A preliminary study of users' experiences of meditation in virtual reality
Thea Os Andersen, Gintare Anisimovaite, Anders Bech Christiansen, Mohamed Hussein, Carol Lund, Thomas Bendix Nielsen, Eoin Ivan Rafferty, Niels Christian Nilsson, Rolf Nordahl, Stefania Serafin · 2017
This poster describes a between-groups study (n=24) exploring the use of virtual reality (VR) for facilitating focused meditation. Half of the participants were exposed to a meditation session combing the sound of a guiding voice and a visual environment including virtual objects for the participants to focus on. The other half of the participants were only exposed to the auditory guide. The participants' experience of the sessions was assessed using self-reported measures of perceived concentration, temporal duration, stress reduction, and comfort. Interestingly, no statistically significant differences were found between the two conditions. This finding may be revealing in regards to the usefulness of VR-based meditation.