Designing Loving-Kindness Meditation in Virtual Reality for Long-Distance Romantic Relationships

TL;DR

This paper develops and evaluates a virtual reality application for long-distance couples to practice loving-kindness meditation, demonstrating its positive impact on intimacy and preference over traditional video calls.

Contribution

It introduces a novel VR-based LKM app for long-distance couples, including design considerations, a prototype, and empirical evaluation of its effectiveness and user preference.

Findings

VR LKM enhances relationship intimacy

Couples prefer VR over video conferencing for LKM

VR app shows potential for long-term use

Abstract

Loving-kindness meditation (LKM) is used in clinical psychology for couples' relationship therapy, but physical isolation can make the relationship more strained and inaccessible to LKM. Virtual reality (VR) can provide immersive LKM activities for long-distance couples. However, no suitable commercial VR applications for couples exist to engage in LKM activities of long-distance. This paper organized a series of workshops with couples to build a prototype of a couple-preferred LKM app. Through analysis of participants' design works and semi-structured interviews, we derived design considerations for such VR apps and created a prototype for couples to experience. We conducted a study with couples to understand their experiences of performing LKM using the VR prototype and a traditional video conferencing tool. Results show that LKM session utilizing both tools has a positive effect on the intimate relationship and the VR prototype is a more preferable tool for long-term use. We believe our experience can inform future researchers.