Enabling Mindfulness through Mixed Reality
Purpose
By nature of the fast pace in which we live, there is a greater need for us to learn to calm the mind, so we are better enabled to deal with the kind of situations we face on a daily basis. With a cluttered and distracted mind, that can be hard.
This is a topic close to my heart and it felt like a natural alignment to find ways to use mixed reality to enable mindfulness.
Understanding the spectrum of elements that can be designed with Cardboard
From 8Ninths research on Hololens Design Patterns and Juan's article on UX Workflows for Mixed Reality
With the goal being to keep to a visual experience, I brought in some of the techniques from Sight/ Visual Meditation. The common factor among all these techniques is to be visually guided and reduce your focus to one goal/thing allowing you to calm the mind and remove other visual and mental distractions. The immersive nature of the experience acts as a positive enabler in this case.
I used Chakra Meditation as a starting point to experiment with Cardboard’s capabilities
Sketching Interactions
Understanding the interactions began started with a similar UX pattern of quick sketching to understand flow and the architecture of the application. Following that, I quickly went into creating a storyboard to set the premise and narrative for the app.
3D sketches and Prototypes
Sketching a UX flow on paper did not quite allow a full understanding of how and what the experience would be. Go Pro's VR player allowed a quick view of what a 2d mocked as a 3d experience would feel.
Final Render
Using the above prototype as a baseline, a quick 3d mockup was done using Unity, tested out with Google Cardboard. The goal of the project being to create a full fledged meditation app, that a user can walk through each of the flows.
Until then, here are some updates to the mocks.