About place: VR Mindfulness
Mindfulness is a useful skill to develop for supporting your mental health and wellbeing, but learning and continuing to practice mindfulness can be challenging. We have developed place – a series of virtual reality (VR) mindfulness practices – to provide an alternative way of learning mindfulness by utilising immersive nature environments.
Research has shown that mindfulness can be helpful for our mental health and wellbeing. It helps us learn skills in getting less caught up with our thinking, including worrying about or dwelling on things. But we also know that many people find mindfulness challenging to learn and to continue to practice. People report finding it hard to deal with distractions, boredom and discomfort in traditional meditation exercises. VR has emerged as a promising technology for supporting people in learning mindfulness by providing suitably designed virtual environments that may act as mindfulness “training wheels”.
Mindfulness is introduced in many of the self-guided programs on Mental Health Online. You may like to explore the use of place as a standalone tool for practicing mindfulness or use it in conjunction with a self-guided program where mindfulness is introduced.
How do I access place?
You can get access to place by registering for an account on Mental Health Online or by signing in. Once you have logged into your account you can sign up to use place.
What do I need to use place?
place has been designed to be supported on multiple devices. You can use place in a smartphone or standalone VR headset, in the YouTube app on a smartphone, or in your browser on a computer. If you have an Oculus Quest 2 VR headset you can download the place app via the Oculus App Lab.
While you do not need a YouTube account to access place, you may like to use one to save the mindfulness practices to your personal playlist.
You will need to be connected to a strong and stable Internet connection to use place. Please keep in mind the cost of data when choosing a connection (we recommend your home Wi-Fi).
Where can I read more about VR Mindfulness?
Our initial research findings are free to access in the Journal of Medical Internet Research.