I have a long and winding path with meditation. I’ve practiced martial arts and meditation since the age of 12, but it was only while studying for a Master’s in Cognitive Neuroscience when I understood what my meditation teachers were telling me; The key was to understand the Predictive Coding Framework.
When I was told “focus on your breath”, my over sensitive bottom up signals would get amplified and send even more prediction error to higher level parts of the cortex that would then try to predict every little muscle twitch. I was getting a classic case of the centipede's dilemma. I realized what I was supposed to be doing was the opposite. Meditation was meant to lower the top down interference from higher parts of the cortex and allow the subconscious rhythm that controls the breathing spread throughout the rest of the brain. The way I’ve learnt to do that is to externalize the breathing parts and give them agency. I call these patterns the “Breathing Gods”, and visualize them as two giant clouds with slight facial features. I even drew them in tilt brush once.
That’s why I’ve been excited to try Tripp VR for sometime now. The ability to hack our brains with visualizations and new methods of feedback has such huge potential. Unfortunately I came out of the Tripp VR demo feeling sad, worried and nauseated. For a company that raised $4 million, I had hoped for more.
I should have expected something was off with the subtitle. “Mood on Demand”. I can’t think of one meditation teacher, therapist or any person who understands emotional regulation thinking that moods can change “on demand”. You don’t stream your mood by pressing a button like you would a video on HBO. Emotional regulation is tied deeply with being connected to our bodies and providing them with what they need. Emotional regulation is the practice of finding stillness and calm within the maddening storm of top down prediction and bottom up incoming sensory data that are being creating by our 80 billion neurons. Emotional regulation is about finding or creating safety and hope even though our past might be filled with pain and trauma.
So many things about Tripp VR were feeding into the ego self, the exact opposite of what meditation is about. One of the mini exercised was collecting gold coins with your head. Can you think of anything less enlightening than that? If I had any paranoid tendencies I’d think Tripp was an attempt of capitalistic forces to undermine all the benefits of meditation. But I’m not, I’m pretty sure they had intentions to “make the world a better place,” so what happened?
One of the biggest problems with Tripp is that it decided to ditch the controllers and have an exclusively gaze-based experience. I was really sad that the affordances of 2 more feedback loops that meditators could be getting were not used. Why would they do that? My guess is they started developing this when Oculus Go was the popular VR headset.
Then came the physical nausea caused by “flying”. 40% -70% of people get motion sickness in VR when the signals from their inner ear don’t fit the signal from their visual perception. If you are a game like Echo VR that is built on the flying mechanism I can understand you’d be OK with focusing on players that can stomach your game mechanics but if you are a meditation app why would you create flying experience? What is the affordance? Is it worth the nausea you are causing people? Beat Saber figured that one out with the objects coming to players instead of player flying. I actually have a really hard time believing an expert like Walter Greenleaf who is the company’s advisor signed off on this experience.
I did enjoy the particle effects that came as a visualization of breathing but the rhythm they told me to breath in was too fast for me. I was worried about the negative effects of not showing people correct feedback of their actual actions. I would have loved if Tripp used the free VR package we at Radix Motion made 3 years ago that used the hand trackers which the user holds to their body, and it gathers data on the users’ breathing patterns. Based on my academic research when the visual sense doesn’t match the internal sensation of what your body is doing (proprioception) your brain will lower the sensations coming from your body. This is why VR can help with physical pain relief.
By giving us false feedback of our breath Tripp is likely lowering our internal sensation of how we are breathing. The “gods of breath” I was hoping to encounter were being blocked by sparkling “false gods”.
The biggest worrying factor is Tripp’s claims that their experience is supported by scientific research which doesn’t seem to be substantiated. The only thing I could find was a broken page with information that would not pass any peer review. I sent them an email a week ago inquiring about any previous research that has been published and have not yet gotten their answer.
