Overview
The project we intend to create for our culmination is an unconventional meditation app. It displays the userās commitment to the practice as a collection of garden-months, where in each plot-day the user can plant and grow a unique tree. Before a session, the user takes a moment to recognize which emotions they are feeling in the moment and chooses the corresponding watering cans, which affects the characteristics of the future tree. With this system we want to emphasise the importance of accepting each emotion as an inherent part of the garden of life.
For the chosen duration of the session, the tree will continue to grow, while the user slides their thumb up and down the screen in sync with their breath. The cyclical motion is synced with an on-screen day and night cycle.Ā This system is a repurposing of the motion used in ādoom scrollingā for a more mindful use of oneās smartphone. The shape and the audio that plays is procedural and is a manifestation of the treeās emotions. The tree stops growing as the timer reaches zero, but the user can still continue to meditate. Throughout the day, all the growth is done on the specific tree of the day, even throughout multiple sessions.
At the completion of each session, the user can choose to log in a journal entry to be associated with that tree, and at any time outside of a session, the user can look back on the previous months and read each entry by choosing the day.
For this project, we are using this original idea to design the user experience around and to implement the fully functioning app in Unity.
Inspiration
Meditation provides numerous scientifically proven mental health benefits, including reduced anxiety, improved attention span, and overall mental wellness. Providing an appealing visual tracking of the progress of oneās meditation practice can serve as a source of motivation, and the visuals of trees growing can additionally create a calming little space on oneās phone, associating oneās inner growth with the growth of a forest.
Sen came up with this idea because she personally practices meditation and even though she mostly meditates unaided, in the past she has used multiple apps, some elements of which she enjoyed, and she wanted to build something original that combined those elements and built on them, as well as including a personal twist and trying herself in an unfamiliar territory but one which she had always found very exciting – procedural code that imitates natural structures and movements.
Budget
We do not expect to need any purchases specific to this project, since it will be done wholly digitally with free software. We do not yet plan to host the app on any stores.
Timeline
Fall 2024:
- Week 4: Draft proposal
- Weeks 5-6: Refining the proposal
- Week 7: Project proposal presentation for the faculty panel
- Week 8: Refining the proposal based on faculty and peer feedback
- Week 9: Prototype proposal
- Week 10: Writing the system for procedurally generated trees
- Week 11: Animating the growth of the procedural trees
- Week 12: Refining the system to produce more visually organic results
- Weeks 13-14: Project prototype presentations for the faculty panel
Spring 2025:
- Week 0: Incorporating faculty feedback into updating the project design
- Week 1: Implementing timers and a calendar system, UI, working on procedural generation
- Week 2: Working on watering can system, devising audio theme
- Week 3: Scene transitions, graphical elements, developing generative leaf structures
- Week 4: Project update presentations for faculty panel
- Week 5: Watering can characteristics
- Week 6: Seeding system, further developing musical score
- Week 7: Testing, digitally painting assets
- Week 8: Journaling system, working on the aesthetics
- Week 9: Faculty panel presentation
- Week 10: Fleshing out the tree characteristics, saving
- Week 11: Interactive day and night cycle
- Week 12: Testing, making final tweaks, finalizing the project
- Week 13: Presentation / demo day
- Week 14: Presenting the completed project for the faculty panel
