Viscereality Companion mark
Altered States of Viscereality Companion desktop operator surface

Operator Guides

Sussex Conditions

Conditions are the operator-facing study choices used by the Sussex Experiment Session window.

Sussex Conditions

The Sussex shell now has a dedicated Conditions tab. A condition is a small, shareable study object that currently combines:

  • one visual profile
  • one controller-breathing profile
  • one Active flag
  • optional key/value metadata for later protocol differences

Only active conditions appear in the Experiment Session condition dropdown. This keeps the live participant window focused while still letting the study team keep draft or archived conditions in the local library.

Bundled Conditions

The committed Sussex package includes two active bundled conditions:

  • current: uses condition-current-visual plus condition-current-breathing, preserving the current Sussex settings.
  • fixed-radius-no-orbit: uses condition-fixed-radius-no-orbit plus condition-fixed-radius-breathing.

The fixed-radius visual profile sets orbit_distance_min and orbit_distance_max to 0, so the orbit-distance envelope collapses to no orbit offset. It also sets sphere_radius_min and sphere_radius_max to 2, so the shared sphere-radius envelope is locked at that radius. That matches the intended interpretation: equal min/max envelope values lock the animated property, and zero orbit distance disables that orbit-distance contribution.

GUI Workflow

Open Sussex University experiment mode, then use the Conditions tab.

  • New Condition creates a local inactive condition using the first available visual and breathing profile references.
  • Duplicate copies the selected condition into a new local inactive row.
  • Save Selected writes the row to the local condition library. Saving a bundled row creates a local override with the same condition id.
  • Load Condition imports a shared condition JSON file into the local library.
  • Share Selected exports the selected condition as JSON.
  • Delete Local deletes a local condition, or removes the local override for a bundled condition.

The visual and breathing dropdowns use the same profile libraries as the Visual Profiles and Breathing Profiles tabs. When the Conditions tab is opened, those dropdowns refresh automatically so newly created or imported profiles are available without restarting the app.

CLI Workflow

The CLI mirrors the GUI through:

viscereality sussex condition list --json
viscereality sussex condition show fixed-radius-no-orbit
viscereality sussex condition create `
  --id new-condition `
  --label "New Condition" `
  --visual condition-current-visual `
  --breathing condition-current-breathing `
  --inactive `
  --json
viscereality sussex condition update new-condition --active --json
viscereality sussex condition export new-condition .\new-condition.json --json
viscereality sussex condition import .\new-condition.json --json
viscereality sussex condition delete new-condition --json

Use --active-only with list to see exactly what the Experiment Session dropdown will expose. The CLI accepts the same portable bundled profile ids that the GUI stores in condition files, such as condition-current-visual and condition-fixed-radius-breathing.

Local condition files are stored under the current operator-data root:

...\ViscerealityCompanion\study-conditions\sussex-university\

For packaged installs this is the host-visible package-local root used by the app and exported local-agent workspace. For source builds it is normally under %LOCALAPPDATA%\ViscerealityCompanion, unless VISCEREALITY_OPERATOR_DATA_ROOT is set.

Adding Future Differences

Conditions intentionally keep optional metadata separate from the profile references. Today the runtime behavior is fully defined by the selected visual and breathing profiles. Later protocol differences can be added to the condition schema and GUI without changing the Unity APK or rewriting existing condition files.