Sonic Cradle
An immersive VR-like spatialized sound project to facilitate yoga-inspired meditation through controlling sound via breath while sitting in a hammock chair (cradle).
Jay Vidyarthi, D’arcy O’Connor, Diane Gromala, Bernhard Riecke
The Sonic Cradle was designed to engage participants without complex visual displays (HMDs).
In other words, the VR is primarily sonic, building on the affordances of spatialized sound.
We developed a framework where immersion is understood as “the psychological process of integrating basic sensations into the experience of cohesive worlds.” The Sonic Cradle aimed to help catalyze “immersion” with one’s own breathing via interactive techniques derived from well-known yoga breathing practices, building on Dr.Gromala’s prior VR meditation work, The Meditation Chamber, co-created and tested with Dr. Larry Hodges, Dr. Chris Shaw and Fleming Seay at SIGGRAPH 2001, Georgia Tech and the first VR clinic in the U.S., Virtually Better.
After demonstrating the Sonic Cradle at UCLA and at TED Interactive, we adapted basic interpretive, qualitative methods and purposive participant sampling to reveal the potential of this new application area in 2012. Systematic analysis from a user study with 39 participants’ subjective and 3 independent data coders produced 11 findings which richly describe the Sonic Cradle experience as clearly comparable to mindfulness meditation (e.g. clarity of mind, loss of intention). Two studies followed, one of which used EEG data (see below).
Jay Vidyarthi, Bernhard Riecke, Diane Gromala. “Sonic Cradle: Designing for an Immersive Experience of Meditation by Connecting Respiration to Music,” in Proceedings of DIS (Design for Interactive Systems) 2012. DOI:10.1145/2317956.2318017
Jay Vidyarthi, Bernhard Riecke, “Interactively mediating experiences of mindfulness meditation” In International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 72:8-9, pp.674-688. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2014.01.006