How companies can leverage virtual reality and AI to improve mental health

Limited virtual reality (VR) holds promise for helping patients suffering from mental illness, research shows, and companies are already pushing the boundaries.

According to a recent report published in Nature Review, immersive VR environments, combined with artificial intelligence, can help manage feelings of anxiety, psychotic symptoms, post-traumatic stress disorder, eating disorders, depression and stress management.

Two companies developing mental health applications for virtual reality—most notably MetaSearch and Apple's Vision Pro headset—are Tripp and Liminal VR, which make virtual experiences aimed at focusing, motivating and calming the mind.

Liminal VR

“There's something special about experiencing content from a first-person perspective and how it affects people,” Damian Moratti, founder and CEO of Liminal VR, told Decrypt. “We knew there was something to that, and that's what made VR different.”

Melbourne-based Liminal, co-founded by Moratti and Nick Busietta, launched its mental health practice in 2018. Moratti explained that Liminal VR not only hired a team of artists and developers to build the Liminal app, but also neuroscientists and psychologists.

“The driving question for Nick and I was why and how,” Moratti said. “So we hired scientists to help us find that answer and guide us through UX design.” The finished product was Liminal.

Liminal VR gives users the option to choose different experiences, including calmness, energy, pain relief, and fear.

“Yes, in general, it can be overstated and described as a combination of vastness and wonder. So we use the word breadth instead of scale, not because scale is not useful for awe,” Moratti said. It is, but breadth includes scale and can include other things. He gave the example of watching an eight-year-old boy pull up a car to free his parents.

“You're looking at the vastness of human potential,” he said.

In addition to healthcare applications, Liminal VR also offers training simulations on things like how to put out fires, pick mushrooms, landscape, and build.

As Moratti explains, fully engaging with VR is recommended because it's fundamentally different from traditional media. Unlike flat screens on phones, PCs, or consoles—where there's a clear separation between you and the content—VR immerses you directly in the experience, making it uniquely immersive.

“With virtual reality, you're plugged in, and you're completely immersed in the virtual world,” Moratti said. “You have a sense of agency in that world, and you're experiencing the content from a first-person perspective. You're getting this scale, breadth, and conceptual depth that can't be replicated in other technologies and has different psychological effects compared to other media.

trip

For Los Angeles Trip, virtual reality alone is not enough to provide a customized experience. In July, the startup announced it had integrated generative AI into its VR experience, which the company called kokua, derived from the Hawaiian word for help, assistance or support.

Trip was founded in 2017 by Nanea Reeves, former Electronic Arts (EA) Senior Vice President and Machinima COO.

[Kōkua] It's a deeply spiritual word for Hawaiians,” Reeves told Decrypt. “It comes down to the concept of giving without expecting to receive.” She added that kokua increases the desire to keep the environment clean.

Reeves said the idea behind TRIPP began to form after he saw how virtual reality could be used to provide excitement and chills in video games.

“If you can easily create that fear, even if someone knows they're in the living room, they'll feel like they're falling off a cliff,” she says. “How else can you make someone feel? And can you use this technology, especially immersion, to create positive emotions?

As Reeves explained, Tripp worked with neuroscience consultants and mental health experts at the University of Colorado's National Center for Mental Health Innovation who helped develop data collection concepts and infrastructure.

“Since we went live in December 2019, before the pandemic, getting all that sentiment data from people using our app has given us the data base to build a recommendation engine and create a lot of our audio content,” Reeves said.

As Reeves explained, when you share your thoughts and feelings with the AI, Kokua offers personalized reflections, custom meditations and mindfulness practices.

“If you play with it, you can break it,” she said. “You could even say, ‘Give me a meditation to help me focus on doing my homework, and I'll do it in the style of a Shakespearean sonnet.'

According to Reeves, her personal experiences, including a mental health crisis as a teenager, led her to use virtual reality technology, video games and meditation for health.

“One thing I'm realizing now is that I felt this sense of agency and control when I was playing games that I didn't feel in my physical reality, but it was cumulative,” Reeves said.

“The real goal is current awareness, and if you think about it, virtual reality is a very powerful tool to capture and present your awareness,” she added.

Edited by Ryan Ozawa.