Virtual reality assisted meditation

A set of research explorations while working on JunoVR, a company I started with my friend Eric Levin to develop therapeutic VR experiences. We became deeply inspired by the possibility of helping people to relax and meditate using virtual reality. We leveraged research around heart rate variability, respiration rates, buddhism, states of awe, the selfing process, self-distancing, and binaural audio.

Some new ideas we built and tested are:

- Large scale, awe inspiring scenes (16 x 20 km scale grid of SF Bay Area)

- Automatic mantra speech detection and immersive visual feedback / reinforcement

- Out of body breathing experience, see yourself breathing from outside yourself 

- Breathing biofeedback based flying meditation, breathe to navigate

- Empathy with the environment, embody a rock

- Compassionate environments, what if the world smiled back at you?

- Sound visualization meditation, see your breath emanate though particles in the air

- A breath biofeedback smiling meditation, as you breathe you see videos of people smiling at you

- A soothing rainy day meditation experience

- A guided breathing meditation using breath biofeedback

- Integration of heartbeat into the coloring of a scene as a feedback mechanism

- Embodiment of an avatar with an animated diaphragm for breathing training

- Breathing biofeedback by showing the environment moving with the breath, changing opacity, removing walls etc. as one breathes 

Motivation

The core motivation across all of these ideas was to learn how to create an experience that naturally gets someone to feel calm, ideally with as little cognitive effort on their part as possible.

Results

We hosted VR meditation events in San Francisco and did onsite user testing at some companies. In one test with 17 users doing a 15 minute guided VR meditation we saw a 36% reduction in anxiety measured with before and after subjective surveys. We developed an intuitive feel for what works or could work well in virtual reality. 

Role

Developer, Sensor Engineer, CEO, Artist