Unplugging Capitalism, Rooting into Reality

CONCEPT

"Unplugging Capitalism, Rooting into Reality" is a virtual reality experience powered by the earth itself, using a soil battery to generate energy. When wearing the VR headset, the user undergoes a digital transformation, becoming a tree or plant, fully immersed in an existence free from capitalist demands.

This project serves as a critique of the current economic system, which perceives time in the physical world only in terms of productivity and profit. It questions the notion that human worth is tied to labor and efficiency, offering an alternative mode of existence where simply being is enough.

If basic needs; food, water, and shelter are met, how do we choose to spend our time? In a world where capitalism has colonized our sense of purpose, "Unplugging Capitalism, Rooting into Reality" invites users to step outside this paradigm. By embracing the perspective of a tree; growing, absorbing energy, and existing in a timeless state, the experience challenges the idea that every moment must be monetized or optimized.

In this digital yet deeply organic space, the most radical act is to simply exist without the need for constant output. The project blurs the boundaries between technology, nature, and consciousness, proposing an alternative way of relating to time and presence beyond capitalist constraints.

DESCRIPTION
As mentioned, the goal is to create an immersive experience that explores a new way for humans to perceive their surroundings. This project is a VR visual experience powered by soil batteries.

Of course, it's nearly impossible to power a VR headset with just four soil batteries. Instead, we developed a system where the soil generates a small voltage, just enough to make an LED blink. When the LED blinks, it signals that you can use the headset and immerse yourself in this non-human experience.

The project is compesed in 3 different process:

• Battery soil
• LED blinking
• Head-set

BATTERY SOIL

Build a battery from the soils is an immersive challange, the core of it is DIY and Low-tech approach. At the beginning we just use as reference a video found on youtube that explains how to build step by step a battery from soil.

what you need to re-make this at home:

• ice bucket trace
• wire
• soil
• copper

TESTING and EXPERIMENTING

Thanks this video we built our first battery, we measure voltage (4-5 V) and ampere (0.08 A) to see if the battery works correctly. So we did 3 other prototype to understand if it was just a coincidence or there is a scentific methodologies and approach in build that. After this the conclusion was that the battery produced high voltage but low ampere, so basically the energy power (Watt) is to low to charge any kind of device; it's able just to blink a led.

Thanks our experiment we understand what details affected energy produced by battery soil:

• spike screw enanched more elettricity than flat ones.
• water, salt, lemon and vinegar could increase the voltage, but take care of that. If you watered to much, you would dicrease the elettrons flows.
• each soils cells shouldn't touch it, if they touch each create a problem in elettrons flow.

To begin our investigation, we dedicated a significant portion of time to understanding how electrical measurements are conducted, particularly in relation to the energy required to charge common electronic devices. This foundational step allowed us to establish a reference framework for comparison.

After that, we conducted experiments to determine the charging duration of a conventional battery when powered by our soil-based battery. Initially, our focus was on comprehending the fundamental principles of battery operation, specifically how and why electricity flows from one battery to another. This preliminary phase was essential in developing a deeper understanding of energy transfer processes before delving into the performance analysis of our soil battery system.

Here you could find some illustrations that explains all the experiment process. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WRUYwTgjDEIY8_nndxN4dG9-blE59Vew/view?usp=sharing

SERIAL and PARALLEL

So we understand that only with ones battery soils you couldn't do basically nothing, instead if we were able to increase voltage and ampere we could do more things as charge for not long time a battery or blink a led. We had an immersive research about how to connect more battery in series or parallel; serial connection increase the voltage instead parallel increase the ampere, you couldn't do that at the same time.

We build serial and parallel and after some test we understand that for this applications was better have only 4 soils batteries connected in serial. Because if we increase the ampere would have a energy discharge so fast and we were not able to charge nothing.

So at the end we had a 4 battery connected in serial for an ammount of 12 V and 0.08 A, finally we were able to charge a battery. So we testing a battery that has 3.90 V and we charged it for 35 mins and at the end it has 3.95 V, so it increase 0.05 V in only 35 mins.

BLINKING LED

To try to connect energy from soil battery and head-set we figured out with a logical systems. Basically we want to have a systmes where a capacitor store energy and when it's full, thanks to a transistor, it release eletricity to a led. So if the led blink you would know that there is energy and you could immerge in the VR experience.

Unfortunally we weren't able to do that, but we will explain you the process just to be clear and also if you want to make it you could do that.

Here’s what you’ll need:

• Breadboard
• 1 x Led
• 1 x Transistor PN2222 – I used an NPN resistor, but you could use an PNP you just need to turn it around and use ground instead of power to source it.
• 1 x Capacitor – The capacitor size determines the speed of the blink. I experimented with 100uf/6.3v and 1000uf/10v and both worked.

We didn't use the resistor because it will never allows our small voltage to push energy and blink the led. We did many attempts, but we didn' reach what we exepted.

VIRTUAL REALITY HEADSET

To achieve the goal of creating this virtual reality experience, we also built a VR headset from scratch. While we could have used an existing one, the available options on the market are too expensive. Moreover, we wanted full control over the software to ensure the experience is as precise as possible.

To achieve this, we first researched the best options to reach our goal. We determined that we could use the following:

• Software: A Python script utilizing the Mediapipe, Dlib, and Imutils libraries.
• Hardware: A Raspberry Pi 5, a 5-inch LCD screen, and a webcam.

The Visualitzation (Software)

First, however, we had to decide how we wanted to interpret a tree’s perception of the physical world. To achieve this, we identified some key aspects:

• Light Perception → Trees have photoreceptors; Highlights bright areas with a glowing aura effect.
• Sunlight as Energy Waves → Creates color gradients over illuminated regions.
• Shadow Distortion → Detects edges and distorts shaded areas.
• Vibrational Waves (Hands) → Detects hands and adds energetic aura traces that gradually dissolve.
• Chemical Wisps (Faces) → Identifies human presence and generates larger energy wisps around faces.
• Slow Motion Effect → Applies motion blur to simulate how plants perceive time differently.

Once we had decided on the desired visualization, we began coding it using Mediapipe. Dlib and Imutils to implement the various visual effects and tracking features.

• Mediapipe – A framework developed by Google for real-time computer vision tasks, widely used for hand, face, and body tracking, as well as pose estimation and object detection. It provides efficient, pre-trained models that work across different platforms.
• Dlib – A machine learning and computer vision library that includes powerful tools for face detection, facial landmark recognition, and image processing. It is known for its high-performance deep learning-based face recognition models.
• Imutils – A Python library that simplifies common image processing tasks using OpenCV. It provides easy-to-use functions for resizing, rotating, displaying, and manipulating images, making computer vision development more efficient.

We experimented with four different code implementations:

1.