No abstract

The Meditation Chamber is an immersive virtual environment (VE), initially created to enhance and augment the existing methods of training users how to meditate, and by extension, to realize the benefits from meditation practice, including the reduction of stress, anxiety and pain. Its innovative combination of immersive virtual reality (VR) and biofeedback technologies added interoceptive or dimensions of inner senses to the already sensorially rich affordances of VR. Because the Meditation Chamber enabled users to become aware of autonomic senses that they are not normally conscious of, and to manipulate them in real-time, we found that it did enhance users’ abilities to learn how to meditate, particularly those who had never meditated. We describe the Meditation Chamber, scientific methods of evaluation and findings, and discuss first-person phenomenological aspects, its long-term applicability for users who have chronic pain, and future directions.

Funded by the Agency for Science, Technology and Research, A*STAR Singapore, CAMTech is collaborating with a Singaporean research institute and two industry partners with the objective to improve electronics assembly processes. The goal of this project is to visualise the behaviour of an electronics assembly industry based on discrete events simulation. The traditional scenario - from the customer placing order for a product to delivery - goes through various phases including manufacturing the product. Several major electronics manufacturing stages can be addressed: fabrication, assembly, testing, and packing. Each of these stages accounts for set up, process, failure, and wait time periods. A delay in one process will accumulate over to the future delays. To simulate the discrete events a general-purpose simulation system has been employed. For modelling and visualisation CASUS (Computer Animation of Simulation Traces) system has been used and refined developed by Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics (Fraunhofer-IGD)

In this paper, we propose a work-in-progress virtual reality system to explore how different ways of navigating emotionally-responsive artwork can change one's phenomenal experience of the artwork in an immersive virtual reality environment. Two sets of navigational scenarios are designed from artwork generated from our parameterized NPR (non-photorealistic rendering) system ePainterly. Preliminary studies are carried out to observe how different navigational environments affect one's viewing experience to artwork generated through a NPR system.

This paper describes the research work being carried out by the Transforming Pain Research Group -the only group whose work is exclusively focused on the use of immersive VR for chronic pain management. Unlike VR research for acute or short-term pain, which relies on pain "distraction," this research posits a new paradigm for the use of VR. In addition to providing an overview of our work, the present paper also describes one of our current works in detail: the Virtual Meditative Walk.