Welcome back to another week of VR development! This week my challenge was to reimagine mediation (and I still haven’t done this successfully). How can we create a meditative space in VR that is (1) easy on the eyes and (2) shies away from more conventional meditation approaches that rely on green, organic forms from nature?

Because I want this to be a sort of escape from the natural world, I am aiming for more of a glitch aesthetic. Earlier this week I had been working in TiltBrush for several hours when it suddenly glitched. The resulting image was beautiful: the models I was working on stood larger than life on both sides of me, mirroring each other. In between them, below my feet, a strand of repetitive lights curled around itself like a DNA strand. I loved the feeling of witnessing a glitch. I felt apart (not a part) from it, and I stood in a sort of awe for many minutes. The moment was strangely peaceful.

So this is what I want to recreate: a sudden suspension of reality. The subtle feeling that something is not happening as it should, but is nonetheless worthy of taking a step back and letting it in. An invitation to observe an apparent lapse in space and time.

This is all very easy to express in words, let us see how I can explore the gap between the elemental/geometric and the natural/organic. Here are some concrete features I am going to add in the coming weeks:

(1) Breath belt! I just sourced a skater’s cloth belt that will be perfect for the breath measurement. I am lucky enough to be able to work with the intelligent and crafty people at the Creative Technology Lab at UAL, and Elle Castle from Physical Computing will be helping me build the belt. We will take some conductive rubber and sow it onto the belt, which will then wrap around the user and register the contraction and expansion of the stomach just below the ribcage. We will integrate Arduino with Unity to store these values and convert them into those of the virtual ocean.

(2) Object interaction: the user will be able to control features like dot size and density with hand gestures, not buttons on the controller. This will provide for a customizable and more intuitive experience, since everyone has different preferences and should have a measure of control over their meditative beach.

(3) Gaze interaction: the user, after having spent ten minutes in the space, will have the ability to float over the ocean waves. Their position in virtual space will rise and wherever they look, they will move. This will give the sense of floating over one’s own breath levels. I am curious to try it out myself!

(4) The ability to go underwater and swim with whales. I will include whales with simple animations, but being careful to not make them look too realistic. Perhaps I will keep them a solid color. I am considering recreating an abstracted ocean floor where apparent light is refracted all around you. An algae forest could be nice.

During all of this, I have to keep in mind that my deadline is early January, so I want to be sure to have defined and simple objectives for each of the six weeks I have beforehand. I want to have a demo I can later expand.

This is all for this week and I hope you enjoy the progress! Let me know in the comments if there is a feature mentioned you are interested in, can improve upon, or maybe something altogether new you think is essential for meditation in VR.