I was curious how others designed an online meditation room, and I was a bit disappointed. 

I looked at the first 20 results from Google. Not all the pages were designed to be a meditation room, but some of them were. But the disappointing part was that the “room” was usually a simple page with a list of audio files you could play. 

Maybe there is a good reason for this. After all, once you choose your meditation and click play, you close your eyes and focus inwardly, and it no longer matters what the page looks like.

But let’s think about a physical meditation room or a temple. In that case, you have a distinct visual experience as well, not only an auditory one. Space and sometimes beauty remind your brain that this room is a sacred place. It invites your mind to relax and slow down. It is an anchor and a reminder that you are about to enter a meditative state. Sometimes you can feel the smell of incense or hear the bells ring, or soft music, or running water. 

Perhaps an experienced meditator does not need all these cues, but for beginners, it may help, and they could make the entry to meditation so much more enjoyable. 

How can we bring this online? 

We can’t generate smell from a webpage (yet), but we control the visuals and the sounds. 

What if, instead of a static page, we generate an experience of entering the meditation room. 

It could start with a white page, where your choices are softly faded in with smooth transitions, with great care to always have enough space between the elements on the screen to create the feeling of openness. 

It could play some gentle music in the background or nature sounds, or the crackling of a fireplace. And once you choose your audio meditation, everything fades to black, inviting you to close your eyes and enter the meditation. 

We could take this further and make it a group experience where more people join the same room, and the meditation would start at the same time for everyone, helping to keep everyone in sync and enhancing the experience. And we could configure the room experience to be a “Nature Room,” a “Void Room,” a “White Room,” a “Crystal Room.” Each one would have a different set of visual and audio cues that would make it unique.

I wonder if anyone would find such an experience valuable and wonderful.