Float away is an interactive Virtual Reality experience that takes you away to a place far from all the stress and chaos of life.
This project was also presented during the 'X=festival', which is a creative festival around Utrecht, the Netherlands, where loads of people tried it!
For centuries, people have used things like meditation as ways to relax their mind and body. The goal of this project was to offer people with busy lives a similar experience, because stress is unfortunately becoming more of a problem every day in our society. What we saw however, is that meditation is often seen as 'boring' and 'time-consuming'. With Float Away, we aim to completely change that, by using state of the art technology to submerge the user in a fun, as well as relaxing, world for around 5 to 10 minutes.
We accomplish this by using a custom Virtual Reality setup. The experience is about canoeing through a serene river, whilst hearing meditative music. We accomplished full immersion by building a special controller-extention that acts like the paddle that the participant holds to steer the canoe. Smell was also taken care of by dispensing water-based lavender-scents around the setup.
I envision this kind of VR-experience being placed in offices and other workspaces so employees can take a quick 'mental break' during workdays.
I envision this kind of VR-experience being placed in offices and other workspaces so employees can take a quick 'mental break' during workdays.
