This week I met with Colin, an executive producer at Nexus studios – who have created VR assets for clients like Google and Headspace. After having explained my project to him, the following feedback was given:
- VR has a higher creative burden to carry in comparison to traditional mindfulness art experiences – Marina Abramovich techniques will not work in VR for this particular research question as it is too distractive.
- Mindfulness helps screen out the real environment, so does VR.
- It is important to rely on sound design for my project, namely positional sound. Using binaural microphones (mics placed where your ears are for positional data and hearing it back how you would hear the space) helps people to be immersed in the content.
- Visuals tell you what to think, sound tells you what to feel, sound is a key indicator – think about spatial audio.
- Idea of supernormal stimuli – taking things that exist in that natural world and exaggerating them for stimuli – an easy example is how flavoured candy is shaped and coloured to look like real fruit, etc.
- Thinking about using the sound of streams, wind through grass as ASMR triggers that can be exaggerated within the hypothetical space of the VR world.
- Binaural sound gets a better response than stereo sound because your brain is picking up the sound as an environment.
- Unity has tools that make binaural sound quite easy, you can place sound objects in space.
- Using pheromones and smell as an example of sensory excitation, your sense of smell is 5x higher when your head is moving – sound can similarly provide cues that put people into an environment.
- Getting people to not focus on the novelty is difficult, you don’t want people to focus on the game state rather than the mindfulness state – incorporate a mindfulness activity with each asset to make it relevant.
- Look into marshmallow laser feast – they did an exhibition on visualising the breath that can be relevant to my project.
- For visuals, go into a very simplistic space with that is more abstract than literal; it can help create an environment that is less distracting and more enabling.
- Neon/tron aesthetic – simple grid lines.
- Focus on breath rather than transformation, for example use objects on the ground that can raise into the sky as a breathing tool.
- Think about the information hierarchy of the experience – visuals, sound, mindfulness elements.
- Filling the phobia – filling out your entire field of view blocks everything else out and helps immersion. – useful for the webgl version.
My biggest takeaways from the meeting were the importance of sound design and the information hierarchy in my project, as these were things that I had not necessarily considered before.
Moving forward, I think I will have to come up with a way to allow simplistic sound design into the experience for it to become even more immersive and effective.