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Pine trees blow in the wind and sunlight glitters on the sea in a virtual reality meditation program designed by Northeastern University researchers, called Stairway to Heaven.
As in similar programs, a calm voice asks participants to be aware of their breathing.
But unlike other applications for mindfulness training, Stairway to Heaven equips participants with sensors that detect when they are taking deep, slow breaths and rewards them with passage up and down a densely forested mountain.
Subtitled “A Gamified VR Journey for Breath Awareness,” the project arose out of a Game Science and Design masters thesis by Northeastern PhD student Nathan Miner, who was exploring new ways to engage people in breathing-based mindfulness practices.
“I was interested in seeing how you could make a supportive and compelling experience with breathing as the only input into the system,” says Miner, who is studying interdisciplinary design and media.
“By paying attention to the breath, you can be guided to a calm and peaceful state,” he says.
Gamifying the experience by linking breathing, registered through a respiration sensor, to progression through the virtual reality forest via glowing stone markers was a way to help keep participants’ focus on their breathing, Miner says.
The 21 study participants registered a notable difference between baseline breathing rates taken before the exercise and breathing rates during the virtual reality journey, with a 57% reduction in breathing frequency, he says.
“Anything below 10 breaths per minute is considered a therapeutic rate,” Miner says. “A majority of the participants tracked toward that.”
To make sure the sensor captured deep breathing from the diaphragm, Giovanni Troiano, a human-computer interaction researcher at Northeastern, referred Miner to related prior work by Mirjana Prpa, who is also Northeastern Faculty on the Vancouver campus.
A green loading bar at the bottom of the screen (known in VR as a heads-up display) guides participants through the ins and outs of belly breathing, while a number on the right side of the screen indicates how many breaths they need to take to get to the next stone marker.
After journeying across the island and to the top of a mountain, participants spend some time around a firepit reflecting on their experience.
The idea is to encourage people who might be hesitant or skeptical to try meditation by making the virtual reality journey, Troiano says.
“The hope is that through gamification you motivate people to engage in deep breathing and mindfulness training,” he says.
A paper on Stairway to Heaven was published in Proceedings from the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, with Miner as lead author and Troiano and Casper Harteveld, Northeastern professor of game design, listed among the co-authors.
Harteveld says the project is a great demonstration of the way researchers and students at Northeastern’s College of Arts, Media and Design combine design and technology “to create something that would make an impact in the world, in this case, to help people with their breathing and meditative practices.”
The researchers say they envision a future where programs like Stairway to Heaven could be used in healthcare, to support patients in learning how to use their breathing to lower stress in their daily lives, or to reduce anxiety before surgery and aid them during recovery.
The virtual reality journey and biofeedback program includes excerpts from an audio guide by Dr. Eva M. Selhub, formerly of the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind-Body Medicine, whose researchers have found that meditation reduces metabolism, rate of breathing, heart rate and brain activity.
“Stairway to Heaven is really motivating users to engage with breath awareness in a way that is seamless and smart because it doesn’t interrupt the experience at all,” Troiano says.
“It integrates the experience,” he says.