VR isn't just for gaming anymore; you can now use it to help support good mental health with VR meditation apps.
With the ability to offer immersive relaxation sessions like nothing you've tried before, VR meditation can help you tackle the stress of everyday life. This is a promising alternative, especially if you are a person who struggles to do traditional meditation.
What Is VR Meditation?
You probably know that VR is mainly used for gaming, but meditation is one of the creative uses of virtual reality. Imagine putting on a headset and being transported to a mountainside where the gentle sounds of nature wash over you. Instead of facing a blank wall in your home, you are staring out at a beautiful landscape far away from any distractions.
Thanks to the immersive qualities of VR, meditating in this way can produce a fairly convincing experience of a relaxing, stress-free retreat in nature, unlike nothing you've experienced before.
How Is VR Meditation Different?
While technology and meditation aren't new, VR does offer something quite different from audiobooks, podcasts, or guided meditation sessions on YouTube.
The most significant distinction is the immersive quality of VR, which is a result of a 3-dimensional viewing space combined with spatial audio.
It's the closest technology has come to creating a replica of how we see and hear in real life while inside a digital space. When you add in the ability to interact with objects and landscapes, what you have is a truly unique way of meditating.
VR Meditation Aesthetics: Surrealism vs. Hyper-Realism
At first, you might think that the best VR meditation experiences are those that transport you to hyper-realistic environments. Apps like Flow, for example, use 360-degree footage filmed in Iceland to set the scene, meaning you can choose to meditate next to waterfalls, volcanoes, and black sand beaches.
But in other VR experiences like Tripp, you can expect kaleidoscopic visuals and surreal mountains populated with happy pictures of dogs.
For those of us who can't easily step outside our apartment into nature, VR meditation offers an enticing gateway. It can also provide a visually expressive way to meditate if you struggle to close your eyes for long periods without getting distracted.
Overall, the choice of visual aesthetics varies from app to app, and not all are created with equal attention to detail either. When done well, you will feel convinced that you are in another world, whether or not that world looks like a real place or an utterly surreal landscape.
But when done poorly, you will find it incredibly difficult to spend much time in that digital space at all. Just take a look at the comment section of any VR meditation app, and you'll immediately find out what design elements people thought were captivating and what they thought were utterly boring.
Plug-In Immersion
One of the instant benefits of meditating in VR is the ability to block out your immediate surroundings quickly. Using noise-canceling headphones is an incredibly effective way to tune out noisy family members or loud traffic sounds. And once you place the headset on, you're completely removing any visual distractions, too, even if that's just light filtering through your eyelids.
On the one hand, some people might enjoy the challenge of trying to avoid daily distractions by meditating. For those people, working on their mental discipline is part of the habit of meditating. But on the other hand, putting on a headset makes it easier to try meditation for the first time, which hopefully encourages more people to give it a go.
Meditation Gaming
Perhaps one of the most exciting aspects of the growing genre of VR meditation is how some developers are incorporating game mechanics. For example, in the magical, neon-colored world of Flowbourne, you can control your movement through the soothing level designs with just your breathing. It works by placing the hand controller on your stomach/chest and using the subtle changes in movement from your breathing to propel you forward in the virtual world.
Meanwhile, in the meditation game PLAYNE, your goal is to grow the surrounding trees on your island by completing meditation sessions. Set in a forest wilderness, you even have a fox companion that you can speak to in order to discover the game's story and get tips on wellbeing.
It seems like a pretty significant leap from traditional meditation to VR meditation games, considering that meditation has been around since ancient times. But adding game mechanics can help incentivize good habit building and also make meditation more enjoyable to learn about.
Hopefully, this opens up the benefits of meditation to a greater cross-section of people, including gamers who might be familiar with playing video games but not with the spiritual aspects of meditation.
Education
If turning meditation into a game doesn't appeal to you, the educational aspects might. In a VR app, you can learn about the technical elements of meditating in a no-judgment practice space.
One example of this is ZenVR, where you can sit down in a virtual meditation class and learn about the skills and philosophies behind meditation as a practice. As it's focused on providing an immersive learning space, the app's strengths don't lie in beautiful visuals or novel modes of interaction.
Despite this, it could be a more affordable way to explore meditation for people who already own a VR headset if attending live meditation classes or retreats is too expensive or not available where you live.
VR Meditation Is a Customizable Experience
Finally, one of the most shining functions of VR meditation is the ability to customize your experience just the way you like it.
If you want to change the weather, time of day, location, or choose anything from meditating underwater to sitting inside a hot air balloon, Guided Meditation VR has you covered.
No matter where you are in the real world, you no longer have to carve out your own physical space to meditate in VR meditation. This level of flexibility makes it even easier to start meditating and hopefully more enjoyable to continue with.
Is VR Meditation Right for You?
In the end, a universal meditation app that suits everybody's tastes doesn't yet exist, and there's plenty of room for improvement within the apps that are out there now. But given the range of experiments across VR meditation apps, it's definitely worth exploring. VR meditation could be a gateway to first-time meditators and a wonderful yet creative way to shake up your current practice.