Floating on Air is a VR experience for learners of mindfulness who want to build a better quality of life with chronic pain. For people with a diagnosed chonic pain condition, learning to pay attention to sensations of pain, can be a tough fight against that powerful survival instinct to flee, to remove our selves from causes of pain. Through this experience, they are guided to gently focus on sensations of pain with open, non-judgemental acceptance; to learn different ways to give up fighting and instead find a new relationship to their pain.
Taking inspiration from stories, photographic effects, animation and nature documentaries, the aesthetic for this experiences is chosen to leave space for the novice meditator, the viewer of the experience, to bring their own perception of their pain experience into the meditation.
Floating on Air fits into a known landscape of virtual reality experiences with immersive imagery without attention getting characters that accompany an audio track of a meditation guide.
Placing familar shapes and movements of sea creatures brings a sense of lightness and rhythmic calm to the setting. The rhythm of movement of these characters is deliberately paced to match a slow, calm breathe. Placing them in the unfamilar environment of the early morning air, brings a sense of openness to the hitherto unforeseeable, new perspectives on pain; shifting energy from fighting pain to learning to accept it as part and parcel of the human condition.
Blubbo was a play with the idea of animation as an act of inspiration, an act of giving an object the breath of life. This was a lesson from Illusion of Life, lecture and reading, although some of the iterative development happened during Character Place Simulation. It started wtih an experiment in embodying a sphere with a sinewave defined movement based on research on jellyfish movement. Blubbo is my first character for the planned VR experience, acting as a visual pacesetter for the ideal slow rhythm.
The short in-class briefs have been a study of movement. The endless combinations and permutations of tempo as well as constant, accelerating, decelerating, zero and irregular motion with change (McLaren, 1976) to represent the movements we unconsiously read in the world around us.
Jon Kabat-Zin, as he teaches meditation, suggests an exercise for learning meditation: being present in the moment as you listen to music and consider the space between the notes (Kabat-Zinn 2011). I’m not sure that I captured the feeling of rhythmic lightness alongside a sense of menace, but it’s given me a step forward from the angular zigzag movement last week, by adapting it into the zigzag float of flowers as they fall. This cylindrical falling shape to the motion will be iterated through adaptations to Blubbo's movement.
My goal for the end of semester is to create a simple VR experience as a proof of concept. Taking an iterative, agile approach the existing 360 degree setting with the swan in the forecground is the minimum viable product, each iteration will be suitable for release as a new version of the proof of concept. Each iteration will be changes to this setting with new movements taken through steps to test, review and improve the meditaiton experience.
This folio documents the explorations to-date, and provides a foundation for the next six weeks to creating a working prototype, viewable on an Oculus Go, that has a simple 360 degree setting designed to accompany a provided audio track of a guided meditation for pain management.
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About This Work
By Amanda Belton
Email Amanda Belton
Published On: 15/04/2019