July Updates: Breathing, Flying, Biofeedback and Moving Meditation

We've been making steady progress and learning a lot about what meditation/relaxation/mindfulness is in VR. Here are some of the key updates.

Breathing, flying, and the best meditation experience yet

Seeing your breath and interacting with the environment through speaking/sound/breath is pretty compelling if we can find a way to do it reliably.  We've found one way of combining breath and particle effects that creates a really magical feeling. This has been the first experience that I felt was engaging at the right level to stay in for 10 - 40 minutes.

Respiration / heart rate variability virtual reality biofeedback

We had the great fortune of working with Alan Macy (BioPac) and Mikey Siegel (Consciousness Hacking) a couple of weekends ago. This event gave us access to some high quality sensors and we pulled in some breathing / respiration data and tied it to your ability to fly around the environment. In the prototype, your breathing fullness controlled your ability and speed while flying around the environment. Surprisingly within 5 minutes I was very in tune with abdominal breathing. The world of biofeedback is definitely going to be revolutionized by VR.

Moving Meditation

At present, we're working on interactive soundscapes that can get someone connected with their body. This is moving in the direction of something like conscious dancing or ecstatic dance and seems like it may be a better use of the medium. Here's a video of some early explorations related to moving and music.

Stay tuned for more updates! 

Relaxing Nature Experiences

Something about being outdoors really helps me to drop into a sense of awe and relaxation. I've tried to capture some of this feeling for sharing with others via a virtual reality experience by pairing an immersive photo sphere with nature sounds and soothing music.

I'll have this uploaded soon and it will be available in the demo section. In the meantime you can check out a preview here (note: this link may not work in the near future as I reconfigure my hosting)

Photos and music are not my own and will be credited in the app.

Guided woods meditation

In this experience, I've combined 360 video of a forest with a guided meditation that I've pulled in from soundcloud.  It's an interesting experience for me but feels disconnected and a little distracting.  I would like to see the visuals in the experience match the guide in some way.

Experience available here.

Kickstarting emotions

I'm excited by the potential to engage people's empathetic responses.  How can we create situations where people will naturally resonate with the emotional states of a virtual space.

In the image below and experience here, I'm exploring the possibilities of using happy people of various ages, sexes and races to trigger a happiness response.

A Relaxing Beach Experience

There will be a world of 360 degree video content that can be combined with audio tracks to create relaxing experiences.  I meshed this youtube video with one of my favorite relaxation soundtracks to create a relaxing experience.

If it will load you can find it hosted on s3 here.