You’re at work and you were just berated by your boss. You have your last exam of the year, and you feel totally unprepared. You’re about to visit your doctor for biopsy results. You’ve had a terrible, horrible, no good, VERY bad day… Now imagine you could snap your fingers and immediately be transported to a beautiful, serene world that responds to your stress with soothing resonance and gently guides you to take those desperately-needed deep breaths.
Introducing DEEP-VR. The artists and designers, Owen Harris and Niki Smit (of Monobanda), do a much better job than I could to describe the concept behind this mind-bending, breath-based virtual reality experience. Watch this video from EnGadget, covering DEEP’s expo at Tribeca Film Festival last April, 2016. Coolest news for me? We are collaborating with these inspiring artists to integrate some additional evidence-based anxiety-reduction techniques and then testing whether these new mechanics improve the effectiveness of DEEP for decreasing anxiety and depression. So excited…
(More to come, including links to our research collaboration and to the graduate students and post-doc heading up these projects).
Here I am with Niki (left) and Owen (right) in New York, at the Tribeca Film Festival. I’m already having way too much fun for this collaboration to feel much like “work”!
