Pulse Breath Water

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By mirjana prpa, kivanc tatar, bernhard riecke & philippe pasquier

Pulse Breath Water is an immer­sive vir­tual envi­ron­ment manip­u­lated by the pulse of a participant’s breath that pro­vokes and chal­lenges the inter­ac­tion between a user and the sub­stan­tial ele­ment of the envi­ron­ment: water.

The system “senses” the par­tic­i­pant, while the participant’s breath­ing feeds the system. The process is a sym­bi­otic play between inter­nal human processes [biosens­ing the participant’s breath] and the system’s agency that guides the par­tic­i­pant between the state of calm and the state of anxiety.

Minimalistic yet sym­bi­otic play is sup­ported by the multi-agent system that gen­er­ates sound through a nego­ti­a­tion (of dif­fer­ent affec­tive states) between agents. The behav­iour and aes­thetic qual­ity of sound and visu­als are the result of the system’s deci­sions, as long as the par­tic­i­pant is con­sent, present, and breathes.

Here’s a video of Mirjana’s pre­sen­ta­tion on “Living In A Box: Potentials and Challenges of Existence in VR” from the Consumer Virtual Reality (CVR) show in Vancouver (May 2016).

Media Gallery

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Related Publications

Prpa, M., Tatar, K., Pasquier, P., & Riecke, B. E. (2016, March). Pulse Breath Water [Exhibition]. scores+traces (group exhi­bi­tion), One Art Space, NY, USA.
Kitson, A., Prpa, M., & Riecke, B. E. (2017, October 6). Designing vir­tual envi­ron­ments for breath-awareness and elic­it­ing pos­i­tive affec­tive states [Poster]. 3rd Annual Innovations in Psychiatry and Behavioral Health: Virtual Reality and Behavior Change, Stanford University, CA, USA. https://med.stanford.edu/cme/courses/2017/psychiatry17.html (Download)
Prpa, M., Tatar, K., Francoise, J., Riecke, B. E., Schiphorst, T., & Pasquier, P. (2018). Attending to Breath: Exploring how the cues in vir­tual envi­ron­ment guide the atten­tion to breath and shape the qual­ity of expe­ri­ence to sup­port mind­ful­ness. DIS ’18 Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Designing Interactive Systems, 71–84. https://doi.org/10.1145/3064663.3064671 (Download)
Prpa, M., Tatar, K., Riecke, B. E., & Pasquier, P. (2017). The Pulse Breath Water System: Exploring Breathing as an Embodied Interaction for Enhancing the Affective Potential of Virtual Reality. In S. Lackey & J. Chen (Eds.), Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality (VAMR 2017) (Vol. 10280, pp. 153–172). Springer. (Download)
Prpa, M., Tatar, K., Pasquier, P., & Riecke, B. E. (2016, November). Pulse Breath Water [Exhibition]. MUTEK International Festival of Digital Creativity and Electronic Music: MUTEK_IMG + VR Salon, Montreal, Canada.
Prpa, M., Tatar, K., Pasquier, P., & Riecke, B. E. (2016, July). Pulse Breath Water [Exhibition]. P.O.E.M.A. by Regina Miranda, Oi Futuro Flamengo, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Prpa, M., Tatar, K., Pasquier, P., & Riecke, B. E. (2016, May). Living In A Box: Potentials and Challenges of Existence in VR [Talk]. Consumer Virtual Reality (CVR) Conference, Vancouver, BC, Canada.