The IEAI Discusses Meditating with Machines

“Meditating With Machines: When Spiritual Symbols Meet Augmented Reality”

What does it look like when we try to design the divine? How do we meditate with machines?

Moving spiritual practices into the digital realm offers opportunities for people to reimagine what it means to connect with their religion. But when such a core element of the human experience is translated into a virtual environment, what changes and what stays the same?

Our speaker for the IEAI July 2025 Speaker Series was Patrick Hung, Professor at Ontario Tech University. He spoke about the Pensive Buddha robot and app, a project supported by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism in Korea. Auxane Boch, Research Associate at the IEAI, moderated the talk. During the session, Prof. Hung touched upon his experience integrating religious elements of Buddhism into twinned digital and physical worlds.

…my first research interest was how to make the [Pensive] Buddha [into] a robot

While meditation apps have existed in the past, Prof. Hung and his team wanted to create an immersive augmented reality (AR) experience which would aid mental wellness and facilitate spiritual practice. Prof. Hung decided to meld the technologies behind anthropomorphic and zoomorphic robots, artificial intelligence, large language models (LLMs) and virtual worship.

The statue [is] over one thousand years old, dating back to the Three Kingdoms Period in Korea…People [then] were hoping that one day the Buddha would come and bring peace

To accomplish his goal of bringing the technological and spiritual realms together, Prof. Hung and his colleagues transformed the renowned Pensive Bodhisattva Statue (designated as National Treasure No. 83) into an embodied figure accessible to users in a virtual AR environment. In this AR space, users can connect with the statue and its environment in religiously meaningful ways, such as burning incense, interacting with symbolic animals and making sacred hand mudra gestures. 

Eventually, the goal is for the AR app to be connected to a physical robot, which is an interactive 3-D scan of the actual Pensive Bodhisattva statue. Prof. Hung’s hope is to one day synchronize the robot with the virtual avatar through an LLM which can learn from the user’s behaviors and preferences in the AR space.

In the Western World, people would think about the Buddha as a philosophical icon…a way of living or meditation…But to touch the Buddha or let it touch you, it’s something like a thin red line.

Prof. Hung wanted a way for the user to receive haptic feedback from the embodied Buddha in the AR environment. However, physical engagement with the Buddha was a sensitive issue. As a solution, the Pensive Buddha robot is accompanied by an animoid robot deer, reflected as an animal avatar in the virtual environment. By interacting with the deer, a deeply symbolic animal in Buddhism, the user can have a spiritually significant experience while respecting the physical boundaries of the embodied Buddha.   

Additionally, the research team gathered other feedback from users regarding the technical design of the project. These included major aspects of the user experience, such as feelings of motion sickness caused by the VR environment and how well the virtual environment connected to reality.  

Prof. Hung also emphasized the importance of user and expert consultations when creating theomorphic robots. He reflected on how consultations with Buddhist monks and users helped the team refine the project and make it more faithful to Buddhist spiritual practices.

Questions asked during the session generated a dynamic conversation about the possible well-being benefits of using technology in meditation. These ranged from using augmented worlds to enhance meditation for dementia patients to creating technologies for a variety of religions. While the Pensive Buddha robot and app are still in their prototype phase, the project is opening up possibilities for how human spirituality can evolve alongside technology and vice versa.

We extend our thanks to Prof. Hung and the organizers for encouraging discussions about the importance of considering cultural and religious contexts in technological design. The recording of the talk can be found here.