Attending to Breath: Exploring How the Cues in a Virtual Environment Guide the Attention to Breath and Shape the Quality of Experience to Support Mindfulness
Paper i proceeding, 2018

Busy daily lives and ongoing distractions often make people feel disconnected from their bodies and experiences. Guided attention to self can alleviate this disconnect as in focused-attention meditation, in which breathing often constitutes the primary object on which to focus attention. In this context, sustained breath awareness plays a crucial role in the emergence of the meditation experience. We designed an immersive virtual environment (iVE) with a generative soundtrack that supports sustained attention on breathing by employing the users' breathing in interaction. Both sounds and visuals are directly mapped to the user's breathing patterns, thus bringing the awareness researched. We conducted micro-phenomenology interviews to unfold the process in which breath awareness can be induced and sustained in this environment. The findings revealed the mechanisms by which audio and visual cues in VR can elicit and foster breath-awareness, and unfolded the nuances of this process through subjective experiences of the study participants. Finally, the results emphasize the important role that a sense of agency and control have in shaping the overall quality of the experience. This can in turn inform the design specifications of future mindfulness-based designs focused on breath awareness.

sound and music computing

virtual reality

musical agents

biodata

biosensors

Författare

Mirjana Prpa

Northeastern University

Kivanc Tatar

Data Science och AI

Jules Françoise

Université Pierre et Marie Curie (UPMC)

Bernhard Riecke

Simon Fraser University

Thecla Schiphorst

Simon Fraser University

Philippe Pasquier

Simon Fraser University

DIS 2018 - Proceedings of the 2018 Designing Interactive Systems Conference


978-1-4503-5198-0 (ISBN)

DIS 2018 - Designing Interactive Systems Conference 2018
Hong Kong, China,

Ämneskategorier

Medieteknik

DOI

10.1145/3196709.3196765

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Senast uppdaterat

2024-03-21