Show Notes
Does meditating in VR really make a difference? Today we are delighted to welcome Nanea Reeves, CEO and Co-Founder of TRIPP, an award-winning, breakthrough wellness platform, based on robust scientific research, which helps its users pursue and implement a daily mindfulness practice. In our conversation, Nanea shares how meditation transformed her life, the incredibly inspiring story behind TRIPP and giving people agency over how they feel.
Key Points From This Episode:
Tweetables:
“That respite of just dropping in and being present is hugely powerful and impacting on your mood. That was really kind of the magic of what we’ve been doing at TRIPP.” — @nanea [0:12:18]
“We don’t want it to replace meditation. But what we can do with the container of virtual reality is allow you to experience what it’s like to have your mind quiet and be fully present. Because VR can capture your awareness in a way that is extremely effective.” — @nanea [0:18:25]
“That palpable group energy. The metaverse can really help us explore all that. It’s nourishing. I want to think about how to create nourishing connections for people.” — @nanea [0:32:42]
“Being a female founder, I’ve seen a much more positive shift in people being conscientious about how they interact with me. The stuff that I just sucked up and ignored throughout the years, I’m not having to deal with now.” — @nanea [0:39:29]
Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:
Nanea Reeves on LinkedIn
Nanea Reeves on Twitter
TRIPP
HTC VIVE on Instagram
HTC VIVE on Twitter
HTC VIVE on YouTube
HTC Vive on Facebook
VIVE
Show Notes
Does meditating in VR really make a difference? Today we are delighted to welcome Nanea Reeves, CEO and Co-Founder of TRIPP, an award-winning, breakthrough wellness platform, based on robust scientific research, which helps its users pursue and implement a daily mindfulness practice. In our conversation, Nanea shares how meditation transformed her life, the incredibly inspiring story behind TRIPP and giving people agency over how they feel.
Key Points From This Episode:
Tweetables:
“That respite of just dropping in and being present is hugely powerful and impacting on your mood. That was really kind of the magic of what we’ve been doing at TRIPP.” — @nanea [0:12:18]
“We don’t want it to replace meditation. But what we can do with the container of virtual reality is allow you to experience what it’s like to have your mind quiet and be fully present. Because VR can capture your awareness in a way that is extremely effective.” — @nanea [0:18:25]
“That palpable group energy. The metaverse can really help us explore all that. It’s nourishing. I want to think about how to create nourishing connections for people.” — @nanea [0:32:42]
“Being a female founder, I’ve seen a much more positive shift in people being conscientious about how they interact with me. The stuff that I just sucked up and ignored throughout the years, I’m not having to deal with now.” — @nanea [0:39:29]
Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:
Nanea Reeves on LinkedIn
Nanea Reeves on Twitter
TRIPP
HTC VIVE on Instagram
HTC VIVE on Twitter
HTC VIVE on YouTube
HTC Vive on Facebook
VIVE
[INTRODUCTION]
[00:00:04] PC: Welcome to Good Vibes with VIVE. I’m your host, Pearly Chen. I’m an executive with a global technology company, HTC. As a mother of three young girls, I’ve loved building and investing in profound immersive technologies that make a positive difference in people’s lives. Each week, I speak with founders at the forefront of VR, AR, and the metaverse. All of them inspire me and some, I’ve been lucky enough to back as an investor. Tune in every week to hear some of the most inspiring closed-door conversations, and walk away informed, inspired, and full of good vibes.
[INTERVIEW]
[00:00:45] PC: I’ve been so impressed by and I’ve been admiring the moment that she walked into my office in San Francisco many, many years ago. She talked about how she wanted to use VR and meditation to help people feel better through VR and meditation. But as I understand, TRIPP is much more than just VR and meditation. We talked about the concepts of [inaudible 00:01:08], of psychedelics, Washington Post calls TRIPP, video game meets meditation, meets a happy pill. How I understand it is that TRIPP is all about inspiring a sense of all, opening up your senses, and perhaps enabling a feeling of altered state of consciousness without using drugs. And hence, how that helps many of us manage our stress, anxiety and for some people, managing and coping with debilitating pain. Nanea, I am so grateful that you’re here. Thank you for joining us today.
[00:01:44] NR: Thank you so much for asking me, Pearly. I’m so glad as well that we could finally figure out a way to work together when TRIPP launched on the VIVE Flow, which to me is one – I would say, it has to be the most comfortable device on the market as far as these head mounted displays, and I’m really excited to see how the landscape really evolves. But it was really fun to work with you and the HTC team.
[00:02:12] PC: Absolutely. I’ve really enjoyed tripping every day with the VIVE Flow device. Now, that is so, so easy to add that to my daily meditation routine. But Nanea, first of all, the original story. How did you as a gaming industry executive, with a shining resume of 20 years become a wellness and VR entrepreneur? How did that story unfold?
[00:02:36] NR: Well, a lot of it is just really based on my own personal journey. I found very early in my life that – I grew up in a very difficult environment. My mother had drug problems, she was addicted to heroin and it was very pervasive in my family. As a teenager – well, as a young child, I felt a tremendous amount of responsibility and the stress of trying to fix everything and maintain everything really started to create some internal issues that ultimately I ended up in a psychiatric hospital when I was about 15 years old. In many ways, we can look at these experiences as damaging or for me, it ended up in hindsight. I can see it was a real blessing because I met a very amazing therapist, who in one of our sessions, when I was having a panic attack, she taught me this breathing technique that immediately calmed me down. I’ve never really been exposed to anything like that.
My father and my mother separated when I was young, but he had a meditation practice. Maybe I had some early exposure, but there was something about this tool that was readily available to me, that became like part of the solutions that I found to navigate challenges in life. She started carving out a portion of our therapy sessions to guide me through meditation. It would start with like five minutes, then expand to 10 and 20. As a teenager, I started even going to meditation retreats. Now, this was way before the mobile apps came out or what I like to call mindfulness. It was a secret. I never told my friends because they would have made fun of me.
[00:04:37] PC: Didn’t seem cool at that time.
[00:04:39] NR: It was not cool, but it became this thing that I realize now was really – it changed the course of my life. My sister ended up going down the same road as my mother did, and she ultimately, 10 years ago in December, she died of a drug overdose. I really do think that, that moment of reaching out for help with my mental health issues, and getting support, getting the gift of meditation, but also the compassion and awareness of that woman to see what was in front of her and come up with a solution that was organic. I took to it like a duck to water. What it did was, it really ultimately rewired my decision framework. Going to the TRIPP experience, throughout the years, my meditation practice has given me a great life. I started making better decisions, I married a wonderful man, I built a great career in the video game industry, I started making healthy choices.
[00:05:52] PC: You had always led the practices you were introduced, the tender age of teenagehood. Actually, I was introduced to meditation teenagehood, probably around the same age of 14, 15. That has really changed the course of your life. And until then, you saw VR for the first time and TRIPP was born. What was the impetus?
[00:06:11] NR: Yeah. Well, I have the very good fortune of working with a lot of the people who were the founding team of Oculus, including the Oculus CEO, Brendan Iribe. I made a small investment in the Oculus company very early on. That gave me access to trying the equipment in the early days, and there was something really awesome about being conscious in this reality, but layering another reality over it. A lot of the early VR experiences were really focused on just simulating this reality digitally. I was more interested in how to use it in ways to experience things you can’t do in this life. There’s some really interesting things around embodiment. If you try TRIPP, you’re sitting in a chair, but we can actually make you feel like you’re rising up into space and floating into space. Those kinds of things were really interesting.
Then a lot of the early experiences I’ve tried, created by gamers, so they focused on scaring the pants off of you. But you can get scared or triggering [inaudible 00:07:40]. It’s very visceral. That got me thinking, “Well, what if, if we could create those kinds of emotions, could we create beneficial feelings, feelings of calm, and feeling safe, or maybe even feeling more confident or energized, or help people feel more focused.” Some of the things I’ve known throughout the years when I played video games, they really did help me feel in control of the world around me. Especially games like The Sims where you’re kind of in like this God mode, and you’re moving things around, and you can kind of escape into these worlds where you have superpowers. There was something psychologically beneficial to me, but also, I played video games to kind of sharpen my focus at times. So with TRIPP, it was really, how do we lean into those kind of mechanics and use technology for good.
[00:08:42] PC: It was always about that game mechanics that inspire you to feel that sense of empowerment to start with, and a world that is kind of fantastical, more psychedelic than a real-world version, this digital version, digital twin version of some real-world scenery. And then that leads me to think about the design choices of TRIPP as a content experience, because it’s a rather different, is procedurally generated, it has a lot of vibrant colors, the binaural, all the old design. You can personalize it with your pictures and different things. It seems like you’re transported to a completely different world. And interestingly, how that helps you find connections to yourself and becomes – not boring, but very stimulating daily practice. How did that initial idea of your element of game design, audio and fantasy come to your original prototype and how has it evolved into the TRIPP that is today?
[00:09:44] NR: Yeah. There’s a few things and I think when I slept in a big computer, really high-powered gaming computer to share the first prototype with you and the team at HTC. We’ve evolved in many ways beyond that, but our initial thinking was, we started to think, “Oh! Maybe we’ll start off on a beach and transition into cosmic.” When we did that, we didn’t find it that relaxing. I found this research out of UCLA that there were some issues with the research itself. But one of the outcomes that they had identified was that, when you have a frame of reference for an environment, like a beach or a forest, and it doesn’t smell or feel like that, like how it should be, it actually kind of creates this weird stress response. Then I found –
[00:10:43] PC: I’m kind of that way too.
[00:10:45] NR: Yeah, it’s like its own weird, virtual environmental uncanny valley. I found some research out of Milan by a scientist named Giuseppe Riva. He was experimenting with how to use awe in VR to trigger different emotional responses. And there’s something about when you go, “Oh, wow!” No matter what’s happening in your thought stream, or even maybe physically, there’s a moment of just letting go where you could sort of relax into the moment your awareness is really present, when you’re in that state of awe and wonder. That was like the key where I went, let’s lean into that. Because in VR, you can do that. You can create – you might be doing it in a small little tiny cubicle. But we can create a feeling of being in a vast space, play with scale in ways that can make you feel smaller, but part of something much bigger. These create states of awe. And then if you can attach sort of magical elements that make you go, “Wow! This is amazing.” No matter how challenging you might be feeling in the moment or your life might be, that respite of just dropping in and being present is hugely powerful and impacting on your mood. That was really kind of the magic of what we’ve been doing at TRIPP.
If we put you in space, can we have a little seahorse come by, something unexpected that surprises and delights you.
[00:12:39] PC: Has building TRIPP shifted your personal practice of meditation? Which I imagine wasn’t open eye before.
[00:12:46] NR: Yeah, it was open eye.
[00:12:48] PC: It was?
[00:12:49] NR: Yeah. I have a Tibetan meditation practice and [inaudible 00:12:54] Zazen practice, and you do meditate with your eyes open. If you look at many of the statues of the Buddha, the eyes are open, it’s in a gaze going down the bridge of the nose. Because to be fully aware, you’re very present. You use your hearing, you use the vision and awareness, your body in space, the sense of – all those sensations, that’s pure awareness. Sometimes, the tendency when you close your eyes, which can be part of a tool to get you connected. But sometimes, we can engage with sort of the internal movies.
[00:13:42] PC: The monkey mind.
[00:13:43] NR: Yeah, and also the movies we create, right, to just be really present. I found that that practice took me to another level of meditation, because I could bring it into any given moment. If something’s highly stressful, like the moment that I experienced when my husband and I were in a doctor’s office being told he had terminal cancer, and that I could be just really present in that moment, and not escalate into a state of fear. But I couldn’t close my eyes, and just kind of go, “Um.” I have to – being able to just connect to that posture, it grounded me to really be present for an incredibly challenging moment and navigate some really big feelings that were coming up. All at once, it was like a flood, I found the power of that practice. It takes many years to evolve it to that point.
[00:14:54] PC: Of course.
[00:14:55] NR: But it can be a very powerful tool, not only in navigating life’s challenges, but also career and being conscious about just power dynamics as a boss, or a parent that you really – if they swing in your favor, you actually have to be even more conscientious about the harm that we might be creating in the other person we’re interacting with.
[00:15:23] PC: If we can all have this practice ability to connect with that power and bringing out, then I believe that the world would be a much more peaceful place as well and much better –
[00:15:33] NR: Yeah. I agree with you, and there’s sort of this ripple effect that happens, that most of us will approach meditation from –with the intention, I want to be calmer, I want to be more relaxed, I want to be better than I am in the moment. What happens though, with a dedicated practice is that, that self-awareness where – it shifts from how is everything impacting me. Oh! That’s making me stressed out, let me meditate. But you start to organically shift how you’re impacting the world around you. That moment of self-awareness can actually be very painful. Because you might not always have a positive answer to that question of like, how did people feel when I walk in the room? I’ve had my own experience with that, especially as in business, and I realize, “Oh! I need to be better. I need to be kinder. I can give a note in a way that’s not damaging.” I need to understand my ripple effect. Because, my own states of fear, if I push that down to my team, they’re going to push it down to their team, all of those people are going to go home and interact with their family influenced by my interactions with them and there is a ripple effect that we have.
That is where really, like in my late husband’s life, he passed away six years ago. He had such a powerful meditation practice. He meditated five hours a day, two and a half in the morning, two and a half in the evening. He was always throughout the day, and his impact on the world around him was tremendous as a result, and he became a source of compassion, and strength, and hope, and courage and love for so many people in our lives, in our community. It was a huge loss when he left, but his impact still resonates. It was very influential to me after I emerged from the grief of that loss to think about what I wanted to do with my life and what I wanted to build. I wanted to help people have the tools readily available to them, to support them through what I could see and had developed over many years and what I witnessed with him. It’s like, how do we use tech for good in ways that can help people.
With TRIPP, one thing I’ll say, when you said in the intro, it’s more than meditation. In many ways, it’s not. We don’t want it to replace meditation. But what we can do with the container of virtual reality is allow you to experience what it’s like to have your mind quiet and be fully present. Because VR can capture your awareness in a way that is extremely effective. To achieve that with a meditation practice might take many, many, many years of daily dedication. In a way, it’s kind of a hack to show you what that feels like, and maybe give you a tool that can help you use it, so you can carry that state into the world, your real life or your current reality and be present with it. We’ve seen people start meditation with TRIPP and then evolve into a big meditation practice. Many people would start off with TRIPP on the Oculus or now the VIVE Flow, and go experience the EvolVR community in all space and the Engage platform. Because they wanted to be with a group of people in VR or group of avatars and have that group experience, that live experience.
We with the team at EvolVR and now they’re part of TRIPP, because it was like the perfect combination of being able to connect to self. But now, you can connect to others with that same intention. I’m really excited about how it’s evolving, right?
[00:20:08] PC: I was thinking about Vic as you talk about all of these wonderful things that you’re building, what a legacy that he’s left for the world through your work, through you as well. You talked too little bit about EvolVR just a moment ago. I think this is a great segue for us to talk about the mindful metaverse, a concept that you mentioned. Of course, last year, you also acquired a PsyAssist.
[00:20:32] NR: PsyAssist.
[00:20:32] PC: PsyAssist.
[00:20:34] NR: P-S-Y Assist.
[00:20:36] PC: That’s right, P-S-Y, PsyAssist to bring VR to palliative care and end of life patients. That’s on the clinical side of your mindful and metaverse vision. And now bring EvolVR into the umbrella of TRIPP to bring live events and group meditation. Tell us more about how your pieces are coming together for this vision.
[00:20:58] NR: Yeah. It’s just been like a wonderful journey. As a technology entrepreneur, I’ve always loved the experience of having an idea and bringing people together to build it. You don’t always know where it’s going to end up, but that’s part of the beauty of it, just build the first idea and get people to start using it, and then it will inform where to go next. In fact, I think when I first met you, we had built TRIPP, it’s procedurally generated, which means the technology can be responsive. We thought we would just do everything for you. We would build AI and have the machine learning learn over time. What does Pearly need in this moment?
[00:21:47] PC: That’s right. I remember that.
[00:21:49] NR: What we found even – we have all of that foundation in place, but what we found was once we launch, people said, “Well, I want to be able to select a male voice as well and have that option” or “I want to stay in longer than the 10 minutes that you’ve determined is the most optimal time to do this experience. What we kept hearing was, people wanted agency over how they feel. They wanted the tools to be able to say, “I want to do it my way. I want to feel empowered to take care of myself.” That was really eye opening to us, and it’s really informed how we’ve made decisions now. We’re going to expand that even more.
TRIPP and PsyAssist are two different entities, because clinical use cases need to be done with a lot more testing and research. When you’re dealing with mental health issues or medical conditions, it’s really important to do that under the guidance of trained professionals. TRIPP really is just more like a tool to support you, but it should never be a replacement for seeking and changing even your current care, working with professionals. I could see my own journey with that, the benefits that I’ve had with getting professional support at times when I’ve needed it and changed my life. Right?
The two are very separate, and that’s why we have separate brands. We’re even working with separate devices currently that allowed the clinician to control the experience or see what the patient is experiencing. With PsyAssist, we found that it is really about helping people, helping providers and clinicians provide tools that can augment or even reduce the dependency on chemicals that might be needed to address, support a patient. Even like thinking about how to help someone deal with how they’re getting treatments. Like in cancer treatment, one could use virtual reality during a chemo infusion, in some cases, depending on the state of the patient.
Virtual reality has this weird time compression where you seem like you’re in it for a much shorter period of time, than maybe the current reality time.
[00:24:36] PC: In real life.
[00:24:37] NR: Yeah. Well, the experiences that you can have in VR are very real. I’m kind of –
[00:24:47] PC: Physical reality.
[00:24:47] NR: Yeah, physical reality. There you go. That time compression can actually be helpful in a chemo treatment that tends to be about two hours long. If the patient perceives it as being only 45 minutes or under an hour, that in and of itself has its own benefit. We’ve seen companies like Applied VR, really drive breakthroughs in how to address pain management through the distraction that VR can apply. You can hack the brain to think that it’s in a cold environment, and deal with burn conditions, et cetera. Virtual reality is a very powerful tool. The PsyAssist part of our business is really focused right now on just collecting information on how we can support addiction recovery, palliative care, end of life, and also how we can maybe even reduce anxiety before different therapeutic treatments, whether it’s the psychedelic treatments to address depression, or surgery, pre-surgery, anxiety reduction.
In TRIPP, we’re seeing that patients are finding it very helpful, but we want to collect the data to actually quantify what that help really looks like. It’s very exciting arena, but it takes so much – it’s a much longer path to commercialization than what we’re doing on the consumer side. What we found with trip on the Oculus Quest, and the PlayStation, and now the HTC VIVE Flow is that, allowing people access to environments that are designed to help relax you, et cetera during the pandemic, really helpful. That was something that I feel like in 2020, and we launched in December of 2019. In 2020, we found our product market fit. We found our reason for being by really, we were a tool, especially to help men on these gamer platforms manage what was happening internally. We all went, we’ve all, the whole planet is going through a very stressful time during the last 24 months.
[00:27:21] PC: The recent study shows that the pandemic has added 130 million new cases, which I think is vastly under estimated of severe depressive disorders and anxiety disorders. Where of course, women, and the younger people are more affected than the others. I wanted to ask you about whether you have observed any gendered difference use of TRIPP during this time. Of course, some explosive user growth on your side as well. Perfect timing, but also removing hopefully becomes a movement where we remove this stigma of talking about taking care of ourselves mentally, which is so real. Like you said, mental health is just health, which is part of your overall health.
[00:28:05] NR: It’s just health, right? It’s not like you can take your mind, and your emotions. They’re separate from your physical being. When our mind is not right, our health can tremendously suffer. You look at heart attacks, and inflammation states and cortisol levels. When our physical state is compromised, it can also affect – you can have chemically-induced states of depression. I certainly saw that with my husband as he went through cancer treatment. How do we help people navigate this? All of us will be affected by it. We were all affected by the pandemic, whether we had a mental health diagnosis or not.
[00:28:52] PC: Or not, yeah.
[00:28:54] NR: Or not. I think the stigma around addressing our states, our internal states is starting to change, because we are starting to understand, it’s just as important that I take care of my internal condition in the way that I exercise and take care of my physical being this. We have to take the time out to do that, and, I think a lot of the people in the VR industry were surprised at how fitness emerged as a very big –
[00:29:30] PC: Use case.
[00:29:32] NR: Yeah, it was a big use case for it. Now we’re seeing – TRIPP was the first one really, one of the first in on all the big platforms. We definitely were the first in VR to bring that concept of –
[00:29:48] PC: Inner fitness.
[00:29:48] NR: Yeah, inner fitness or mindfulness, and the mindful metaverse. I really am focusing – our clinical business, I ultimately believe longer term for the company might actually be our largest revenue stream. I hear your little baby. She sounds like she’s going to be a fierce warrior when she grows up.
[00:30:13] PC: That’s her name, Athena, Goddess of War, Warrior Goddess.
[00:30:17] NR: There you go.
[00:30:18] PC: With fair and wisdom.
[00:30:20] NR: She’s owning it.
[00:30:21] PR: Crying with gusto. I’m sorry about that.
[00:30:24] NR: No, no apologies. I think this idea, everybody’s talking about the metaverse and it is, to me, crazy that we’re going – all we’re talking about is, how do brands go into the metaverse? Oh, you can go to virtual malls and [inaudible 00:30:45], buy digital Nikes and Gucci purses for your digital avatar. I’m just going, “What?” We have a chance to build something amazing, why are we replicating the worst parts of what we’ve built here, right? So I’m trying to look at it like, how do we create use technology in different environments to help you have a different experience with yourself and the concept of self? Can you just let go of that and maybe plug into a collective consciousness?
Digital coherence and explore how energy can come together in ways that you contribute energetically too by coming together as a community. This is what the EvolVR community has created, where they’ve had really meaningful talks about death, and dying and how to support each other through challenges. They’ve had big celebrations when people got jobs and new ways to support each other. I think it’s just the little seeds being planted of maybe different ways we can connect to each other. I really want to create the spaces and the environments that allow us to innovate beyond this current reality, in how to connect with each other and collectively. What is a collective communal state of consciousness? We felt it in group retreats. Some people feel it when they go to events like Burning Man, and that festival culture, you can feel it. Even when you’re out at a festival, and the DJ is like really helping, you do feel that palpable group energy. The metaverse can really help us explore all that. It’s nourishing. I want to think about how to create nourishing connections for people.
[00:32:56] PC: That is so inspiring. That is the quintessential definition of whole person wellbeing, as well. It’s physical, it’s psychological, it’s also social. It sounds to me that you’re bringing all of these pieces together to create a whole person wellbeing and conscious –
[00:33:12] NR: There’s also, there’s also a really important part of expanding our whole kind of spiritual connection. One of it, it’s really like, first, we have to allow ourselves to receive support and that can be really challenging. My grandmother was Chinese and really hard to even receive a compliment, right? I find in life, like there’s almost a part of me that even expressing confidence sometimes I think it’s going to bring me bad luck or something. Do you know that mentality, right? Like be careful kind of thing. But there is, just first allowing myself to receive help and receive support, whether it’s from a tool or others, right? Can be, the abstraction of these virtual environments actually makes it easier to allow myself to receive it.
And then what I found in my own life, and what I witnessed in my husband’s life, in Vic’s life was, when the focus got on giving back, I had a sense of purpose. No matter what was falling apart in my world, fundraising for a VR company in the pandemic, like all the fear around it, having that sense of purpose and mission. It really motivated me. It helped me deal with the stress. So creating these opportunities for people to give support, so to give and receive, really, I think is a huge opportunity to not only TRIPP, but when we approach these concepts of metaverse communities and environments. I’m really excited about. We need to encourage people to think outside the virtual mall box, and really think about how to innovate. We can innovate new economies. Some of the play to earn economies look really interesting to me. I’m noodling some ideas on –
[00:35:23] PC: Meditate to earn.
[00:35:25] NR: Care to earn.
[00:35:26] PC: Give to earn. Care to earn.
[00:35:29] NR: Care to earn. Care for myself, care for others.
[00:35:33] PC: Compliment to earn.
[00:35:35] NR: Yeah, exactly. Because that has value. It has value in the world. We know it helps people.
[00:35:43] PC: That’s so inspiring. I really got me thinking. In the very near future, when TRIPP has set out to achieve all of his wildest dreams, what would that look like for you?
[00:35:54] NR: Well, I can’t share all of them.
[00:35:56] PC: Okay.
[00:35:57] NR: I have a couple of ideas that we’re in the process of executing very soon, and I’m really excited about and it’s all in this vein that we’re talking about. It really, ultimately, it’s going to be more about the tools that we build and how we let other people contribute. And have that sense of purpose. I think a lot about gamification, and I was talking to my friend, Amy Jo Kim, who’s an amazing, amazing person in the games industry. Her contribution is huge. She works with a lot of companies on how to gamify their experiences. I always call it like, lamify or lamification when it’s done wrong. Do you know what I mean?
In mental health apps, it can actually make you feel worse, right? Because it’s constantly reinforcing that you’re not good enough the way that you are right now, until you achieve some stupid resiliency score, some mindfulness score, right? What we found was, how do we gamify this feeling of contribution, like you’re making a difference in the world and that you’re part of something bigger. You will see us in our approach to augmented reality and how we connect that to our virtual reality experiences as a sort of a seamless reality layering. How you can move from full immersion to enhanced experiences, we’re going to use that as a mechanism to try to explore how to have a sense of contribution.
[00:37:49] PC: That is really, really exciting. I can’t wait to see what you bring next.
[00:37:53] NR: It’s definitely confusing if you don’t. But if you look at video games that have these co-op modes of gameplay, like EVE Online or co-op modes of world building, like Roblox and Minecraft. Those communities are really strong, right, and they’re evergreen. People stay in them. They have a sense of purpose. They’re connecting. There’s a version of that that is in the zone of transformation of mindfulness. I’m putting a stake in the ground to be a big part of that.
[00:38:29] PC: Becoming of the mindful metaverse, hopefully with more people joining TRIPP, and all of us can become more conscious and create a collective consciousness that’s ultimately beneficial for creating a better future for daughters, and sons and future generations.
[00:38:44] NR: Yeah. Thank you so much, because we – the world is actually really amazing right now. There are terrifying aspects of it, and technology has opened our eyes up to conditions that have existed throughout all of our existence as a civilization. We just didn’t see it at the level that we’re seeing it now. We can feel the reactions we’re having to the injustices, and lack of equity and inclusion. We’re seeing a shift just on how I deal with others now in the business community. Being a female founder, I’ve seen a much more positive shift in people being conscientious about how they interact with me. The stuff that I just sucked up and ignored throughout the years, I’m not having to deal with now. It is getting better because technology has helped us really escalate the discussion, shine a light on and amplify. I think that there are ways to do that that are very topical, and there are ways to do it that are very effective. Our goal is to look at how do we do this in ways that are very supportive.
[00:40:09] PC: Thank you, Nanea for spending time with us today. I really feel inspired and I’m going to go for another session of TRIPP before my lunch. Thank you, Nanea.
[00:40:18] NR: Thank you for supporting us, Pearly.
[00:40:20] PC: This is amazing. We look forward to continue to support TRIPP’s journey and continue to working with you.
[00:40:27] NR: Thank you so much. It’s always a pleasure to talk to you. I hope we can connect soon. Bye-bye.
[OUTRO]
PC: Thank you for listening. Please subscribe and share this podcast with a colleague or friend that you think could use some good vibes. Learn more at vive.com and follow HTC VIVE on social media. See you next week.
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