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RelaWorld: Neuroadaptive and Immersive Virtual Reality Meditation System

Published: 07 March 2016 Publication History
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    Meditation in general and mindfulness in particular have been shown to be useful techniques in the treatment of a plethora of ailments, yet they can be challenging for novices. We present RelaWorld: a neuroadaptive virtual reality meditation system that combines virtual reality with neurofeedback to provide a tool that is easy for novices to use yet provides added value even for experienced meditators. Using a head-mounted display, users can levitate in a virtual world by doing meditation exercises. The system measures users' brain activity in real time via EEG and calculates estimates for the level of conCentration and relaxation. These values are then mapped into the virtual reality. In a user study of 43 subjects, we were able to show that the RelaWorld system elicits deeper relaxation, feeling of presence and a deeper level of meditation when compared to a similar setup without head-mounted display or neurofeedback.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    IUI '16: Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces
    March 2016
    446 pages
    ISBN:9781450341370
    DOI:10.1145/2856767
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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    Published: 07 March 2016

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    Author Tags

    1. meditation
    2. mindfulness
    3. neurofeedback
    4. virtual reality

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