Nanea Reeves: TRIPP’s Meditation Platform
Nanea Reeves, CEO and Co-Founder of TRIPP, speaks with Kim Bullock, Jessica Hagen, and Faaizah Arshad about the process of establishing TRIPP, as well as her company's design thinking, evolution, and advice for other up and coming XR companies.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
BIO
Nanea Reeves founded TRIPP, an award-winning global XR Wellness company, following a period of tremendous personal loss that led her to rethink her life’s purpose. With a lifelong meditation practice that began in her teens, Nanea recognized its transformative powers, and she wanted to figure out a way to make meditation more accessible to people around the world. TRIPP was the solution, which married her meditation practice with her love of video games and her extensive software development experience. Through interactive, immersive experiences that combine gameplay mechanics, mindfulness structures, and psychedelic-inspired environments, users are guided into powerful, awe-inspiring transformative states. Ultimately, TRIPP aims to empower people to take control of their mental and emotional well-being wherever they are. Nanea brings over 15 years of experience in digital distribution, video game technologies and mobile application development. Prior to co-founding TRIPP, Nanea was President and COO of textPlus, one of the top mobile communications applications. Nanea was also COO at Machinima, the largest gaming network on YouTube that was acquired by Warner Brothers, Chief Strategy Officer at Gakai (acquired by Sony) and she was the Senior Vice President and COO of Global Online at Electronic Arts who acquired JAMDAT, the mobile game start-up that Nanea ran technology at. Through her leadership at these previous companies, she’s facilitated $1.6 billion in exits.
Jessica Hagen
Hello and welcome back to Psychiatry XR. I'm your host Jessica Hagen. I'm joined by my co-hosts. Dr. Kim Bullock and Faaizah Arshad. We have a distinguished guest on today's episode, Nanea Reeves, CEO and co-Founder of TRIPP. Nanea founded TRIPP, an award-winning global XR wellness company, following a period of tremendous personal loss that led her to rethink her life's purpose. But the lifelong meditation practice that began in her teens, Nanea recognized its transformative powers and wanted to find a way to make meditation more accessible to people around the world. TRIPP was the solution which married her meditation practice with her love of video games and her extensive software development experience. Nanea brings over 15 years of experience in digital distribution, video game technologies and mobile application development. Prior to co-Founding TRIPP, Nanea was President and COO of textPlus, a mobile communications application. She was also COO at Machinima, a gaming network on YouTube that was acquired by Warner Brothers, Chief Strategy Officer at Gakai (acquired by Sony) and Senior Vice President and COO of Global Online at Electronic Arts who acquired JAMDAT, the mobile games startup that Nanea ran technology at. Through her leadership at these previous companies, she facilitated $1.6 billion and exits. Nanea, thank you so much for joining us today.
Nanea Reeves
Thank you, Jessica. I'm so glad to be here with you and Faaizah and appreciate the platform you've created to have these discussions and very honored to have Kim join as well. Kim Bullock is someone I've admired from the onset of creating TRIPP.
Jessica Hagen
That's so fantastic. Can you tell us a little bit about TRIPP and how it works and its use case?
Nanea Reeves
Well, it's still definitely a work in progress. But you would think of TRIPP as a new way to meditate. We have focused first and foremost on a consumer wellness offering, because we could see that 1) there was a real need, and it was present decision to launch right before the pandemic, because we found that we were able to really support people with navigating how they were feeling in the moment. And the other thing though, just from a pure entrepreneurial standpoint, when you build software, you need a lot of people to use them, so that you can get that conversation to start between you and your end users on how to make the product better and improve over time. And it's really hard to do with even just a few 100 people or even just a few 1000. You need a lot of people and I know that coming from the games industry. So that was really, I think a key differentiator for TRIPP and maybe other companies in the space that we want consumer first, really with the goal of: can we just get a lot of people using the product. And then the wonderful thing about launching on the gaming platforms like Oculus Quest and PlayStation VR: gamers are the best early users you can ever work with because they will tell you immediately how much you suck. And they will take the time to write very long missives on how you can be better. And so, I find if you look at all major platform launches, whether it's personal computers, mobile, handheld devices, or now we're seeing these spatial head-mounted displays, having gamers be the very first audience on there is a really important voice to listen to when you're creating content. They really know technology, and they have very strong opinions about graphics quality, quality of experience, as well as how to keep them retained and engaged.
Jessica Hagen
That's really important. So, it was so valuable to get that feedback right off the bat.
Nanea Reeves
Yeah, 100% it was painful, you know. But, we also knew that it was important because it's very easy to get fooled in XR by the novelty factor of that first time VR experience where the user goes, “Oh, wow!” But in order, for even in the clinical use cases, it's very important to design your experiences to get repeat usage. That can't be tacked on as an afterthought. I see a lot of mistakes that services created with more of a clinical focus… they kind of save the gamification for later. They'll deal with that later while they focus on measurement and the approval thing. But the reality is, it has to be part of the design. It has to be inherent to the design. And oftentimes it shows up in the end result, something I cheekily call Lame-ification. Because like scoring, et cetera, it's not going to motivate someone really. You have to give them benefit. There has to be fun involved. There has to be some kind of personal ongoing investment. That is really important. And all of that has to be part of the product design, too. If you want to drive a behavioral change that will lead to a different outcome.
Kim Bullock
Absolutely. So, is that design thinking that's informing you? Would you call that? It sounds like from the gaming industry, you're able to have a process to iterate.
Nanea Reeves
Yes, iteration is actually really key. So one, you can’t analyze data you don't insert. So even just designing the data acquisition part of your product is really important because you can't retrieve data you don't insert, etc. There's certain sorts of software laws. And again, many people in our industry didn't understand the value of that even in the games industry in the early days of online gaming. And then they started to realize that data driven decision trees, etc., are really important. And I've looked at that lens of: how do you create a digital therapeutic, especially for a chronic condition. The foundation, the medicine, is the engagement as it were. And so, it has to be part of the thinking. Now, there are things around the design thinking for game and engagement models that have to meet certain factors. One is, you know, getting over that initial novelty. And then how do you get someone to get a sense of investment into the experience, so that they want to continue to progress through whatever the protocol is, or the goals are within the product. And then also, you have to balance that because Faaizah might have a different way of reacting and responding to the environment than Jessica would have. And so, it has to be adaptive in real time. And that balancing is super hard, right? And even the best people in the industry will take ongoing iteration, analysis, tests to get that balancing right. And we've all felt it. You can feel it when something's too easy— you get bored very quickly. And if it's too hard, you get frustrated, and you give up. So it's finding that sweet spot and that sweet spot varies from one person to the other. And I believe that this is the biggest risk in the category of digital therapeutics because you can spend a lot of money, not have enough users really helping you harden those engagement models, which can take (and it took us) I would say about 18 months with 10s of 1000s of regular users using our application daily to harden our metrics. And then you go to market with commercial therapeutic offering. And it fails. It actually has an effect on the industry as a whole, you know, whether investors want to step up and fund et cetera. So it's really important that we get this right. And so our decision was not to focus on the clinical stuff just yet, to really harden engagement models. But there's been a really interesting byproduct of just being available broadly as a consumer product on a low-cost device. Researchers have been picking up our application and studying it. And oftentimes, I won't know until they have certain requests as they move into Phase Two even. And it was interesting, I had one investor say, “Well, you shouldn't let people do that. What if the data doesn't come back positive?” And I said, “Well, I want to know!” I welcome it. You know, we want to know where our product has opportunities and where it has shortcomings too.
Faaizah Arshad
Since you wait before you start implementing like the clinical perspective, when do you start involving like clinicians and like a psychiatrist or getting input from providers who will eventually want to use this for their patients?
Nanea Reeves
TRIPP consumer doesn't make any claims. Our approach more to how we present TRIPP is in much the same way that we work out physically proactively. We feel that there are tools needed to help people think about what's the internal version of that. And that's another thought that I have about the medical industry right now specific to mental health, it's kind of carved out as this separate thing from the health. And oftentimes, we only react when someone's in a moment of crisis. But what does the average person without a mental health diagnosis do to help them during a global pandemic, during the loss of a job, the day to day stress of life? We know that a mindfulness practice can help a person with that. And we saw a really great use of, native use of VR, to capture someone's awareness and bring it to the present moment, which ultimately if you have a meditation practice, this is the long term goal, right—present awareness. And there's huge benefits that come from that. I've seen it in my own life, as far as being able to self-regulate, et cetera. So to answer your question, Faaizah, when I got funding, I knew in my career that I was at a point that if I had an idea, I could walk in to, you know, get VC meetings, and I could get support. And that took many, many years to accomplish. And you know, when I mentor anyone, I always say, like, you know, “Align yourself with successful teams, etc, because it will facilitate your ability to bring your own ideas to life.” That's been my experience. And so as soon as I got funding, I hadn't even built the product or prototype yet. It was a concept. I had read a lot of Walter Greenleaf’s research, Skip Rizzo’s, Giuseppe Riva and, and I got really inspired by that and went, “Wow, if we could really bring like what we know how to do in the games industry, to this, and we're at an inflection point where the devices are going to be much more accessible to a broader audience, we can really make a difference in the world.” And that's what I pitched. And I raised $4 million in seed money. And I saw that there was a conference that Kim was at and Walter, and I flew up there and I said, “Look, I have funding. I have this idea. I know I can get it supported. Will you help me build it right?” And I was really inspired by the work that was presented at that conference. I think this was in 2017…that it was at Stanford, late 2017. Or it might have been early 2018.
Kim Bullock
That was our psychiatry conference. Yeah. Yeah. With VR. Yep.
Nanea Reeves
Yeah.
Kim Bullock
Yeah.
Nanea Reeves
With VR.
Kim Bullock
Yep.
Nanea Reeves
Yeah. Giuseppe was there and Walter and Skip and you, and I had just gotten funded. So, from the onset, I really wanted the support. And Walter was so generous with his encouragement, and he said, “Look Nanea, so many people never approach us at the beginning before they've built it. It's always after the fact.” So, he connected me with Matt Vogl's team, and we worked with Debbie Boeldt and others at Matt’s when they were the National Mental Health Innovation Center, just even to help us with how we collect data in our app. The research we were leveraging, was it sound, or was it sort of pseudo woo-woo? I didn't have the understanding to differentiate. And so having guidance of people like Walter and Matt and Debbie and Skip and attending Kim's SPIT-C sessions, and really, you know, I was very humble in my understanding that I knew nothing about this, that there were a lot of people who have been working in this space for a long time, and it would be really lame for me not to leverage that all throughout. And so, it's ongoing, you know. Matt and Debbie and Walter, I consider them part of our team, in many ways, and then we collaborate with others along the way. And then, you know, we look at the research coming in, and if it looks promising, we'll figure out how to continue to evolve it as well working with the researchers. So, but the idea being that if something emerges, like we've seen some positive, early signals on attention, depression, specific to you know, how we could work even with ketamine. You know, the VA had done something with TRIPP. So, we look at that and then can we use our platform flexibility, the way it's architected to maybe work with subject matter experts in the future, to target the content specifically to an indication or, you know, to create different interventions.
Jessica Hagen
That's fantastic. And yeah, you were talking about these collaborations that you've established, right. And in January, you actually announced a partnership with Equa Health, which is a mindfulness training app spun out of Carnegie Mellon University with the aim to develop TRIPP’s first clinically backed experiences for mindfulness.
Nanea Reeves
Correct.
Jessica Hagen
So with that, is that kind of pushing along this expansion into providing TRIPP as a mental health treatment? Or are you still very much analyzing how it works within the more preventative measures that you've been talking about?
Nanea Reeves
Yeah, we're more focused right now on broadening the consumer distribution input, because we think that…well, there's two reasons for that decision. One, it helps us harden the engagement models without having sort of the guardrails of a regulatory process, if we're going to target a specific indication. So really, like with our consumer app, we're learning how to get people back in, how to keep them engaged, you know, around just wellness. You would think of it as a different way to meditate beyond just listening to an audio file on your phone. We are understanding the frequency of content updates, how to use our data to give the people a sense of progress— that's something that Equa Health has really nailed. We got excited about their process and how, you know, combined with our offering that could evolve our product in a way that will help people continue to connect. You know, it's just like, how do you get people to adhere to a workout routine, right? There's a muscle that gets involved. I mean, for me, it's been ongoing, but I've been meditating several decades do you know. So I do know how to sit in the chair and just get it done, no matter what's happening. A lot of people need more framework for that. So that's our main focus. But there's some real reasons why we prioritize that first. One, I do see kind of the early days of focusing on digital therapeutic, going to market through the 510(k) software as a medical device classification as being too restrictive for a successful software solution. We know from being live as a consumer product that you have to update product all the time. You have to personalize the journey to the user. And it's just part of why we use the apps that we use in our daily life. It is an application and it's a live service. And I only recently am starting to see some shifts in the thinking on how the FDA needs to change its approval process to support that, right. They're surprisingly innovative in their thinking on this and much more than I thought they would be. But it's still so much of a moving target that I'm not ready to invest in that yet. Because I see the investment in hardening the engagement models and getting across all the devices as being a key driver of success on the therapeutic side. Because you can see some companies have already gone to market with devices that are four years old, and they're stuck to those devices. They have sensors and things that… now we have devices that track your real hands and new ones coming out that track your whole body.
Kim Bullock
Yeah.
Nanea Reeves
So I see that as really risky.
Kim Bullock
Yeah, being flexible and responsive to the technology changes and innovation.
Nanea Reeves
It's very similar to the mobile app, Kim. Like in the early days of the future phone, before there was more standardization, it was chaos. Everyone was trying to own mobility. And they were competing at the feature level. That's what's happening with HMDs right now, to kind of go through an approval funnel. And now we're even seeing some of the ones you know could potentially be banned from certain territories. So it's challenging, right?
Kim Bullock
Yeah, you have to be thinking about the long game. And I've been a fan of yours because of the quality of your product. And now that you're describing this, I know why now. There's such good quality because you understand the process from your background and entrepreneurialship and gaming and business background. And then you turned your kind of wellness XR idea and brought it to market. And I'm just wondering because many of our listeners like myself are in academia and clinicians and don't have that background. So how can we reverse engineer this where if we have an idea we think is cool, and we want it to be quality like yours or bring it to market, how do we do that without a business background? Or how do we get that business background? What steps would you suggest for kind of clinician inventors and innovators coming from the bedside?
Nanea Reeves
I believe in order for this category to be successful, we need a healthy balance of both working together. That was the intention of me going up to Stanford that day, almost five years ago, because I knew that one, we just wanted to build something that would eventually have big impact. And you can see there are a lot of mindfulness applications in mobile that are now working much more closely with healthcare, etc, as the landscape evolves in this category of software as a therapeutic offering. And so, I didn't want to like build one thing in a vacuum, and then try to tack that on later. I really wanted to start the collaboration early on. And I think in the spirit of Equa Health coming from it the other way out of academia, and they had something they were excited about in mobile… they could see the impact that was measurable. And also understanding that, you know, application development and live service development is hard. And so, if we look at how we build our teams with the balance of both in the beginning, I think that's really important. And also, to be honest, content creation is getting easier. You know, we have standardized platforms like Unity and Unreal Engine, they do make it easier. And now they're starting to incorporate AI, machine learning. I've seen that transform even our own pipeline. So it is important that we think about it from a technology standpoint too. And then so you can do authoring now using some of these tools that can help you produce content much more quickly. And then I believe, eventually a version of TRIPP will have real time authoring in that it adapts to the individual. I would love to be part of the conversation early on with, “How does something like that go to market safely?” You know, with the right ethics considerations and concerns, and safety, testing, and research… you know. Those are some of the conversations I think are really important. I've always raised my hand to participate in that. I've noticed Philip Rosedale has as well from a business entrepreneur standpoint, and he builds amazing experiences. And so, it's important for us to work with you on that as well.
Kim Bullock
Yeah, maybe that leads to my next question I had for you. So you're saying with good reason, you know, yourself and other XR companies are very conservative and delving into, you know, especially the serious mental health space and, and just starting to get your toes wet with some wellness and maybe preventative mental health products. And what I'm noticing is there's a lot of mental health providers and psychologists, but I've really noticed a lack of presence of psychiatrists. And can you explain why psychiatrists aren't on boards or advisory committees or teams? And I can't quite figure it out myself. But there's like an absence of this one discipline and it's maybe because of that caution around serious mental illness or what do you think maybe are the barriers and challenges of working with psychiatrists entering into this collaborative process with industry?
Nanea Reeves
I personally don't have an issue working with that. For me right now, as a business owner, I have to kind of pick my lanes. I can't spread myself too thin, right? So…
Kim Bullock
Right.
We are focusing on consumer first and looking at community building, engagement loops, reward feedback. We're really working right now on a really cool feature for mobile AR that gives you out of immersion, sense of connection contribution.
Kim Bullock
Yeah, you know, you're very diverse and open to diversity, and not even just your company but every company not including psychiatrists… I'm just curious about why. Do you think it's just an artifact of you know, you can't get psychiatrists on board or are the field is a little cautious?
Nanea Reeves
That I don't know. I don't really have an opinion. It wasn't a conscious choice. We saw a big opportunity with just trying to look at what's immersive meditation. Right? What does that look like? I have a Dzogchen practice. Its eyes open, right? There's a mental model that closed-eye meditation is the real way to meditate— in the West. If you go to Tibet, every statue of the Buddha, he has his eyes open.
Kim Bullock
Oh, yeah, no, no…Tibet is open. Yeah. Yeah.
Nanea Reeves
Right, you know, because the ultimate goal is to have active awareness presence all the time. Right? So, it's much more integrated into your day.
Kim Bullock
Yeah. I love that.
Nanea Reeves
So, for whatever reason, I could see the opportunity the first time I tried an Oculus, I was an early investor in Oculus. And so, I had access to the devices early on. And you know, the very early experiences were all around scaring the crap out of you. So, it occurred to me that if you could create fear so easily, could you create calm or other feelings as well through immersion? And that, you know, I think there's enough to do in that.
Kim Bullock
Yeah.
Nanea Reeves
As people study our app, we would definitely, at some point work very specifically with medical entities.
Kim Bullock
Yeah, I noticed on your site, you had the virtual reality based training for aggressive behaviors with individuals with severe mental illness. You're doing a feasibility proof of concept. So that's fantastic.
Nanea Reeves
They haven't published all the data. But Dr. Lindenmayer’s team has been awesome to work with. They reached out to us. We showed them when we were still just on the Lenovo daydream. They had tried TRIPP at the CNS conference, CNS, or CNA. And they got excited about trying it in their facility at Manhattan Psychiatric. There was kind of a lot of pushback. We had heard early on that, you know, you should be mindful of schizophrenics using these applications. But you know, that is their population there. And they saw some very positive reactions to what we were doing even more so than the simulated environments, which is kind of interesting. So, again, they're doing the study, and they completed phase one. They presented some data sponsored by the New York Office of Mental Health, and they did some baseline fMRI imaging. So, they've applied for further funding, because they do have the machines on site to do that. And because it's clinician run, study, the quality of the data collection… you know, that's something we've seen in the field is some studies are definitely better than others, right, based on how the data is being collected. This is all new for me. But we've also learned how to support people who are looking at our product, we can give them our session data, our in-app data collection, all de-identified. There are ways they can create accounts in TRIPP where we have no PII from the research initiative. So, we help people with that aspect of it.
Kim Bullock
So, psychiatrists came to you to do this study. Is that right?
Nanea Reeves
Yeah, correct.
Kim Bullock
Okay.
Nanea Reeves
Yeah. And then they can collect different data sets as well, whether it's, you know, different bio signals they might be capturing. We're using the PICO device on one study where we're capturing 15 pupil measures per second. And then we can give that raw data to the researchers as well. So, they can look at variances in the self-reported data to what the pupil data is saying, and then they're also capturing blood pressure, etc. We've seen some recurring themes on the data people are collecting. There's a NASA study right now. We're being used in phase two. We just gave them the content. They are collecting cortisol and Biopac data looking at immune biomarkers.
Faaizah Arshad
Nanea, one thing that I wanted to ask you is I am wondering what your thoughts are on how psychedelics are being used. So I think earlier, you mentioned that there's like increasing research on ketamine assisted therapy. And I know I'd read some articles, including one by MobiHealthNews a couple years ago, that TRIPP was getting more involved in psychedelic assisted therapy. So, I'm wondering if you can talk about if you see your company continuing to immerse in the field of psychedelic medicine and what it would look like in the platform.
Nanea Reeves
There's a lot of thinking around those and some efforts. We did acquire a company called PsyAssist, and they had developed some support framework for people specifically in ketamine and then they had content strategy for how to support people with MDMA, as well as psilocybin downstream but ketamine being up and running now, you know, with clinics all around. And so our focus is threefold in that. And really, we're still in the data collection mode. We do it under a separate brand with the goal that as we evolve it, it could potentially be something that is more clinical in nature. And this really came about because there was a lot of organic usage of TRIPP in some of these clinics to reduce anxiety before the treatment, just like how they have people meditate, or they have peaceful rooms that you kind of prepare for. Because in the psychedelic naive, there can be some anxiety about that initial session. So we thought… well, why shouldn't we help create something that would go through more rigorous focus and testing rather than having people use our consumer product in a way that it wasn't designed for. And in our terms of service, we definitely discourage that kind of use. And so, the VA had actually been using TRIPP with ketamine in combination before and after the treatment as a way to kind of decompress them, land the person after the treatment, but also reduce some anxiety before and they saw some encouraging results from that. And I didn't even know they were doing it until Anne Bailey reached out to us and let us know about this study in San Diego. And then we started working with a San Diego clinic specifically that had also been working with the VA to do a feasibility study with a VR experience that has content specifically designed to support the patient before they get the treatment. Then we would look at, “Is there content that can help during the treatment?” Maybe with low dose usage, would be one area we would look at, as well as we have music, etc., that is designed for the journey itself that Sunny and David in their work have really hardened. But the biggest gap is post session support and integration. So, there's a mobile application that we've been looking at— how do you support the patient in between treatments to look at would that help with adherence in the second, third, subsequent treatments. If the first one is too stressful, sometimes they'll see a drop off in the later session. So there's certainly specific goals, we're looking to see: can we help with some of the pinpoints there… but doing that, you know, working with doctors and clinicians on it. It's an opportunity. It's definitely a smaller priority for the company right now. But you know, a lot of these cycles take a long time to collect the data. You need a lot of data. You know, we're just in the final like last three patients for the feasibility safety study at Kadima so that we can do a broader study across multiple clinics.
Jessica Hagen
And Nanea you've talked about this… you've given some great tips to different companies on how you progressed as TRIPP was developing and becoming more successful. And there are many meditation apps that are on the market right now. With that in mind, for companies who are up and coming within XR, whether mindfulness based or not, do you have any suggestions or tips on how to flourish within the industry?
Nanea Reeves
Oh, wow, that's, there's so many tips! Yeah! You know, the biggest thing is just to get something out there, and then learn and evolve as you go. To me, that's the joy of building software. It's iterative. And if you're looking at the analytics in a way that it's a conversation… because focus groups, and even self-reported data… people are not going to always tell you the truth about things. So, the best way is to see their engagement with certain types of content, how that might vary from one cohort to the other. And you're just not going to know that until you get people using the product. So, it's really hard. I can see it even within our own team— the analysis paralysis. And we started off with the same approach everybody else was doing, which was simulated, calming environments, but they didn't feel that great when we actually started testing them on people. And I have some assumptions on why I think that is, but then it occurred to me to find our version of what is native to the experience. So how can we create experiences you can't have in real life— that became a brand attribute. I think every company should find their own version of that, rather than just copying whatever. That takes some iteration and you know, having a name like TRIPP… a lot of people think we did it to point to psychedelics. The real reason was I had all the early VR devices because of my friendship with the Oculus team, and whenever anybody would come to my house and try it, they would take it off and go, “Wow, that was a trip.” You know, this was even before we had built anything. So there's just something about VR that stimulates that response. And we were making a solitaire app because every great platform has a good solitaire app. And, and I said, the name of the company is TRIPP. And my co-founder was like, “No, it should be casual VR games.” And I went, “No, I want to call it TRIPP because that's what everybody says VR is. It’s a trip.” But maybe that was, you know, some Hawaiian psychic powers that I've inherited in my DNA because it actually really influenced a lot of our thinking in, you know, there's some research that I saw that the brain is calmed down by fractals and geometry and patterns. And we could incorporate that in. And, you know, just thinking from a design mindset of, instead of telling you to inhale and exhale, why don't we show you your breath? You know, and because you can. In VR, there's no gravity. You can see your breath. So, I would encourage any company out there working on any of these things, like, what is the creative sort of concept that you want to apply to it that is exciting to you, that you think people will connect with? And that's really an awesome way to think about it because you have enough intelligence and understanding of how to support people who are struggling and suffering, right… from your work in that field. So that will organically show up in the approach as well. Obviously, measurement’s really important— how you capture that. But the other question, I think, is, okay, how do we get someone to do this again? That's the big question.
Jessica Hagen
Yes, engagement.
Nanea Reeves
We know we can get people to try it once. But how do we get them to do it again? And how do we get them to do it consistently. And everybody has their own unique path to that. We just launched something in October, that has had a huge impact on daily usage for us where we opened up the camera: when you use TRIPP for three days within the same weekend, we give you an augmented reality gift. And it can be a jellyfish that flies around your living room, or we're now giving people a Victrola of digital phonograph player that plays vinyl digital records of Ram Dass and Moby Ambient music. And you know, so it's rewarding you for the behavior change. It's very rudimentary, and it's design and approach… it was more like a prototype test. But now it's expanding into a huge metagame. So I think everybody has their own version of that, and maybe taking the regulatory guardrails that we put on just aside for a creative session to ask those main questions like, “How do we approach this differently? What's native to this platform? And how do we connect with the person in a way that they're going to want to continue to support themselves with this solution?”
Jessica Hagen
So, originality and then going back around and getting that feedback to really make sure that it's engaging as well?
Nanea Reeves
Yeah, like we made some assumptions early on. We always built TRIPP that it would be adaptive. We've received patents for that. We were able to detect breath and heart rate through the gyroscope itself. We got those patents last year. And we're now starting to build the classifiers to launch real breath detection. You know, our assumption is if it's your own breath that you're seeing in the environments adapting to it, that'll have a deeper action. But that takes some work, right? But our goal has always been to build the experiences procedurally in ways that they could be driven and generated by AI to the individual. We knew that that future was going to show up. It looks like it's showing up faster than I thought it would. And so that's unique to us. We kind of have this concept of experience on demand, right? That's right for me. Eventually, you could even see that scaling into new types of earning models, etc. So, experimenting and finding out what excites you as a creator, and that's really the thing. I have had people come and talk to us about, “Well, you need pair codes, you need this and that,” and I said “Look, if we focus first and foremost on getting an experience that people love, and feel good being in, we're going to be hugely successful, right.” And we got to get that right. The other stuff will show up, you know. We're already seeing through the research data coming back… there might be categories that are really good for us to work with, you know, doctors and the academic community to really focus on that category. But it's still going to be built all on our framework.
Jessica Hagen
Right.
Nanea Reeves
And that's taken a lot of investment and focus to create. So anyway, going back to the assumption that we made that was wrong, we thought… Okay, we'll build experiences that are based on the optimal time to be in VR, which we heard was 7 to 10 minutes early on, feature female voices because they have a different effect on people, and we’ll generate the experience for the user that the system thinks that they'll like. And when we got up and running, the first feedback was, “Well, I want the option of a male voice, and I want to be able to stay in there longer.” And what I started to realize was, “Oh, my God, our product design was wrong.” People want agency. They want a sense of control over the experience that that in and of itself has a positive feeling. Even though when we give them all those options, they tend to pick female and they tend to stay in like eight minutes. There's something about having the agency that in and of itself was a product design choice we weren't even thinking about. And we needed users to tell us this is what they want.
Jessica Hagen
That is so valuable. Nanea, thank you so much for your time and all of the insight that you gave us. I really, really appreciate you being here!
Nanea Reeves
Thank you so much. And I’ll just throw it out there: if anybody wants to connect with us. I'm on Twitter @Nanea. You can also email us directly at support@tripp.com. The whole company looks at all of the emails. We love to work with researchers and see if we can support you. So, thank you so much.
Jessica Hagen
Thank you.
Faaizah Arshad
Thank you so much.
Kim Bullock
Yeah, thank you so much Nanea.
Nanea Reeves
Yeah, you're welcome. My pleasure.
Jessica Hagen
That's it for this episode of Psychiatry XR. We hope you gained a new perspective on using extended reality in health care and thanks for listening. We'd also like to thank the International Virtual Reality Healthcare Association for its support. IVRHA is a member driven organization aiming to facilitate and support the growth of virtual reality within the healthcare industry. To learn more about IVRHA visit ivrha.org This episode was brought to you by Psychiatry XR, the psychiatry podcast about immersive technology in mental health. For more information about Psychiatry XR, visit our website at psychiatryxr.com. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast and tune in again next month to hear from another guest about XR use in psychiatric care. You can join us monthly on Apple podcast, Twitter, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Psychiatry XR was produced by Dr. Kim Bullock, Faaizah Arshad and myself Jessica Hagen. Please note this podcast is distinct from Dr. Bullock's clinical teaching and research roles at Stanford University. The information provided is not medical advice and should not be considered or taken as a replacement for medical advice. This episode was edited by David Bell and music and audio was produced by Austin Hagen. See you next time.