Multimodal interactive VR mindfulness experience

Several attempts have been made to enhance mindfulness through Virtual and Mixed Reality. To date, they only offer users an alternative way of presenting guided imagery (e.g., mentally visualizing a beach vs. rendering a beach). We propose a preliminary study investigating whether allowing users to actively explore guided imagery through their actions (e.g., grasping virtual objects with hands) affects the mindfulness experience. To this aim, we present a preliminary study on a VR scenario for mindfulness practice that encourages the user's interactive behavior in two conditions: interactive multimodal VR vs. audio-only. No significant difference was observed in self-reported mindfulness between the two conditions.