Research shows that one particular medium — virtual reality (VR) — shows promise in helping patients suffering from mental illness, and companies are already moving into this cutting-edge field.
A recent report from Nature Review suggests that the immersive environment offered by VR, combined with artificial intelligence, could help address anxiety, psychotic symptoms, post-traumatic stress, eating disorders, depression and stress management.
Two companies developing mental health applications for virtual reality (specifically the Meta Quest and Apple Vision Pro headsets) are Tripp and Liminal VR. These companies create virtual experiences that aim to focus, inspire and calm the mind.
Liminal VR
“Experiencing content from a first-person perspective and how that affects people is something unique,” Damian Moratti, co-founder and CEO of Liminal VR, told Decrypt. “We knew there was something there. That's what makes VR different.”
Melbourne-based Liminal, co-founded by Moratti and Nick Buschietta, began offering mental health experiences in 2018. As Moratti explained, Liminal VR employed a team of artists and developers, as well as neuroscientists and psychologists, to develop the Liminal app.
“The biggest questions Nick and I had were why and how,” Moratti says, “so we enlisted scientists to help us find the answers and guide our UX design.” The resulting product was Liminal.
Image via Liminal VR
Liminal VR gives users the option to choose from a variety of experiences, including calming, energizing, pain relief and awe.
“Awe can generally be simplistically explained as a combination of vastness and wonder, so we use the word vastness instead of scale, not because scale is not effective in expressing awe,” Moratti says. “It can be, but vastness incorporates scale and can incorporate other elements.” He gives the example of an 8-year-old lifting a car to help a parent.
“You can be in awe of the vastness of human potential,” he said.
In addition to wellness applications, Liminal VR also offers training simulations for firefighting, mushroom picking, landscaping, construction, and more.
As Moratti explained, VR is fundamentally different from traditional media, and you're encouraged to fully immerse yourself in it: whereas the flat screens of phones, PCs and consoles clearly separate the user from the content, VR directly immerses the user in the experience, creating a unique feeling of immersion.
“With VR, you plug in and you're totally immersed in a virtual world,” Moratti says. “You feel a sense of agency within that world, experiencing the content from a first-person perspective. It has a sense of scale, vastness, and conceptual depth that no other technology can replicate, and it has a psychological effect that's different from other media.”
Trip
For Los Angeles-based Tripp, virtual reality alone isn't enough to deliver customized experiences: In July, the startup announced it had integrated generative AI into a VR experience it called “Kōkua,” after the Hawaiian word for “help, assistance, support.”
Tripp was founded in 2017 by former Electronic Arts (EA) senior vice president and Machinima COO Nanea Reeves.
“Kokua is a very spiritual word for Hawaiians,” Reeves told Decrypt. “It really boils down to the notion of giving without expecting to receive,” he said, adding that kokua also inspires a desire to keep the environment clean.
Reeves said the idea for TRIPP came from seeing how virtual reality was being used to deliver thrills and chills in video games.
“If it's so easy to create fear, even in your living room, you should feel like you're about to fall off a cliff,” she says. “I kept thinking, 'What other emotions can I give people?' Can we use this technology, and immersion in particular, to create positive emotions?”
Reeves explained that Tripp worked with neuroscience advisers and mental health experts at the University of Colorado's National Center for Mental Health Innovation to help develop the concept and infrastructure for data collection.
“Since we launched in December 2019, just before the pandemic, we've been collecting all of the mood data from people in the app, which has given us the data foundation to build our recommendation engine and power a lot of our audio content,” Reeves said.
Image: TRIPP
As Reeves explained, users share their thoughts and feelings with the AI, and Kōkua offers personalized reflections, custom meditations, and mindfulness practices.
“You can tinker with it, and you can interrupt it,” she says, “or even say, 'Make it a Shakespearean sonnet-style meditation on paying your taxes.' And you can see how it adapts in real time, if you want to be specific.”
Reeves said personal experiences, including a mental health crisis he experienced as a teenager, prompted him to explore using virtual reality technology, video games and meditation for wellbeing.
“I realize now that when I was playing the game, I felt a kind of sense of agency and control that I probably didn't feel in physical reality, but it was cumulative,” Reeves said.
“The real goal is present consciousness, and if you think about it, virtual reality is a very powerful tool for capturing consciousness and making it present,” she added.
Editor: Ryan Ozawa.
Generally intelligent newsletter
A weekly AI journey narrated by generative AI model Gen.
