Preparations are well underway for our first co-design workshop on virtual reality (VR) with people who practice mindfulness on Tuesday 18^th February 2020. With a large, inviting space booked in the David Hume Tower and a range of participants signed up, it will be a fun day of exploring different virtual reality technologies. Some Oculus Quests and Oculus Go’s virtual reality headsets have been reserved via the UCreate studio (https://www.ucreatestudio.is.ed.ac.uk) in the George Square university library. Siobhan has been playing with some of the current VR apps for meditation and relaxation to see what the competition is like, swearing she hasn’t fallen asleep in her office while using them!

By a stroke of genius, Beverley has secured a Magic Leap (https://www.magicleap.com/) for everyone to play during the workshop with which is a novel augmented reality (AR) tool. At the same time, Alison is beavering away preparing questionnaires and gathering creative materials that we plan to use in the afternoon to let participants work on designing their own VR application for mindfulness. Who said you can’t use knitting and textiles to design apps. Two very keen Masters students, Yajing Wang and Jialin Luo, and a PhD student, Gregg Lloren, are also on board to help facilitate the workshops so it should be an exciting day with those who’ve signed up trying out virtual reality technologies to see if they can improve mindfulness practice.