Mindfulness in VR
As we have adopted technology to help optimize our days, making us more connected and efficient — it has also filled in the empty spaces in our days (think the way people fall into their phones in an elevator or Starbucks line). This, combined with social media’s influence on our perception of ourselves and others, is widely believed to be a contributor to rising numbers of anxiety and depression. Although its too early to know if these claims are valid, besides cross-checking with personal experience, the tension has sparked a new interest in mindfulness and meditation. Because of the often overwhelming nature of our tech devices and managing our digital identities, many people have turned to meditation for relief. I believe mediation can do nothing but good and is vital to calibrating your lived experience. But while many people completely shun tech to accomplish this goal, I see a huge opportunity for aided mindfulness/mediation in the emerging field of virtual reality.
The practice can most simply be boiled down to a process of body awareness. As a parallel trend gains traction through the health wearables space, the concept of virtual reality mediation be fueled by your own body — with biometric data affecting your experience. This visual feedback loop, making metrics read from brainwaves and electric pulses in your own head into pleasing visuals, would work to bring people closer to the inner working of their own mind. What once was invisible in the process of mediation — its quantitative effects on the brains functions — can now be shown, and in effect, help people become more comfortable with the practice. Much of the discomfort with getting started in meditation arises from the being silent in your own head, and some of the people who need it most lack the patience or initial ability to settle in.
The popular app Headspace — which aims to make the practice of medication more accessible to the average citizen — celebrates the practice of the “full body scan”. The guided session asks you to imagine a ring of light slowly moving down your body, starting with your head and ending at your toes. To imagine a bio feedback interface is to imagine a better way to scan, aligning exploration of feeling with real time visual feedback (like heartbeat, breathing, stillness, brainwaves) — leading to better body awareness.
The practice of mindfulness is also affected by the one’s sense of space, where VR presents its most impressive case for opportunity. Much of medication practice, in addition to the body scan, starts with developing an awareness of the space you inhabit. Its only after positioning your self as a body in a defined space can you begin to close your eyes and dissolve that relationship.
While there have been a number of meditation related VR/tech experiences surfacing since the medium has caught on, they all seem to miss an important point — the dynamic way experience can change in order to aid user’s practice. An VR experience shouldn’t have me arrive in a different place that is simply a digital version of the real world (under a tree in an outdoor landscape). No matter how good the representation of a space is, it won’t give the same effect of the real thing. The video game “feel” of these worlds take the experiencer out of the present, as the space constantly reminds them that it is constructed and false.
Instead, the architects of these experience should recognize the unique opportunity for dynamic space, and take advantage of the ability to breakdown dissolve boundaries.
To understand this opportunity, and its benefit, it is helpful to look at the world of installation artist James Turrell. Employing sensory deprivation techniques, his work aims to eliminate focal points — in order to destabilize the viewer while strengthening inward perception. But while the Turrell’s spaces take hundreds of thousands dollars to create, VR developers can deliver these ethereal experiences to anyone with a headset. And remembering the opportunity in biofeedback — these spaces can become personal.
While VR is celebrated for its ability to deliver experiential entertainment, allowing people to live in the world of their favorite movies or games, It has incredible potential in allowing people to see inward. As the world we live in gets more and more busy — saturated with images in a space often in-human boundaries of concrete walls — VR has an opportunity to provide relief through experiences of intensely personal infinite spaces.
