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Virtual Reality

Immersive and transformative technologies can augment and enhance contemplative practices in novel ways. In the CIRCL, we design contemplative practices with cutting-edge digital technologies for expert and naïve meditators, and research how such interventions can induce new experiences and catalyze openings. Our studies deploy Virtual Reality (VR) in an alternative “numadelic” aesthetic developed by aNUma to simulate contemplative experiences, train participants in practices, and investigate neurophysiological and phenomenological effects.

 

VR Meditation – Focusing the Mind 

Inspired by a historical practice to focus the mind, this study investigates a Virtual Reality meditation designed to cultivate sustained attention. The VR experience reimagines this practice with a salient visualization and embodied breathwork to train participants in their faculties of sustained attention, mindfulness, and meta-awareness. In the immersive VR environment, the meditation begins with a box-breathing technique that calms the body, guided by flowing lights. The practitioner is gradually introduced to a focal object visualization wherein an orb of light is synchronized with the in- and out-breaths via the movements of their arm gestures through the tracking of hand-held controllers (in a motion like gently flapping wings). The practice is designed to foreground the symmetrical processes of expansion and contraction between the breath and the mind, mimicking the vacillations involved in focused attention. Participants are guided through iterations of focal object dissolution, in which the light dissolves into the darkness of space. Participants will practice in the virtual environment, in real life, and toggle between the two to test measures in the virtual and in real life conditions.

Collaborators

 

VR Meditation - Lucid Dreaming

Transformative Benefits of Contemplative Sleep Practices: Novel Pathways to Deliver Benefits to the General Public

Inspired by historical dream yoga practices, this study investigates a Virtual Reality meditation designed to simulate lucid dreaming. It seeks to understand how dreaming may hold a key to overcoming the many assumptions that tacitly guide people’s waking lives. We leverage VR technologies to induce embodied and experiential openings of lucidity within one’s waking life to support the transformation of ordinary habits of perception and cognition. The VR experience is designed to cultivate contemplative life skills by performing specific contemplative tasks while lucid in a dream-like, interactive, immersive virtual environment. We measure the effects this intervention has on participants’ ability to cultivate associated skills, including psychological flexibility, creative imagination, somatic awareness, and overall wellbeing.

Collaborators