HatsumiVR

We are a research and design studio exploring the intersection of arts, health and immersive technology. We work with patients, artists, researchers and healthcare professionals to develop experiences that challenge how we think and feel about the world, and imagine the future of health and wellbeing.

Pain and emotions are still rarely understood, and often impossible to see or measure. Using drawing, painting and collage to make these invisible experiences visible enables the indescribable to be shared with others and thereby increases the understanding of another’s subjective experience. Importantly it also provides the creator with a new perspective on their own experience. Body mapping is an arts-based research tool, which, due to its focus on embodied experience, lends itself to the exploration of bodily and psychological feelings and experience. Body mapping involves tracing around a person’s body to create a life-sized outline, which is then filled in via a creative and reflective process, producing an image that reveals aspects of embodied experience.

Within this virtual reality experience, you will be guided to create your own, life-sized body map, which visualizes and explores lived experience. You will be led through a series of meditative and creative activities based on the tenets of mindfulness during the body mapping process in order to help articulate and visually express experiences of, and methods for coping with every day and out of the ordinary experiences of pain, emotion and sensory experience.

This virtual reality experience is expanding the potential of body mapping in a new paradigm that can be utilized in communication, research and health interventions for pain, sensory and mental health conditions.