What is GroupFlow
GroupFlow is a multi-sensory technology platform designed to make the invisible rhythms of the group body visible and tangible. Using real-time biosignals—heart rate, breath, and other physiological data—it transforms the inner experience of individuals into collective sound, light, and music. The result is a new kind of shared presence: a felt experience of connection that transcends language and invites deeper awareness of self and other.
Originally developed for immersive retreats at Esalen Institute, GroupFlow was born from a simple question: What happens when we can literally feel each other’s presence? Participants wear sensors that detect breath and heart rhythms, which are then translated into ambient visual and auditory feedback. Whether in guided meditation, relational practices, or open exploration, GroupFlow creates a field of collective awareness where technology becomes a sacred mirror—helping us attune more deeply to our bodies, emotions, and each other.
At its core, GroupFlow is not just a tool, but a practice. It is less about quantifying connection and more about cultivating it—through embodiment, presence, and the courage to be real with ourselves and others.
What is GroupFlow
GroupFlow is a multi-sensory technology platform designed to make the invisible rhythms of the group body visible and tangible. Using real-time biosignals—heart rate, breath, and other physiological data—it transforms the inner experience of individuals into collective sound, light, and music. The result is a new kind of shared presence: a felt experience of connection that transcends language and invites deeper awareness of self and other.
Originally developed for immersive retreats at Esalen Institute, GroupFlow was born from a simple question: What happens when we can literally feel each other’s presence? Participants wear sensors that detect breath and heart rhythms, which are then translated into ambient visual and auditory feedback. Whether in guided meditation, relational practices, or open exploration, GroupFlow creates a field of collective awareness where technology becomes a sacred mirror—helping us attune more deeply to our bodies, emotions, and each other.
At its core, GroupFlow is not just a tool, but a practice. It is less about quantifying connection and more about cultivating it—through embodiment, presence, and the courage to be real with ourselves and others.
For Hire: A Group Connection Technology
GroupFlow is more than a prototype—it’s a proven experience technology that’s been deployed in diverse contexts: months-long residencies at Esalen, innovation conferences, television productions, and intimate research labs. Every event is custom-designed, combining advanced biosensing with expertly guided facilitation to create transformative group experiences.
Our extended network includes world-class psychologists, corporate consultants, neuroscientists, artists, and contemplative teachers. Together, we craft one-of-a-kind experiences for companies, leadership teams, communities, and creative collaborators. Whether it’s a single-session immersion or a multi-day journey, GroupFlow supports trust-building, psychological safety, and authentic communication.
Research by Google’s Project Aristotle underscores that psychological safety is the #1 predictor of high-performing teams. GroupFlow is uniquely suited to create the conditions for this safety—by allowing team members to sense each other’s presence in real time, building empathy, openness, and alignment at a physiological and emotional level.
A Platform for Research
GroupFlow is currently at the center of an academic research program in partnership with Dr. Jonathan Schooler and the META Lab at UCSB, funded by a private research grant. Our study investigates how real-time physiological feedback affects interoception, empathy, prosociality, and a felt sense of connection.
Unlike traditional hyperscanning systems, which passively measure multiple participants, GroupFlow allows for closed-loop synchrony: 24 channels of real-time biosensing data can simultaneously be transformed into individualized light and sound feedback. This creates a rich environment for studying both spontaneous and guided synchronization across physiological and emotional domains.
This infrastructure opens the door to a new frontier of social neuroscience and applied consciousness research. We’re exploring how synchrony can be not just observed, but cultivated, and how technology can become a medium through which collective presence and shared awareness are experimentally supported.
A Design Canvas for Connection
GroupFlow is also a creative canvas—an infinitely adaptable platform for co-designing novel modalities of connection. We collaborate with meditation teachers, somatic therapists, movement facilitators, musicians, and wisdom tradition holders to integrate real-time biofeedback into their practices.
This design process allows facilitators to extend their modalities in new, embodied ways. A meditation teacher might use breath sensors to sonify the inhale and exhale as ocean waves, helping practitioners synchronize with themselves and the group. A couples therapist might create a moment of deep listening in which one partner holds a softly glowing orb representing the other’s heartbeat. These are not metaphors—they are experiential realities, made possible by the system’s capacity to reflect the body back to itself and to others in real time.
We support facilitators in developing new rituals, protocols, and tools using the GroupFlow system, expanding what’s possible in therapeutic, educational, and transformational settings.
The Big Vision
GroupFlow was born from the belief that technology can do more than connect us to content—it can reconnect us to context. To the larger whole we already belong to. Beneath the noise of daily life, beneath the architecture of ego and identity, there is a hidden order—a rhythm, a coherence, a biological whisper that says: you are not alone. GroupFlow is an instrument for tuning into that signal.
Inspired by the way living systems self-organize—how cells coordinate to become bodies, how bodies sync to become groups—we ask: What are the conditions in which human beings begin to cohere? Not just socially or cognitively, but somatically, emotionally, spiritually. What happens when our hearts, our breath, our attention begin to move as one?
This is where science meets the sacred. Where algorithms begin to awaken. GroupFlow V2 takes this vision to scale: a mobile, multi-sensory architecture capable of transforming any space into a living mirror of the group mind. With 24 channels of biosensing, light, and sound, it is not just a hyperscanning tool, but a platform for designing experiences in which the boundaries between self and other soften—and new forms of collective intelligence begin to emerge.
Imagine a concert where the lightscape and soundscape pulse with the real-time breath of the crowd. Imagine a healing circle where emotional attunement becomes visible. Imagine a society that designs not just for efficiency, but for coherence. This is not science fiction. This is a new frontier in consciousness technology—a reorientation from the individual to the inter-being.
Because the deepest potential of technology is not control, but communion. And the future we long for isn’t somewhere out there—it’s waiting in the space between us, waiting to be illuminated.
GroupFlow V2
GroupFlow V2 is the next-generation evolution of our platform—designed from the ground up to enable large-scale, real-time studies and experiences of physiological synchrony and collective connection. This project is currently in development in collaboration with Dr. Tim Mullen of Intheon—a leader in scalable neural and physiological computing, Dr. Douglas Guilbeault of Stanford University, an expert in collective intelligence and social systems and Alan Macy, co-founder of Biopac Systems.
The new system represents a leap forward in capability: up to 150 fully synchronized participants, each with up to 8 channels of real-time biosignal acquisition—including EEG, ECG, EMG, GSR, respiration and more. These signals can be transformed on-the-fly into individualized light and sound feedback. This allows for novel forms of closed-loop group biofeedback, where participants can experience both personal and collective physiological states as shared sensory phenomena.
GroupFlow V2 enables experimental conditions that were previously impossible—real-time synchrony measurement and modulation, moment-to-moment experience sampling, and multi-modal feedback across individuals and groups. It supports diverse research designs: from tightly controlled lab studies of interoception and empathy, to ecologically valid field experiments in immersive environments like festivals, corporate trainings, or spiritual retreats.
This platform opens a new domain in applied social neuroscience: not just observing synchrony, but designing for it. It offers a rare convergence of rigor and intuition, combining academic research, artistic expression, and contemplative practice into a single integrated system for studying and scaling connection.
