What does it look like when we try to design the divine? How do we meditate with machines?
These questions were the focus of the TUM Institute for Ethics in Artificial Intelligence (IEAI) Speaker Series on July 16, 2025, titled “Meditating With Machines: When Spiritual Symbols Meet Augmented Reality”, hosted by Prof. Patrick Hung, Professor at Ontario Tech University. Dr. Auxane Boch, Research Associate at the TUM IEAI and coordinator of the alignAI project, moderated the session. alignAI Doctoral Candidate Julia Li attended the session and reflected on the intersection between spirituality, culture and technology.
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. To achieve this, 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.
The AR environment is further mirrored in the physical world by a theomorphic Pensive Buddha robot that resembles the statue and can respond to people through movement. Additionally, the Pensive Buddha robot is accompanied by an animoid robot representing a deer, which is an animal with deep symbolic meaning in Buddhism. Together with the AR app, the goal is to eventually merge the virtual and tangible aspects of the project by utilising an LLM to transform the user’s virtual input into a robot-led personalised meditation experience.
What should the role of technology be in religion and spirituality?
During the session, Prof. Hung touched upon his experience integrating religious elements of Buddhism into twinned digital and physical worlds. He noted that a key challenge in constructing theomorphic robots is the “Uncanny Valley” effect, where humanoid robots generate feelings of revulsion and discomfort for people. To prevent this from happening, his team made adjustments to specific elements such as the robot’s movement speed and the robot’s colour.
Prof. Hung also emphasised 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 to be more faithful to Buddhist spiritual practices.
Additionally, the research team gathered other feedback from users regarding the technical design of the project. These included major aspects of the user experiences such as feelings of motion sickness caused by the VR environment and how well the virtual environment connects to reality.
Questions asked during the session also 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 other 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 organisers for encouraging discussions about creatively using AI technologies and the importance of considering cultural contexts. The recording of the talk can be found here: https://youtu.be/FLSzVnrtxYo