Running sessions

Before you launch: the transparency report

Every session on a project page has a ? button. It opens the transparency report: the session type, its ID, who made it, every line, distractor and text it uses, the iteration count, the audio URL, and an expandable list of its images. Read it if you want to know what you are getting into. It also has a copy button for the full session JSON and a report flag.

Launching

Press Launch Session. A Launching Session… dialog runs through:

  1. Warming up. Finds your open run of this session or starts a new one.

  2. Cold storage. If the session has not been opened for some time its images are restored from cold storage first: “This session hasn’t been opened in a while. Give us a moment to take the images out of storage…”

  3. Preloading images, with a counter. A Skip Preload link appears if you would rather start now. Preloading also gives up after about 1.5 seconds per image and continues in the background.

  4. Launching session.

You can cancel at any point with the ✕, Cancel or Escape.

Mantra and Brainwash Spiral Tasks also offer VR and, on accounts with WebXR enabled, XR. See below.

In the player

The player is a full-screen page with no site chrome.

Key

Action

q

Quit back to the project (or playlist). Disabled in Write Lines Tasks so it cannot fire while typing.

f

Toggle fullscreen

~

Toggle the console

A faint cluster of buttons in the bottom-right corner offers the same fullscreen and console toggles with the mouse. It fades to near-invisible after loading.

The console

The console has tabs:

  • Console: engine messages, including YSS and shader diagnostics.

  • Images: click an image to exclude it from this run only.

  • Spec: the HypnoSpec document the session launched with, read-only.

  • Utility: Reset spiral to fallback (swaps in the media spiral if a shader or media failed) and Force spiral to loop (disables the end check for MST and BST so the session never finishes on its own; reload to re-enable).

  • XR: headset tuning, shown for XR launches only.

  • Metrics: live counters from the engine.

Audio

If a session has audio, the project page shows a red speaker icon next to it. Browsers sometimes block audio until you interact with the page; the player retries playback every second, and the Require a touch or keypress setting in User Settings makes it wait for you first.

Completion

When the session’s own completion condition is met (all lines shown, the required number of lines typed, the Complete button pressed, and so on), the player records the run as complete and returns you to the project page, or moves to the next entry in the playlist or schedule. Re-launching a completed session starts a new run.

Each run is tracked as a session instance with a run counter and elapsed time. Your elapsed time is streamed to the creator’s statistics page while you play. Creators see your username there unless you chose Anonymous in User Settings. There is no personal history page for your own runs.

VR and XR

VR

A side-by-side stereo layout for a phone slotted into a simple headset. Available on Mantra and Brainwash Spiral Tasks. Launch from your phone with the VR button, then put the phone in the headset.

XR

A true WebXR session on a VR or AR headset, available when your account has WebXR enabled. The session first plays flat; a bar at the bottom-left offers Enter VR, Enter AR (the session wraps around you as a translucent overlay on passthrough) and Exit XR. The headset must approve the request, so the button cannot be skipped. On a browser without WebXR the session plays flat. In XR, scatter images float at their own depth, and a controller trigger pins the screen to the room or lets it follow your head. WebXR access is enabled per account by staff.