Mindful Bloom
Improving digital meditation through spatial metaphors in augmented reality
In a future where AR glasses are mass-adopted, how can we leverage spatial interactions to more effectively teach meditation? Mindful Bloom is a working proof-of-concept built for the Magic Leap headset to reimagine meditation education in AR.
Initial collaboration with Sunniva Liu and Anton Renouf.
Initial collaboration with Sunniva Liu and Anton Renouf.
Timeline
4 months
Role
UX Designer • Unity Prototyper
Type
Augmented Reality • Prototyping
Project Overview
Mindful Bloom is an augmented reality experience designed to teach meditation to beginners through space-driven interactions. Unlike most AR meditative experiences, Mindful Bloom takes an active, semi-guided approach, using the metaphor of finger painting to teach core concepts such as stress, grounding, and mindfulness.
Visualizing Stress
A stressed user enters the experience, where they begin learning meditation by visualizing their stressors.
Active Meditation
Meditation is taught through finger painting - a way to connect a user to the space around themselves.
Nudges of Success
As users finger paint, their visual stressors fade, until they are left with a peaceful memento of mindfulness.
Understanding the digital meditation landscape
Meditation can reduce stress, but barriers such as high costs and learning difficulties limit its adoption. Digital platforms like Headspace offer affordable alternatives, while VR and AR research shows immersive environments can enhance focus during practice. Our team conducted a two-part landscape analysis of digital meditation - gaining insights about both its present and its future:
XR meditation has unexplored potential
A research review revealed that XR meditation research has focused mainly on breath-based and static meditation. However, movement-based meditation, a type of meditation we felt could be expressed effectively in XR, had not been explored in depth yet.
Current digital meditation limits adaptation to individuals
We each onboarded onto Headspace and used it for a week. Although mobile-based meditation was a more accessible start to routine practice, the prerecorded nature of each session reduced the flexibility to meditate at our own pace - such as repeating parts of a session we found the most helpful.
Hands-on prototyping to think spatially
Through this research review, we decided to explore an AR meditative experience with minimal guidance. In particular, finger painting piqued our interest as a repetitive, simple motion that has been shown to clear mental blocks through creative expression.
To streamline our process from concept to working prototype, we jumped straight into finger painting, using paper and found objects to visualize what painting spatially would feel like compared to being limited on a flat paper canvas.
Building fast in AR for user testing
With the goal of user testing, we created a proof-of-concept using Unity and a Magic Leap AR headset. Our initial prototype centered around the finger painting mechanic and a basic visual representation of stress - reinforcing that meditation was the antithesis of stressfulness.
Initial State
A user’s surroundings start with floating spiky objects - representing their stressful thoughts.
Interaction Loop
Users dip their fingers into a central pool of “ink” then lift their fingers towards a stress object to remove it from space.
End State
Removing all stress objects results in a visual memento appearing, signifying the positive outcome of finishing meditation.
User testing reveals a need for more guidance
We invited a group of 10 Carnegie Mellon faculty and college students to try our initial prototype Each demo took place in a set designed to resemble an office workplace. Demos lasted about 5 minutes - involving a short presentation about our concept, fitting the Magic Leap to each user, and sitting next to them to guide them as needed. Two patterns emerged from our sessions:
Problem 1 - Frustrating progression
Hitting already difficult-to-hit stress objects was extremely frustrating for users - resulting in feedback that the prototype actually heightened stress rather than reducing it.
Reflecting on our initial prototype, I realized we were misrepresenting meditation through our designed interactions, causing it to frustrate users rather than destress them. Here’s what happened:
Reflecting on our initial prototype, I realized we were misrepresenting meditation through our designed interactions, causing it to frustrate users rather than destress them. Here’s what happened:
Combining freeform interaction with rigid goals
Our prototype stifled the freeform expression of finger painting in space by giving it a very specific goal - accurately hitting virtual objects in space. Each time a user failed this concrete goal, they felt frustrated.
Representing progression too literally
Meditation reduces the negative influence of stressful thoughts over our present activities. However, since our meditative action deleted stress objects, we were reinforcing the behavior of actively blocking out stressful thoughts, a practice that induces more stress instead.
Solution - Flexible, gradual progression
To combat these issues, I overhauled the user flexibility in our experience. Progress would no longer be measured by how accurately a user could finger paint, but how long they engaged with this meditative activity. This change meant that Mindful Bloom would correctly reflect that different people approach meditation at their own pace.
This change to the flow of our experience meant that stress objects also needed a major visual revision. By making quick planning sketches and then tinkering with Unity’s shader graph system, I landed on a visual treatment that could transform stress objects from daunting to dainty.
Problem 2 - Lack of context
Even after briefing through a slide deck, our visual metaphors were lost in translation to users. Most of the test group felt that having upfront, on-screen guidance would help their experience be more painless.
Identifying confusing elements
Based on qualitative feedback from our user testing sessions, I audited our current prototype to find each element that needed upfront explanation:
Solution - Onscreen context delivery
Mindful Bloom needed on-screen text tooltips both for onboarding as well as periodic encouragements and refreshers. All the highlighted green areas within this experience storyboard could benefit from further context:
Crafting a UI design system around hardware constraints
I needed to design a spatial UI to deliver this contextual information, while also navigating AR hardware and Unity software constraints:
Limited field-of-view
The Magic Leap headset running Mindful Bloom has a very constrained area to display AR content; any on-screen UI must be compact to limit drawing attention away from the rest of the experience.
Additive displays
The Magic Leap is a passthrough AR headset - the lighter colored an object is, the easier it is to see in space. Additionally, dark or black objects are invisible, as the headset can’t display black like a traditional screen can.
Ease of development
At this stage, Mindful Bloom was a solo project - any UI I designed was also my responsibility to develop. A system built with Unity’s UI system in mind would be ideal for quick iteration and testing.
I needed to design a spatial UI to deliver this contextual information, while also navigating AR hardware and Unity software constraints:
Checking font readability at different sizes
Using black in UI to occlude background
Once these hardware and software boundaries were clear, I honed in on a visual design system for Mindful Bloom's spatial UI:
This design system ended up being straightforward to implement in Unity through stock UI components and smart usage of layout groups. Here’s a peek at the editor:
Reflection and next steps
Mindful Bloom was an eye-opening project in iterative design incorporating user feedback. Our initial testing revealed surprising insights about our initial assumptions, and continuing this project as a solo design-development effort felt highly rewarding when all the pieces finally came together onto the Magic Leap.
If I were to continue this project, I would love to build out demos for how Mindful Bloom could further adapt to individual users, including reduced guidance for routine meditators, and a progression for users to eventually practice movement meditation without relying on any visual aid.
If I were to continue this project, I would love to build out demos for how Mindful Bloom could further adapt to individual users, including reduced guidance for routine meditators, and a progression for users to eventually practice movement meditation without relying on any visual aid.