Dis/Immersion in Mindfulness Meditation with a Wandering Voice Assistant
arXiv Preprint Archive April 22, 2023 Bonhee Ku, Tatsuya Itagaki, Katie Seaborn
A voice-based virtual assistant that moves its location along the body during guided meditation can create simultaneous feelings of immersion and dis-immersion. Researchers developed a multi-speaker system embedded in a yoga mat that shifts sound to different body areas as the meditation progresses, comparing it to a fixed smart speaker in interviews with twelve people. The wandering voice embodiment offers new design possibilities for guidance tasks beyond meditation, though the experience is not uniformly positive.