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Modernizing Meditation
Researchers create a virtual environment By Jane M. Sanders |
Modernizing Meditation , PDF format
IT TOOK A 3D SCIENTIFIC VISUALIZATION of the arterial tears and plaque buildup caused by high blood pressure for Diane Gromala to fully understand why she should reduce her stress level.
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She turned to meditation for help
and not only found that it reduced her stress, it also became the only treatment
that systematically worked to deal with the chronic pain for which her doctors
can provide no cure.
"I was resistant to the idea at first because it seemed to suggest that
I was the problem," says Gromala, an associate professor in the Georgia Institute
of Technology's School of Literature,
Communication and Culture. "If I could just relax, then it would be all
right. I wondered if meditation could do anything.... It does work, though,
because it forces one to focus in precise detail on how one's body works.
You can reconfigure your sense of how your body works and physically change
it to some degree."
Now a 15-year veteran of meditation and convinced of its benefits, Gromala
has collaborated with colleagues Larry Hodges and Chris Shaw in the Georgia
Tech College of Computing on a project
that may make meditation more appealing. The researchers and their students
have created a virtual-reality-based "meditation chamber," which they have
field-tested and are now refining for potential commercialization.
In its current form, the program is a 15-minute virtual experience in relaxation
techniques and meditation. Users wear a head-mounted display with audio and
video that guides them through a series of sunset and moonrise scenes and
muscle relaxation exercises. The system also monitors the users' respiration,
pulse rate and sweat gland activity (a measure of calmness) to provide real-time
biofeedback regarding the effectiveness of the virtual experience.
"This project started as a support system for doing meditation," explains
Larry Hodges, a professor of computing and virtual reality expert, who is
leading the research team. ".... Some people find it very easy to see in their
head whatever is the image they want to visualize. But some people have a
very difficult time with this, so having visual images to look at and the
audio helps a lot."
Also, the added benefit of biofeedback allows the program to modify the
user's experience based on what their body is doing. "When the sun is going
down and the moon is going up, the actual timing of that depends on how your
body is relaxing," explains Hodges, also a veteran meditator. "If you're having
a hard time, the program gives you a chance to start over. It actually says,
'Let's try again.' "
Researchers demonstrated the meditation chamber for almost 500 attendees
at SIGGRAPH, the pre-eminent graphics conference held in Los Angeles in August
2001. With four booths, the researchers were booked for a week doing 20-minute
individual demonstrations for people in the arts, animation and academics.
Researchers are now analyzing biofeedback data from those demos and are also
reviewing questionnaires completed by participants.
"From the anecdotal evidence people offered at SIGGRAPH, we found that people
new to meditation thought it was great," Gromala says. "Even the computer
scientists who were really cynical about it actually saw the benefits of the
meditation chamber and thought it worked. They were really enthusiastic about
it."
Researchers believe the meditation chamber's greatest value will be as a
training tool and for delivering feedback to meditators of any experience
level. They are now gathering information from clinical psychologists around
the country who are offering the meditation chamber experience to their patients.
Professor
Larry Hodges collaborated with colleagues Diane Gromala and Chris
Shaw in the Georgia Tech College of Computing on a project that
may make meditation more appealing.
The psychologists are customers of
Hodges' Atlanta-based company, Virtually
Better. The company has an exclusive license to produce several virtual-reality-based
therapeutic technologies developed at Georgia Tech by Hodges and Virtually Better
co-owner Barbara Rothbaum, a professor of psychiatry at Emory University.
Hodges believes patients who might not otherwise try meditation will embrace
the virtual environment to learn and practice it. "If you read the medical
literature, you see that the positive effects of regular meditation are undisputable,"
he says. "The problem is that people don't do it because it requires discipline.
You have to make the time in your life to do these things.
"This is where the virtual environment comes in. It gives the structure
to lead you through meditation, not only the audio cues, but also the visualizations,"
Hodges adds.
From a research standpoint, Shaw says: "The meditation chamber may be useful
in situations where you want a standard exposure to a relaxation therapy that
is timed relatively precisely. It may form a basis for comparative studies
of relaxation."
Researchers hope to complete a second-generation version of the meditation
chamber this summer based on feedback from the SIGGRAPH demos and psychologists'
trials. It may expand to a 20- to 30-minute, more detailed and effective meditation
experience.
"We'd like to refine it so your biofeedback is more obvious and continuous,"
Gromala says. "The tough problem in a multimedia realm with multiple inputs
is which one you pay attention to. It's difficult in meditation because you
want to block out any input. So to continually have graphs and charts being
output is not a wise idea. So we're looking at when and how to give people
feedback in real time. Maybe it will be a haptic device that you squeeze when
you want the feedback."
Also, to give the program wider appeal, researchers plan to make the second
version as neutral as possible in terms of audiovisual inferences to various
meditation traditions. And they plan to give it a more inviting name, such
as "the relaxation environment."
When the meditation chamber is ready for consumer use, Virtually Better
will pursue three markets. One is its current target customer – clinical
psychologists already using virtual environments and/or biofeedback for treatment.
Another market is health spas, corporate wellness centers or even airport-based
booths. The third, and perhaps largest, market is the home- and/or office-based
consumer, who would run a shorter, PC-based version of the program that might
include simple biofeedback.
Hodges estimates that the software might cost around $5,000 if sold to smaller
markets, such as therapists. But a PC-based version for a large market would
be much less expensive. If Virtually Better pursues this market, it would
sublicense the technology to a distributor, Hodges adds.
Gromala believes the desktop version of the meditation chamber would even
appeal to veteran meditators like her.
"It would give me a sense of ambient time and cues," she explains. "When
you meditate, even if you're experienced, it's still easy to be distracted.
The meditation chamber will keep you focused."
photo
by Gary Meek
For more information, contact Larry Hodges,
Department of Computer Science, University of North Carolina at Charlotte,
9201 University City Blvd, Charlotte, NC 28223-0001. (Telephone: 704-687-4880)
(E-mail: lfhodges@uncc.edu);
Diane Gromala, School of Literature, Communication and Culture, Georgia Tech,
Atlanta, GA 30332-0165 (Telephone: 404-385-1496) (E-mail: diane.gromala@lcc.gatech.edu);
or Chris Shaw, College of Computing, Georgia Tech, Atlanta, GA 30332-0280.
(Telephone: 404-894-6328) (E-mail:
christopher.shaw@cc.gatech.edu).
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Last updated: July
25, 2002