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Research
Computer science research projects in graphics, XR, and HCI
Celestial Blossom: A Collaborative, Meditative VR Journey of Fractal Art and Music
Associated With
NYU Future Reality Lab
NYU MARL
Submitted to SIGGRAPH 2025
Celestial Blossom is a collaborative, meditative VR experience where participants co-create generative fractal art through hand-drawn sketches, transforming movements into evolving audiovisual symphonies.
Set in a celestial void, strokes morph into glowing fractal particles, from microscopic grains to cosmic stars, each resonating with a musical note and evolving into immersive sound textures.
Multiplayer interaction allows users to weave their creations into a shared immersive composition.
At the end, participants receive a printed rendering of their artwork, which can be scanned to revisit the fractals and melodies they created in VR.
Motivation
Virtual Reality (VR) has been explored as a tool for mindfulness, with studies showing that VR-based meditation can reduce stress and enhance emotional well-being. However, most VR meditation experiences are passive, relying on guided breathing or static environments. While effective, meditation is fundamentally about self-awareness and presence, which can be deepened through active engagement rather than passive observation.
One way to cultivate active presence is through creative expression. Activities like coloring books promote relaxation and introspection, making artistic creation a powerful meditative tool. VR expands this concept, enabling immersive artistic experiences beyond traditional media. Applications like Tilt Brush and Quill make digital art intuitive and accessible, allowing users to create freely in three-dimensional space while enhancing meditative focus.
Building on these ideas, we introduce Celestial Blossom, a VR experience that merges artistic creation with meditation. Using body gestures, participants generate evolving fractal patterns accompanied by harmonious sound, transforming their movements into an immersive, meditative journey. By actively shaping their environment through creative expression, users cultivate self-awareness, presence, and tranquility, offering a deeply personal and interactive path to mindfulness.
The fractal design is inspired by the idea that small actions can lead to infinite complexity. As William Blake wrote, "To see a world in a grain of sand, and a heaven in a wild flower," a single sketch in Celestial Blossom expands into a self-replicating pattern, illustrating how simple gestures can generate vast, intricate forms. These fractals mirror the meditative process itself, where focused, deliberate actions unfold into something greater.
Fractals
System Features
Celestial Blossom runs on a custom WebXR platform with a built-in renderer and multiplayer capabilities. The system uses Meta Quest 3 headsets with hand-tracking for intuitive interaction.
Gesture-Based Sketching
Participants can draw freely in VR using hand pinching gestures.
The system recognizes these sketches by calculating the mean squared error between the drawn paths and predefined shape templates such as moons and stars. Once a match is determined within a defined threshold, the system morphs the sketches into particles in the recognized shape.
Fractal Particles
The particles will be replicated at various scales to form a fractal pattern.
The movement and color of the fractals are influenced by the user’s drawing behavior, including speed, direction, and stroke continuity. This dynamic particle system ensures that each drawing evolves organically, creating a visually intricate and responsive environment that reflects the user’s actions.
Interactive Music
Each drawn stroke evokes a corresponding musical gesture, shaping an evolving and immersive soundscape. The system maps various attributes of the user’s drawing, such as stroke length, curvature, and density, to music generation and sound synthesis parameters, including pitch, duration, grain size, density, envelope shape, and spatialization.
Multiplayer Interaction
Celestial Blossom is designed as a shared experience, allowing multiple participants to create and interact in the same virtual space. Users appear to each other as ethereal, glowing forms. Drawings and sounds are synchronized in real time, enabling participants to collaborate on evolving artworks.
Revisiting The Experience
At the end of the experience, each participant receives a printed card featuring a top-down rendering of what they created in VR. The image on the card serves as a scannable pattern that, when scanned by our designated app, directs users to an online portal where they can listen to the unique music piece created during their session.
The Experience
Our booth in SIGGRAPH 2025 is designed as a serene, Zen-like space. Participants enter a dimly lit area with cushions, soft lighting, ambient lamps, and natural elements, creating a peaceful atmosphere. A projector displays a real-time top-down view of the evolving fractal patterns for spectators.
We guide 1 to 4 participants into the booth at the same time, where they sit on cushions. They will start with a built-in tutorial introducing the interaction before experiencing Celestial Blossom for about 3 minutes. After the session, each participant receives a printed card featuring their fractal artwork that they can scan to retrieve the music they created.
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