Read the Room Designing Neuroadaptive Space in VR to Enhance Situated Interactive Mindfulness
Architecture and Occupant well-beings
We spend most of our daily lives inside a spatial enclosure of various properties. More than 90% time of the day, we act as building dwellers space-users while navigating, perceiving, and interacting with our surrounding built environment. Spatial design strategies employes various techniques such as curvature, material choice, and lighting control can have a strong influence over the "space users"' physiological functions and mental state.
Current mental well-being strategies Physical/Mobile •
Has been explored in both physical reality and virtual reality
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mostly has been voice-guided sessions within the user's home
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So far, most physical reality based meditation methods are one-way interaction (visual instructions, auditory guidance)
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Design strategies that focus on using materials and boundary geometry that are more appealing to human occupants (curve v.s Angular)
VR •
VR-based meditation experiences.
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While it unlocks the limited spatial constraints of the conventional meditation methods, it mostly remains one-way guidance, allowing user inputs while unable to produce results directly associated with the users' wellbeing
Claudia Daudén Roquet and Corina Sas. 2018. Evaluating Mindfulness Meditation Apps. In Extended Abstracts of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '18). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Paper LBW575, 1–6. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3170427.3188616
Limitations of exisitng mental-wellness approaches STATIC, ONE DIRECTIONAL, ENCLOSED Existing mental wellness interventions are very extensively researched and widely implemented. However, some limitations are inherent constraints given the contextual medium of the activity. 1). dedicated spatial and time requirements 2). lack of anchoring performance matrics (some research projects have demonstrated innovative hybrids between bio-sensors and interactive displays but most of the data are presented as a quantitative benchmark) 3). Most of the interactions are instructional 4). The potential of spatially induced sensory response has not been explored
Data to Interactions
EEG/EMG HEADSET
FEATURE EX TRACTION
IOT PLATFORM
VR INTERACTIONS
Extract EEG and EMG data
Identify expressed facial
extracted data will be sent
The users will experience
for feature extraction
expressions
to an IoT platform with
predesign spatial changes
custom node-flow to tag
associated with their
and distribute data into
cognitive performance
separated channels
index and facial expressions.
Element 1. Relaxation and volumetric visibility
Window sizes are associated with high post-occupancy satisfaction and lower self-reported depression. Not only windows can bring in natural light, they can also increase the range of spatial visibility and dramatically elevate a sense of spatiousness. In our first iteration of experimental design we associated the user's relaxation level with degrees of window openness.
Sample Scene
Low Relaxation
Medium Relaxation
High Relaxation