digital xchange

Opportunities & Benefits of VR Meditation

• Meditate on your own possibilities, e.g., time, space, people-interaction

• Increased access to nature and places not always possible to visit, e.g, the space / learn about planets, galaxies, stars

• Useful for pain/palliative care, especially for people who cannot move/attend in-person meditation sessions

• Opportunity to connect the art-world with meditation, giving more visibility to digital artists & musicians

• Potential for (virtual) community building, especially for lonesome/introverted people

• Increased appreciation of natural environments, especially if missing certain environments/not able to travel to certain places, e.g., alps landscape, Caribbean, etc.

• Opportunity for governments to help increase awareness for environmental protection & for touristic agencies to promote visits to places of special interest/ (natural) beauty

• Available 24/7 & access all over the world (anywhere, anytime)

• Imagination boost

• VR meditation can be useful to treat fobies/PTSD

Other Benefits

• Helpful to disconnect from reality, relax & recharge=improve quality of life & relationships

• Easier to become mindful, especially for non-experienced meditators

• Opportunity to scale meditation sessions

• Reduced barrier for deep meditation via immersion

• Opportunity for body scan meditation (localized meditation)

• It could be used as part of color/shape therapies

• Useful to enhance the health of disabled people

Risks & Challenges of VR Meditation

• People may develop depency/addition to meditate in VR environments and not develop offline skills to meditate (independently)

• Exposed to being manipulated, need 3rd party to meditate and supervise content & quality

• The cost may be too high for certain groups, who may be/feel excluded

• There may be a disconnection with the "real world"/self-isolation

• Enablement of escapism (running away from problems), experience/pain is information, thus VR meditation may be fostering willful ignorance

Other Risks/Challenges

• There may be a decline in "real" exposure to the environment and people may develop different attitude towards objects, e.g., 3D graphics of dog= not feared, real dog= increased/reduced fear?

• Motion sickness & eye-tiredness can limit adoption

• Reduction of tactile experiences / contact with other humans

• Losing sight of purpose of meditation (when focus is on games/digital images)

• Some applications focus too much on gamification to attract customers & not on meditation, which is desired by many users