With a VR headset and a sensory deprivation tank, aspiring cosmonauts can experience the thrill of being in orbit without having to leave planet Earth
I have always wanted to travel to space. But unless I suddenly find a hidden talent for engineering or Russian, floating in a darkened pod of ultra-salty water is probably the closest I’ll ever come to feeling completely weightless. More than 14,000 kilometres away from Nasa’s rocket launch site at Cape Canaveral, a sensory deprivation tank in Hong Kong is my portal to the cosmos for an afternoon.
I’m here for Asia’s first virtual reality (VR) space float experience, ready for blast-off this month at Float Co. Mid-Levels (formerly Float On), Hong Kong’s first centre to offer “float therapy” to the public. Instead of a spacesuit, I wear a bikini—though, “most people float naked,” says Lulu Ward, Float Co’s head of marketing.
In a neon-lit room, I slip into a white, oblong pod partially filled with water. I close the lid, sealing myself in, and lie buoyant on the surface of the water, made twice as dense as the Dead Sea with 500 kilograms of Epsom salt dissolved into it. I glance at the emergency button one last time and put on the VR headset. The womb-like darkness suddenly gives way to the Sahara desert, snowy tundra, wide plains and mountainous terrain. Guided by soft narration, I fly above oceans, through aurora and into a cyclone, all real footage from the International Space Station (ISS). I feel completely weightless, apart from when my toes bump the edge of the “spacecraft”.
The experience is touted as “the planetary perspective that was only available to astronauts until now” by its inventors at San Francisco start-up SpaceVR. Even real astronauts are impressed: Loretta Whitesides, who will be among the first to fly with Virgin Galactic’s spacefleet when it finally lifts off, described the experience as “a great proxy” to being in orbit.
Space VR is available in more than 15 locations in the US and Europe, and Hong Kong is its first location in Asia. As of writing, only 569 people have ever been to space: around a tenth of the number that have summited Everest. For the overwhelming majority of earthlings, a VR space float will be the closest they can get to the stars.
Float tanks were introduced to Hong Kong in 2015 when Irish entrepreneur Ciaran Hussey established Float On after discovering floating was an antidote to the insomnia and stress he suffered while working in the food industry. “When I first floated in Bangkok in early 2015, I fell in love with the idea. It was the perfect escape from a busy city,” he says. “By simply shutting out the world, even for a short period, our body is allowed to reset, rejuvenate and heal.” For HK$650 for a single session, Float Co. clients lie in 30cm of water in a darkened pod for one hour, which creates a meditative sensation.
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Float therapy was the inadvertent creation of US neuroscientist John Cunningham Lilly in 1954. Originally researching human and dolphin communication, he began testing human consciousness by administering psychedelic drugs to participants in “restricted environmental stimulation tanks”. Float tanks became commercially available in the 1970s as a new, therapeutic trend and naturopathic healers in the US promoted the tanks as an alternative to using drugs.
Floating crossed over to pop culture with the 1980 sci-fi horror Altered States, which was based on Lilly’s research, and has continued to surface—from The Simpsons to the 2003 Ben Affleck movie Daredevil. John Lennon was a fan, as is basketball star Stephen Curry. “It’s one of the only places where you can get unplugged from all the noise and distractions that go on with daily life,” Curry says.
After floating’s boost in popularity over the last decade, there is now an annual conference for members of the industry, started in Oregon in 2012 by owners of Float On, which has no affiliation with Hussey’s Hong Kong centre. So when SpaceVR CEO Ryan Holmes began looking at ways to integrate his company’s technology with floating, his search stopped at the Hong Kong Float On and its director Peter Sharp.
“I always admired Elon Musk and how he takes on these huge things,” says Holmes, via Zoom. “So, I thought, what would be my major contribution to the world?” In 2012, he read The Overview Effect, written in 1987 by space philosopher Frank White, who coined the term in the title of his book. It describes the sense of awe and insignificance experienced by astronauts when they see Earth from space for the first time. The book inspired the 2012 short film Overview, which featured five US astronauts familiar with the effect, including retired Nasa engineer Nicole Stott, who also mentioned that sensory deprivation tanks were “the closest I have ever come to the zero gravity of space on Earth”.
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