Biofeedback in VR - SOLAR

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By mirjana prpa, karen cochrane & bernhard riecke

Resonance in Virtual Environments: hacking biofeedback for altering user's affective states

How can we com­bine immer­sive vir­tu­al envi­ron­ments (VE) with biofeed­back and gam­i­fi­ca­tion to foster relax­ation, de-stress­ing and med­i­ta­tive states?

That is, instead of increas­ing sen­so­ry over­load, can we use the immer­sive and affec­tive poten­tial of VE and gam­i­fi­ca­tion to assist espe­cial­ly novice med­i­ta­tors in expe­ri­enc­ing med­i­ta­tive and relax­ing states through play­ful explo­ration with a bio-feed­back based inter­ac­tion design com­bin­ing breath­ing sen­sors and EEG? 

SOLAR is an immer­sive vir­tu­al envi­ron­ment (VE) gen­er­at­ed by user’s brain activ­i­ty and res­pi­ra­to­ry rate. The pur­pose of this design was to sup­port novice med­i­ta­tors in estab­lish­ing their med­i­ta­tion prac­tice, as well as to pro­vide a unique expe­ri­ence to more expe­ri­enced med­i­ta­tors. We ground­ed our design on pre­vi­ous work, out­lin­ing the ele­ments that we find effec­tive and gaps that need to be filled by our design. The design prin­ci­ples employed in our design are: Thought Distancing; Abstract Visual Elements; Rewarding System; Immersion and Attention Restorative Theory – ART; and Affective Connectedness; We eval­u­at­ed our design deci­sions through par­tic­i­pa­to­ry design activity.

prob­lem: Many novice med­i­ta­tors find med­i­ta­tion hard.
Most common rea­sons are: unfa­mil­iar­i­ty with med­i­ta­tion prac­tice, and lack of a feed­back on how they are doing.

design goal: design a vir­tu­al envi­ron­ment that novice med­i­ta­tors will use as a tool for learn­ing med­i­ta­tion and get­ting into practice.

issues:
reli­a­bil­i­ty: the per­for­mance of sen­sors proved to be incon­sis­tent, which can have a high impact on one’s experience
gen­er­al­iz­abil­i­ty: pro­to­type 1 was eval­u­at­ed during SFU Open House, and we assume that most of our study par­tic­i­pants are affil­i­at­ed with SFU. This might affect the results of the study, and the result might not be con­sis­tent if there was a vari­ety of the participants.

[mediatags]SOLAR[/mediatags]

Video of stimuli

[vimeo 152089040]

Mirjana’s pre­sen­ta­tion at Mindcare 2015:

Publications

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