Over the last couple of weeks I have been collaborating on my intervention with VR student Meg, as well as doing self directed learning. We have planned to meet 1x a week for now, and progressively increase that frequency in July/August.
So far I have identified a gap in the market for VR- based meditation, whereby most brands try to mimic real- world meditation settings, but my intervention will test how a fictional world can affect VR meditation.
After having spoken to Meg, she agreed that based on her experiences, fictional VR worlds are much easier to create as the designer is able to branch out creatively and the end- user is able to feel comfortable in a space that doesn’t “mimic” real life or seem Freudian. We thus decided to look at non- natural meditative VR environments, thus altering my research question:
NEW PROPOSED RESEARCH Q: How can artificial environments be implemented into mindfulness- based Virtual Reality experiences in order to provide tailored narratives that are unique to each user?
For the moment I have decided to remove biometrics from my project just to make it a bit more manageable (even though it was a really cool idea), but I may change this further into our experience development.
It feels really nice to be able to collaborate and get insight from Meg, as it helps us bounce ideas off each other and helps me understand what is feasible. So far we have set up a collaborative padlet space, as well as began the visual development of the experience:
These resources will be constantly added to and modified over the course of the next few weeks. At the moment I’m quite drawn to the world of Disney’s Soul and very inspired by the way they built the ethereal world:
I have also completed the first module in the basics course of Unity, and can now understand how to use the platform and the interface well enough to operate within a game – experience. So far I have created my own microgame which can be played here: https://play.unity.com/mg/lego/webgl-builds-63908
I will hopefully be finished with the next two modules in the upcoming weeks, as well as complete the rest of the tasks on my delivery timescale list.
Sources to explore:
https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007%2F978-3-319-08234-9_162-1
https://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijcgt/2011/282345/
- http://blog.kenperlin.com/?p=21486
- https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/computer-science/object-permanence
- https://www.inettutor.com/source-code/augmented-and-virtual-reality-capstone-and-thesis-project-ideas/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6974516/
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02667/full
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/computer-science/artificial-environment