Biofeedback in VR - SOLAR

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By mirjana prpa, karen cochrane & bernhard riecke

Resonance in Virtual Environments: hacking biofeedback for altering user's affective states

How can we com­bine immer­sive vir­tual envi­ron­ments (VE) with biofeed­back and gam­i­fi­ca­tion to foster relax­ation, de-stressing and med­i­ta­tive states?

That is, instead of increas­ing sen­sory over­load, can we use the immer­sive and affec­tive poten­tial of VE and gam­i­fi­ca­tion to assist espe­cially novice med­i­ta­tors in expe­ri­enc­ing med­i­ta­tive and relax­ing states through play­ful explo­ration with a bio-feedback based inter­ac­tion design com­bin­ing breath­ing sen­sors and EEG? 

SOLAR is an immer­sive vir­tual envi­ron­ment (VE) gen­er­ated by user’s brain activ­ity and res­pi­ra­tory rate. The pur­pose of this design was to sup­port novice med­i­ta­tors in estab­lish­ing their med­i­ta­tion prac­tice, as well as to pro­vide a unique expe­ri­ence to more expe­ri­enced med­i­ta­tors. We grounded our design on pre­vi­ous work, out­lin­ing the ele­ments that we find effec­tive and gaps that need to be filled by our design. The design prin­ci­ples employed in our design are: Thought Distancing; Abstract Visual Elements; Rewarding System; Immersion and Attention Restorative Theory – ART; and Affective Connectedness; We eval­u­ated our design deci­sions through par­tic­i­pa­tory design activity.

prob­lem: Many novice med­i­ta­tors find med­i­ta­tion hard.
Most common rea­sons are: unfa­mil­iar­ity with med­i­ta­tion prac­tice, and lack of a feed­back on how they are doing.

design goal: design a vir­tual envi­ron­ment that novice med­i­ta­tors will use as a tool for learn­ing med­i­ta­tion and get­ting into practice.

issues:
reli­a­bil­ity: the per­for­mance of sen­sors proved to be incon­sis­tent, which can have a high impact on one’s expe­ri­ence
gen­er­al­iz­abil­ity: pro­to­type 1 was eval­u­ated during SFU Open House, and we assume that most of our study par­tic­i­pants are affil­i­ated with SFU. This might affect the results of the study, and the result might not be con­sis­tent if there was a vari­ety of the participants.

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Video of stimuli

Mirjana’s pre­sen­ta­tion at Mindcare 2015:

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Publications

Prpa, Mirjana, Karen Cochrane, and Bernhard E. Riecke. 2016. “Hacking Alternatives in 21st Century: Designing a Bio-Responsive Virtual Environment for Stress Reduction.” In Pervasive Computing Paradigms for Mental Health, edited by Silvia Serino, Aleksandar Matic, Dimitris Giakoumis, Guillaume Lopez, and Pietro Cipresso, 34–39. Communications in Computer and Information Science. Cham: Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978–3-319–32270-4_4.