-human-brain-activity
• Emotion signatures (Barrett and colleagues): https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5899060
• Experience machine studies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_machine and https://iep.utm.edu/experience-machine/
• Memory and retrieval: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3459586 and https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnbeh.2010.00175/full
• Slater on presence: https://diposit.ub.edu/dspace/handle/2445/53086
• Child-body illusion: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3732927
• Einstein body: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00917/full
• Cummings and Bailenson meta-analysis: https://vhil.stanford.edu/publications/immersionpresence/how-immersive-enough-meta-analysis-effect-immersive-technology-user
• Session length (Meta): https://developers.meta.com/vr/blog/optimize-user-time-goldilocks-session-length-meta-quest/
• VR duration limits: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6901952/
• Exiting VR (Knibbe et al.): https://forskning.ruc.dk/en/publications/the-dream-is-collapsing-the-experience-of-exiting-vr/
• Depersonalisation after VR: https://www.psypost.org/virtual-reality-can-induce-mild-and-transient-symptoms-of-depersonalization-and-derealization-study-finds/
• Madary and Metzinger: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/robotics-and-ai/articles/10.3389/frobt.2016.00003/full

What people pay for:

• Zach Choi: https://guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/414035-most-subscribers-for-a-food-cooking-channel-on-youtube
• Li Ziqi's return: https://technode.com/2024/11/13/chinese-youtube-star-li-ziqi-returns-to-social-media-after-3-year-hiatus/
• Just Chatting hours: https://statista.com/statistics/1409490/hours-spent-watching-twitch-just-chatting
• Twitch IRL in 2025: https://www.tubefilter.com/2025/12/03/twitch-year-end-recap-2025-900-million-hours-watch-time/
• ASMR and heart rate: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6010208
• Mukbang and loneliness: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11412535/
• OnlyFans FY2024: https://issuu.com/ballmatthew/docs/onlyfans_fy2024-10.31.2025
• Adult industry size: https://qz.com/1309527 and https://www.covenanteyes.com/?p=106899
• Pornhub 2025: https://gigazine.net/gsc_news/en/20251211-pornhub-insights-2025/ and https://www.techspot.com/news/110562-xbox-suffers-brutal-69-drop-pornhub-traffic-playstation.html
• Take It Down Act: https://www.congress.gov/119/plaws/publ12/PLAW-119publ12.pdf
• Eras Tour: https://uproxx.com/pop/taylor-swift-eras-tour-2-billion-tickets
• Oz at Sphere: https://www.8newsnow.com/entertainment-news/wizard-of-oz-at-las-vegas-sphere-hits-half-a-billion-dollars-in-ticket-sales/ and https://s23.q4cdn.com/910947899/files/doc_news/The-Wizard-of-Oz-at-Sphere-Surpasses-400-Million-in-Ticket-Sales-With-Over-3-Million-Total-Tickets-Sold-2026.pdf
• Top 100 tours 2025: https://news.pollstar.com/2025/12/12/year-end-business-analysis-a-return-to-earth-2025-grosses-ticket-sales-drop-averages-increase-beyonce-oasis-coldplay-have-top-tours-venues-stadiums-rock/
• Everest permits: https://www.alanarnette.com/2025/09/03/everest-just-became-more-expensive-and-unattractive-to-some/ and https://everestchronicle.com/nepal-issues-427-everest-climbing-permits
• Virgin Galactic: https://ground.news/article/virgin-galactic-reopens-sales-for-spaceflight-tourism-priced-at-750-000-a-seat
• Blue Origin: https://www.space.com/space-exploration/private-spaceflight/blue-origin-pausing-space-tourism-flights-for-at-least-2-years-to-focus-on-moon-plans and https://www.kentreporter.com/?p=76126
• Singita pricing: https://www.krugerpark.co.za/Kruger-Park-Private-Concession-Lodging/pricing-singita-lebombo-lodge-sabi-kruger.html
• Oregon psilocybin: https://www.medicinenet.com/safety_standards_at_us_psilocybin_centers/news.htm
• Spravato: https://www.biospace.com/business/j-j-sees-spravato-sales-surge-as-psychedelic-competitors-loom
• Meditation app demand: https://appfigures.com/resources/insights/20240510/3-demand-for-mental-health-apps-is-at-an-all-time-low
• RelieVRx trial: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11975725/
• gameChange: https://doi.org/10.1016/S2215-0366%2822%2900060-8 and https://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/htg701/resources/evidence-generation-plan-for-virtual-reality-technologies-for-treating-severe-agoraphobic-avoidance-in-people-with-psychosis-13245880717
• VR for PTSD (meta-analysis): https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6713125/
• VR in palliative care: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9248003
• Meeting You: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/2/14/mother-reunites-with-dead-daughter-in-virtual-reality and https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/art/2020/04/688_287372.html
• AI avatars of the dead in China: https://www.npr.org/2024/07/18/nx-s1-5040583/china-ai-artificial-intelligence-dead-avatars
• "Haunted by" griefbots (Cambridge): https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1043793
• Meta glasses sales: https://uploadvr.com/meta-essilorluxottica-sold-7-million-smart-glasses-in-2025/
• Walmart VR training: https://corporate.walmart.com/news/2018/09/20/how-vr-is-transforming-the-way-we-train-associates
• PwC soft skills: https://www.strategy-business.com/article/Virtual-reality-creates-a-new-environment-for-employee-training and https://pwc.com.au/digitalpulse/upskilling-training-vr-metaverse.html
• Surgical VR transfer: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8052560
• True crime audience (Pew): https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/06/20/true-crime-podcasts-are-popular-in-the-us-particularly-among-women-and-those-with-less-formal-education/
• Pew on sports betting: https://casinobeats.com/2025/10/03/pew-research-study-americans-view-legal-sports-betting-bad/
• Betting and bankruptcies: https://frontofficesports.com/gambling-study-credit-scores-bankruptcies and https://michiganadvance.com/?p=86758

Capture and venues:

• Ego4D: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2110.07058
• Gig workers and egocentric data in India: https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/26/human-archive-taps-into-indias-services-startups-to-collect-data-for-physical-ai/
• I-XRAY: https://www.androidauthority.com/meta-smart-glasses-facial-recognition-name-tag-3640904/
• Sandbox VR: https://gamesbeat.com/sandbox-vr-hits-300m-in-lifetime-sales-and-grows-to-80-locations/
• Carne y Arena: https://archive.vrroom.studio/?p=19742 and https://animationmagazine.net/2017/10/academy-votes-special-oscar-for-alejandro-inarritu-vr-installation-carne-y-arena and https://phi.ca/en/studio/works/carne-y-arena/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carne_y_Arena
• Darkfield: https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/colorado/news/denver-center-performing-arts-darkfield-continues-awe-scare-audiences
• Tree: https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252457943/How-the-immersive-file-Tree-was-created
• Gorilla Tag: https://roadtovr.com/gorilla-tag-revenue-vr-success-another-axiom/
• Animal Company: https://www.uploadvr.com/animal-company-daily-monthly-users-july-2025/
• VRChat concurrency record: https://wiki.vrchat.com/wiki/VRChat
• XR shipments: https://mixed-news.com/en/idc-smart-glasses-shipments-q2-2026-vr-headsets-decline/ and https://bolverkgames.com/vr-industry/idc-smart-glasses-hit-85-of-xr-shipments-as-headsets-shrink-to-15-4/
• Reality Labs Q3 2026: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0001326801/000162828026066773/meta-20260930.htm

Geography and law:

• VRChat in Japan: https://roadtovr.com/vrchat-key-stats-japan-growth-concurrents/
• VTuber market (Yano): https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-topics/g02554/
• Japan's Article 175: https://cbldf.org/2012/06/codifying-obscenity-in-japan/
• Mukbang origins: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/mukbang-eatcast
• South Korea's deepfake law: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/south-korea-deepfake-porn-law-ban-sexually-explicit-video-images
• China livestream commerce rules: https://www2.yicaiglobal.com/news/china-steps-up-regulation-of-livestream-e-commerce-includes-ai-hosts-for-first-time
• China minors' gaming cap: https://techcrunch.com/2021/08/30/china-restricts-kids-online-gaming-to-three-hours-a-week
• Maha Kumbh VR: https://www.storyboard18.com/amp/brand-marketing/10-technological-innovations-that-will-redefine-maha-kumbh-2025-53105.htm
• India data tariffs: https://telecomtalk.info/data-tariffs-nosedive-93percent-delcline/175247/
• IPL 2025 final: https://www.angelone.in/news/tata-ipl-2025-final-sets-digital-viewership-record-on-jiohotstar
• Personality rights in India: https://www.livelaw.in/articles/celebrity-rights-personality-rights-india-deepfake-misuse-legal-framework-article-21-311287 and https://www.storyboard18.com/brand-makers/delhi-high-court-protects-ramdevs-personality-rights-orders-takedown-of-deepfakes-and-false-endorsements-90654.htm
• Virtual Black Stone: https://www.newarab.com/news/saudi-brings-hajj-metaverse-vr-black-stone
• Diyanet on virtual Kaaba visits: https://hurriyetdailynews.com/visit-to-kaaba-on-metaverse-not-real-hajj-says-diyanet-171215
• Indonesia's MUI: https://voi.id/en/news/134090
• Data affordability: https://businessday.ng/?p=1044000
• Nigerian viewing centres: https://nairametrics.com/2021/04/18/the-football-viewing-centre-experience/
• Afrinolly: https://techcabal.com/2015/12/07/afrinolly-launches-new-app-to-combat-film-piracy/
• Circuits pay-per-film: https://leadership.ng/pay-per-view-virtual-cinema-debuts-in-nigeria
• Remittances: https://www.the-star.co.ke/news/2024-07-01-remittances-slowed-in-2023-to-grow-faster-in-2024-world-bank
• Detty December: https://commonedge.org/detty-december-how-lagos-urban-street-party-is-fueling-an-economic-boom/
• UN Broadband Commission's affordability target: https://broadbandcommission.org/advocacy-targets/2-affordability/
• South Africa's FPB: https://digitalpolicyalert.org/digest/dpa-digital-digest-south-africa
• POPIA: https://popia.co.za/section-26-prohibition-on-processing-of-special-personal-information/ and https://popia.co.za/section-72-transfers-of-personal-information-outside-republic/
• Chile's neurorights law: https://www.carey.cl/law-no-21383-constitutional-reform-to-establish-the-scientific-and-technological-development-at-the-service-of-the-people-is-published
• Emotiv ruling: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10929545/ and https://law.stanford.edu/?p=565291
• Rio Grande do Sul: https://neurorightsfoundation.org/brazil
• WhatsApp in Brazil: https://www.yalo.ai/blog/insights-and-trends-of-whatsapp-users-in-brazil
• NBA in VR: https://www.meta.com/blog/nba-2024-25-season-free-basketball-games-vr-mr-xr-xtadium-horizon-worlds/
• BraveMind at VA sites: https://www.disabledveterans.org/vr-treatment-for-ptsd-now-available/
• VR Church: https://www.pcgamesn.com/vrchat/vr-church-baptism
• Neural data laws: https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/you-read-my-mind-neural-data-and-the-4163975/
• MIND Act: https://www.commerce.senate.gov/2025/9/sens-cantwell-schumer-markey-introduce-legislation-to-shield-americans-brain-data-from-exploitation
• Sphere's 2025 losses: https://www.sixteen-nine.net/2026/02/13/sphere-entertainment-reports-revenue-growth-as-las-vegas-venue-gains-momentum/
• EU AI Act and emotion recognition: https://fpf.org/blog/red-lines-under-eu-ai-act-unpacking-the-prohibition-of-emotion-recognition-in-the-workplace-and-education-institutions/
• Neurodata as personal data: https://www.mofo.com/pdf/resources/insights/240722-it-s-all-in-your-head-not-anymore-eu-data-protection
• VR in history education (Germany's Federal Agency for Civic Education): https://www.bpb.de/lernen/digitale-bildung/werkstatt/505406/geschichte-in-360-grad-erleben/
• UNESCO on neurotechnology: https://unesco.org.uk/news/unesco-adopts-first-global-framework-on-neurotechnology-ethics
• Ofcom and 4chan: https://www.scl.org/ofcom-fines-4chan-450000-for-not-protecting-children/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4chan