Viveport Review: Skill Master VR - Learn Meditation

Build focus by visualizing your breath in a virtual reality experience created specifically to help you meditate.

By Desmond Madison, Greenlit Content

Meditation is utilized in schools and hospitals across the world. Certain types of meditation are used to treat mental health conditions including severe anxiety, clinical depression, and more. Seeing projects like Skill Master VR teach valuable mindfulness and self-care techniques is an encouraging sign that virtual reality can go beyond games and bring people back to their emotional center through focused meditation.

In a world overwhelmed by sensory overload and social media 24/7, it says a lot that developers are thinking about how they can create content that helps people stay calm and relaxed for their own mental health.

As the practice of meditation almost entirely focuses on breathing, Skill Master VR - Learn Meditation helps you visualize your breathing before your eyes, as you sit and watcha visualization of your breath expand and contract, while the app keeps you tuned in and on-pace with your meditation.

You can choose from 12 different calm and peaceful environments to meditate in, letting you stare at the heavens during different times of day. From a grey morning sky, to candy colored afternoons, golden sunsets, and the dead of midnight, there is a mood and atmosphere option for most any flavor of Zen you’re looking for.

There are also ten different meditation visualization objects to represent your breath. You simply click the touchpad at any time to cycle through each of the shapes, from smooth and calm to outright abstract and psychedelic. Between the shapes and visualizations, you can focus and concentrate on watching thoughts pass by, allowing anxiety to slip away.

While the visual aids are very helpful, so far most of what Skill Master VR has to offer is typical to any meditation practice. Where it gets high-tech is interesting. As you use the app, you'll keep one hand rested by your side, and hold a controller to your chest with the other. While your chest rises and falls with your breath, the trackers in the controller monitor that movement, and feed the data back to the app.

This allows Skill Master VR to project the meditation visualization in front of you as an accurate recreation of your physical activity, expanding and contracting along with your breathing. In comparison to normal meditation practice where you have to rely on your own intuition - or perhaps an instructor - to monitor your breathing, Skill Master VR takes that burden away, allowing you to concentrate your focus on the act of breathing itself. This is the key to any successful meditation practice, and it helped me concentrate and focus much faster than 'normal' meditation.

Meditation can be described quite simply as the process of paying attention to your breathing, and focusing on thoughts as discrete items. At a certain point in meditation, with enough focus, you can visualize each thought, watching it being presented before you, then floating away. Thoughts flow past you, allowing for a deep relaxation to renew the mind and spirit. You breathe in, you breathe out. It sounds simple, but if it was, we'd all be doing it.

While the practice is yours to pursue, Skill Master VR is a great guide to beginning your meditation journey.

Skill Master VR - Learn Meditation is available on Viveport.