Multimodal interactive VR mindfulness experience
Maurizio Mancini, Andrea Chirico, Radosław Niewiadomski, Giovanna Varni, Tommaso Palombi, Fabio Alivernini, Fabio Lucidi · 2024
Several attempts have been made to enhance mindfulness through Virtual and Mixed Reality. To date, they only offer users an alternative way of presenting guided imagery (e.g., mentally visualizing a beach vs. rendering a beach). We propose a preliminary study investigating whether allowing users to actively explore guided imagery through their actions (e.g., grasping virtual objects with hands) affects the mindfulness experience. To this aim, we present a preliminary study on a VR scenario for mindfulness practice that encourages the user’s interactive behavior in two conditions: interactive multimodal VR vs. audio-only. No significant difference was observed in self-reported mindfulness between the two conditions.