Comparing Meditation and Immersive Virtual Environment for Relaxation

Traditionally, meditation has been used to help people change their emotional states, and most beginners practice meditation by closing their eyes to imagine a relaxing scenario. In this study, we explore the use of sensory information provided by immersive Virtual Reality Environments (VRE) to help people relax. We have designed two scenes in the VRE to help people transform from an anxious state into a more relaxed state. Previous workhas confirmed that the emotions of humans can be detected by observable quantifiable data. In this work, the emotional states of users are detected through physiological measurements. The results show that meditation makes participants relaxed possibly through a physiological mechanism while immersing in a natural VR environment can help users achieve better relaxation through positive sensory information. The users also indicated preferences on the types of virtual scenes that can help relaxation, which sheds some light on the future direction of customizing virtual scenes to achieve better effects for different users.