Yes. More of this please. Photo: The Inertia
Meditation is good for you. It helps you sleep. It helps you think clearly. It helps moderate emotional responses to the uncertainties of life in healthy ways. And for all the health benefits of meditation with practice and discipline, it is relatively easy. In most cases it’s as simple as sitting and breathing. But as much as we’d like to practice, we don’t always find ourselves in places that inspire our most contemplative selves. A crowded airplane, a busy office and a claustrophobic apartment in the city can all be places with more distractions than tranquility. Which is why virtual reality can give you a much needed chance to sit and breath in a stunning landscape…sort of.
California has long been considered a place in which once-disparate cultures collide. North and South. East and West. Digital and organic. Its geographic identity is based on the idea that it can blend differences into something new, constantly being reborn. Consequently, for more than a century California has served as a staging point for meditative practices and the religious traditions they stem from to travel across the Pacific and distribute globally. Given the golden state’s surge of technological innovation and the presence of a number of renowned meditation centers, California serves as the setting for virtual reality’s first notable foray into mediated mindfulness.
The scene opens on a stunning vista of the Pacific Ocean from atop a cliff some hundred feet above the surf at Big Sur. With headphones on, you’ll notice the landscape is full of the sound of the churning ocean. Your guide, narrator and renowned meditation teacher Mark Coleman, asks you to take in the view and locate yourself in this landscape. You look around in 360°. Behind you the soft hills disappear into the sky. To both sides epic points reach out and bookend the small cove in front where wave after wave lulls you into a digital reverie. Or does it?
Unless you own the expensive Oculus Rift or HTC Vive VR headsets, you’re experiencing this on the Google Cardboard device that NY Times VR recommends. And while the sights and sounds are beautiful, you can see the stitched pixels betraying a seriously compressed – i.e. visually compromised – video format. All this if you’re able to push past the inherent goofiness of plastering a cardboard-wrapped smart phone to your face in the first place. Posture is key in meditation and it’s difficult to settle into your bones even with Coleman’s guidance along with awkwardly trying to secure the headset over your eyes (Hint: don’t even try it if you wear glasses). Of course, this is where detractors would hit eject on this matrix of meditation and sit like folks have been doing for thousand of years, IRL. And I wouldn’t blame them for doing so
While virtual reality is making huge strides in the interactive all-digital realm of video games, it is still quite rudimentary in its ability to utilize video to take people to photo-realistic landscapes. This would seem to be the case especially for experiences as potentially rich as meditation. And while the magic and beauty of Big Sur is powerful enough to illuminate the “Meditation Journeys” experience, it never really tricks you into thinking you’re actually there. Yet, for as self-important as this project risks being, maybe realism isn’t the point. In our stressed-out, pressure cooker of a modern world where the vast majority of inhabitants live in urban areas at least hundreds of miles from this stunning landscape, why not provide even a visually compromised opportunity to detach from the political news circus, the Pokemon GO hunt, or the social media cooler-than-thou rat race, all to remind people to sit, reflect, and be (virtually) present?
At the very least, if this hippy-dippy meditation stuff isn’t for you you can digitally watch the waves for a bit.
