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Awakening from the American Dream: The Return to a Virtuous Reality

new-american

Guest Post By: Dr. Michelle Wang, PsyD

What a year it’s been. Precarious, strange, extravagant, horrific, real. It is staggering to know we are at once capable of feeling disillusion and awe, love and suffering, stillness and chaos. Where one ends and another begins is hard to tell. In times like this we are tempted to lose focus, but it is exactly this time that our full presence and participation is required.

Our participation is our awareness and our willingness to ask the important ‘whys.’ We’ve been roused from the American Dream and awakened to a new American story. When we are lost and without direction isn’t it our nature to return to the basic, that which is simple, and turn to those whose kinship we can rely on? It’s what I call the return to a Virtuous Reality.

Life, as it always has been and continues to demonstrate, is truly a remarkably complicated journey, taking us on the ride of our lives, and demanding our capacity for both intrigue and sobriety.

“From Sea to Shining Sea”

The intrigue is what drew my Chinese-Korean immigrant parents to this country in 1985 with $250 USD in one hand and the sweet promises of the American Dream in the other. I heard the familiar lines immigrant parents say sometimes – of needing to work three times as hard to get half as far, that great things will happen to you as long as you work hard, and if great things aren’t happening you haven’t worked hard enough. Dreams of becoming an artist or musician were quickly funneled into a box labeled “Hobbies,” and I was summoned to pursue more serious vocations – you know the type.

Growing up we had a straight row of white picket fences and a very effective home alarm system. I tagged all my school supplies with my name written in cursive for more grades than I can count. Warnings of “stranger danger” and poisoned Halloween candy were well-versed mantras. “The Country of Beauty” is also the literal translation of “America” in Chinese so the vigilant guarding of personal property, the blatant racism my parents and I encountered, and the arbitrary nature of authorization confused me as a young child. Perhaps the beauty was in the possibility of raising free-thinking children in this country or in the promised equal opportunity for those who could exhibit hard work, determination, and initiative. A few others might have been missed: nepotism, segregation, privilege, misogyny, discrimination, competition, etc. But who’s to say? Maybe in the back of their minds they secretly understood hard work and determination can get you places, but first-world standards of success usually require an extra shot of moral concession. The Dream was a temporary solution to a deeper wound and my parents really needed a salve.

““The Country of Beauty” is also the literal translation of “America” in Chinese”

The Sojourner Experience

Within 17 years my parents grew to experience the sobriety of what quickly became referred to as “The American Dream” in air quotes and often accompanied by a deep sigh. After almost two decades of paving a successful path for themselves in spite of being treated like second-class citizens, no amount of opportunity no matter the price tag could convince my parents to remain in the States any longer, confirming once again that financial wealth is a terrible predictor of happiness. When I graduated high school in 2002, the 3 of us boarded a plane to Urbana Champaign, IL where I would embark on the next chapter of my newly adult life; my parents were to jet back to Beijing where my father had a cushy tenure position waiting at Beijing University and my mother did not have to feel humiliated on a daily basis for her accent.

Now, the American Dream wasn’t a failure for them – far from it. They had simply come to realize that it was more of a single paragraph on a page out of a much longer novel. It was not the destination they hoped it would be but it was an important and necessary leg of a much larger journey. I too give it as much credence as I would any dreamy enterprise. My parents traversed the great unknown, carried largely by their faith and determination to do the right thing. And for them, the right thing was to assimilate, acculturate, and acclimate. I cannot underscore my gratitude enough for the foundation and stability they provided. I could earn a doctorate in clinical psychology – a career that seems frivolous to many of their peers – and I have the luxury to explore the depths of my consciousness and garner a real sense of self-assuredness about my place in the world. A success by all accounts, just, not the end of the story.

The New American Story

My parents gifted me the luxury to question. Their preoccupation with safety gave me the luxury to question the value of it. They created the sandbox, and I was allowed to play freely, but as is the case with human nature, in due time I began kicking at the boundaries wanting more than what security and containment could provide. I questioned my parents in ways they never dared to question theirs. And I found this to be a sentiment shared by many of my peers. One by one we all heard ourselves exclaiming at one point or another, “This can’t be all there is to life!” We quickly familiarized ourselves with the parameters of safety and then began the search for courage, because we knew it was courage, not safety, that will take us deeper, higher, wider, and ultimately beyond our dreams and certainly that of our parents’. We felt empowered enough to disrupt status quos, reconfigure beliefs that have gone unexamined for too long, and challenged systems that were never designed for growth but the preservation of stasis.

“My parents gifted me the luxury to question. Their preoccupation with safety gave me the luxury to question the value of it.”

We began asking more questions. What was all the fear mongering really about? How do our picket fences interfere with community and trust building? How can we combine all of our 1.5 bathrooms, 1.5 children, surveilled units into one shared living space? Can we share more of our resources and avoid feeding into a hoarding culture of possessions and ownership? Is working hard for a lot of money really all that rewarding? And might we consider redefining “work?” Or “work-life balance for that matter?” And will there even need to be a balance as more and more of us feel wedded to work, self, and romantic interests with equal vigor and devotion, what David Whyte refers to as “The Three Marriages?”

We began to ask how we can better address the concerns of the rightless: the working class, immigrants, refugees, the displaced, and the stateless. We allowed ourselves to admit that we don’t have any tidy answers but we are trying. We began re-enlisting members into the humanities, the arts, trades that address not only the intellect but the corporeal, no longer “wishy-washy” careers but perfectly viable ones for a soulful life. We embraced technology, albeit with conflicting measures, as a compelling inflection point that holds so much potential for good. We started to redefine what constitutes a “family” as more of us feel we can belong to many tribes and communities that feel no less kindred than those related to us by blood and no less meaningful than traditional nuclear family units. We began re-exploring the ideas of marriage and romantic partnership since so many of us witnessed the archaic paradigms simply, truly, repeatedly not work or demonstrate relevance to our present-day values.

Friends, we’ve woken up from this American Dream and now it’s time to reimagine The New American Story – of tearing off concealing draperies, of repatterning and retelling, of countering the blistering “over-politicized and under-moralized” culture David Brooks claims to have been our country’s problem for the last century and guiding ourselves gently back to grace and morality, of bringing back lost virtues. The New American Story is the creation myth of the ever-evolving, steadily-unfolding of our prodigal return to a more Virtuous Reality.

“Friends, we’ve woken up from this American Dream and now it’s time to reimagine The New American Story”

A Virtuous Reality

One glance at Burning Man culture, festival culture, the tribal revival movement, and the rise of intentional communities, and it becomes glaringly clear the kind of Virtuous Reality more, and more of us hope for, and for some, return to, for this way of living is not new even if it is revelatory. A Virtuous Reality offers opportunities to meet our fullest potential, to courageously move with and beyond our fears, to find communities in support of our psychological and spiritual growth (and with whom we may consider co-parenting our young), for the sowing of social consciousness seeds around matters of space, ownership, ecosystems, and disparities, to foster wisdom in knowing how to meet human suffering with compassion and quiet stillness, and for the allowance of our collective weakness, fragility, and failures because those qualities are what drives evolution.

We may differ in how we imagine this Virtuous Reality, but most of us would agree that a virtuous one, however defined, is vital to a life well-lived. So I’ve started a Virtuous Reality Manifesto, intended to open dialogue, be edited, and begin setting a framework for our New American story.

The Virtuous Reality Manifesto

Virtuous Reality as a Nondual Space

Anyone who’s ever experienced a non-ordinary or altered state of consciousness – be it through daydreaming, a meditation practice, flow state, REM sleep, floatation tanks, entheogens, or immersive virtual experiences – can understand what it’s like to be in an elevated or expanded state. That feeling of expansion in our physical bodies that allow for deeper exhales; of feeling bigger than our worldly concerns; of being struck with awe and gratitude at the simplest things we’ve grown accustomed to overlooking; of not being limited by our physical bodies and intellectual capacities; and perhaps my own personal favorite, the unlocking of our creative genius – a treasure trove of ideas and concepts we can sometimes hardly believe are our own.

In these states we find ourselves holding multiple realities, states of mind if you will. One reality is our ordinary consciousness, and at least one other is our expanded one. They may often feel like seemingly opposing realities and yet they co-exist. An example is Virtual Reality (VR). VR floored me the first time I experienced it. There was the bizarre phenomenon of at once feeling emotionally affected and intellectually robbed as my body responded to stimuli my intellect was fully aware wasn’t there. Underscored in this state was the process of my brain indiscriminately registering all subjective perceptual input as valid and real, regardless of the version of reality.

That there are co-occurring truths was not what floored me. What floored me was how, for the first time I had encountered a technology, an actual piece of hardware, that serves as a tool to show me (not tell me) that the stubborn Cartesian dualism of “subject” vs. “object,” “good” vs. “bad” was indeed far too simplistic and frankly insulting to the intelligence of profoundly complex humans living in an even more complex tapestry that is the phenomenon of life. I no longer needed to imagine nonduality, it was available for me in first-person, cutting through all intellectual and egoistic disbelief and filtered through my body’s somatic knowing. What floored me was the existence of a platform that offers the experiential knowing of nonduality, which I view as the acknowledgment and willful acceptance of multiple realities and multiple truths; the essential oneness of everything – a worldview much more compelling and with far greater reaches into the human potential than the alternative.

“…the stubborn Cartesian dualism of “subject” vs. “object,” “good” vs. “bad” was indeed far too simplistic and frankly insulting to the intelligence of profoundly complex humans living in an even more complex tapestry that is the phenomenon of life…”

As a practicing Emotional Intelligence Coach I see people clinging onto old narratives that no longer serve them, and of course, this makes complete sense if the belief is that there can only be one story and the hand dealt at birth is the only story available. No matter how much we may want to give up our narrative, as long as the belief is in either/or’s and zero sums, our attempts will be futile. The moment we let go of the idea that our stories are fixed is the moment we begin inviting in new ones. We may no longer look to define ourselves solely by a Meyers Briggs type or an astrological sign; we may see ourselves as both an introvert and extrovert under very different conditions; our partners saying “you’ve changed” may not be a sign of a doomed relationship, rather, an evolving one because we are all many things at once.

In a Virtuous Reality, there is a belief that everything is interconnected and many narratives exist at the same time. Nonduality begets liberation.

Virtuous Reality as a Possibility Space

Since my first VR experience, I have explored a wide range of others. One of my favorites is Fantasynth, a VR experience where the player leisurely glides through a hypnotic array of colorful backdrops and light shows synchronized to electronic beats. There is no need for controllers, and the experience does not require an avatar, so in the virtual world, I am quite literally without a body. Staring down at the empty virtual space where my brain expects my body to be, I considered this might be what it feels like to be without consistent form and disembodied. As you might’ve guessed disembodiment is not part of my repertoire either as a coach or Chief Psychology Officer. In fact, disembodiment has become such a rampant present-day concern that embodiment and mindfulness have become household names and digital detox and meditation commonplace practices.

And yet, I never fully bought into the idea that embodiment could only be learned through locating our physical bodies. I imagined if we placed intentional awareness on the sensation of being disembodied, we might find cues that teach us how to (re)embody. But I wasn’t quite ready to prescribe that to anyone. So every Friday, for four consecutive months, I very intentionally explored the relationship between VR and my corporeal awareness. What I found was a strange, beautiful, and surprising assortment of states and contradictions – disembodiment and embodiment, empathic transcendence, amplified awareness of consciousness, and an uncanny ability to suspend disbelief, which freed me from judgment and afforded me the psychic spaciousness to wonder and wander much as I would as a child. I was simultaneously the creator and the creation, the object and the subject, philosophically and neurologically the differences all collapsed and I had never been more aware of my own consciousness, at once distinct and imperceptible.

“What I found was a strange, beautiful, and surprising assortment of states and contradictions – disembodiment and embodiment, empathic transcendence, amplified awareness of consciousness, and an uncanny ability to suspend disbelief, which freed me from judgment and afforded me the psychic spaciousness to wonder and wander much as I would as a child.”

But I also noticed I had very few people with whom I could process these wonderments because in the larger community still, very few people have tried VR let alone own headsets, and in the clinical psychology community the numbers are even fewer. While I hear so many espouse the healing potential of VR, meditation, therapy, entheogens, etc., what I don’t hear being discussed but might be the most integral element to the sustainability of transformation: the formation and maintenance of in-person communities to balance out our media ecosystems. We don’t need research to tell us that in order to reach our highest potential we need in-person communities operating in real time to physically hold and nourish us with touch, food, witnessing and acceptance. After we’ve experienced other truths we need spaces where we can share those realities; this is where we derive courage and a sense of ground.

Without the support of one it is unlikely anyone will embark on the path towards awakening. This is why I think so many people enthusiastically download meditation apps but immediately stop using them when they realize they have no idea what to do with this newly heightened awareness and there’s no one qualified or trusted enough to guide them.

Enlightenment, after all, comes with responsibility and anyone who’s ever taken on a heavy knapsack without support knows, we simply don’t get very far. In a Virtuous Reality I envision community-generated, peer-facilitated, in vivo and virtual meet-ups for people exploring contemplative and consciousness expansion practices. Communities will gather regularly with the intent of exploring the elusive self and rooting insights garnered through these expanded states in meaningful ways relevant to our daily lives. Over time I imagine the process of integration will be internalized and become the default mode by which we approach all of life’s significant experiences whether in community or in solitude, virtual or analog.

And then there’s the fear of a Virtuous Reality, as counterintuitive as it may seem to some, it also makes a lot of sense. Most people I talk to are still very afraid of mind expansion tools such as psychedelics and VR and while I do not share the same fears I can understand more generally the anxiety towards any unknown medium. My guess is there are deeper, more subconscious forces fueling this anxiety. The limiting of human consciousness is not just reserved for “evil” institutions to bestow upon us, we do it to ourselves all the time. I believe the fear of our own possibility and potential far exceeds our fear of our own bondage and demise. Abraham Maslow describes this as the “Jonah Syndrome,” the fear of our own greatness and actualization –

“It is precisely the godlike in ourselves that we are ambivalent about, fascinated by and fearful of, motivated to and defensive against. This is one aspect of the basic human predicament, that we are simultaneously worms and gods.” – Maslow

The fear is of our highest possibility. In any Possibility Space, be it a Virtuous Reality or a virtual reality, we will notice resistance to possibilities and we can often trace the resistance back to ourselves. As I like to ask my clients, if you knew the view from the penthouse was breathtakingly spectacular but the inevitable plummet would be equally so, would you still want to visit the top floor? Or would you consider the 4th floor where the view isn’t very impressive and neither is the fall? Our fear of being morally shattered by our experiences – high or low – is often what keeps us stuck, smack dab in the middle.

Like any tool, technology, or human, Virtuous Reality has the possibility for both “good” and “bad.” Of course it does. It has the capacity to be as remarkably favorable as it does severely distasteful because it is simply a reflection of our collective humanity and we are capable of everything. And that’s what I like about this Virtuous Reality – it is a Possibility Space that can surprise us, delight us, and teach us. I think the next level of this game will require us to collectively move beyond our desire to be safe and the illusion that we are distinct organisms separate from everything else. We’ve got to possess a voracious appetite for truth and exploration so that we can reweave another narrative that can dance alongside all the other ones, no one more or less important than the other. Our challenge is to step on the path of nonduality and devote ourselves to the practice of radical inclusiveness.

Possibilities of a Virtuous Reality have always been there and it is not outside our scope, our brilliance, or our humanity. The question is, do we have the moral imagination, the courage, and the responsibility to choose it?

Dr. Michele Wang, PsyD is also Chief Psychology Officer of my company, NewPathVR.

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Analysis of a Scene: Building Our First VR Prototype

by Guest Author Eiran Shalev, CTO, NewPathVR

When Lisa Padilla first approached me with her vision for NewPathVR, I was immediately inspired by what we could achieve. Imagine the possibilities to not only unlock the hidden power of the brain but to empower our users to look inside themselves and find a way to improve. To feel better. Gain the strength to refine, and then to share that with others. While VR may be many things, to the folks at NewPath, it is the best tool to reprogram the brain for success. We huddled around and researched hundreds of papers where studies demonstrated how positive reinforcement, perception, and sensory filters can influence our behavior, as well as our memories.

Research and Design Phase
We knew we needed a prototype to prove VR as the right medium for spiritual growth, but what platform could serve us best?. Was this going to be a seated experience? How much interaction should it have? And what to build? For instance, did you know that if you perceive yourself as taller in VR, it actually makes you feel more confident during and after you remove your head-mounted display (HMD)? As it turns out, this is very true. Our discussions turned towards identity, and how to connect our users with their VR self. In gaming, this is called your “player self”. You have three “selves” actually. The first self, the real you, is what you do outside of games or VR experiences – ie your life: work, job, family, etc. The second self is the you that plays the game using peripherals, and experiences the content through the point of view of one or several characters in the game. You become a “player self” and share characteristics with the “game self”, but you are not the character. The third self, the “game self”, is the content’s avatar that represents you, and has a role to play in the content’s story or scenarios that your avatar experiences. By witnessing the story, and in some cases, by making choices for your avatar “game self”, your “player self” gets to experience those same emotions, and thus, share those same experiences. The cool thing about VR is that the player and the game self boundaries become blurred, such that you feel as if you are literally inside the content, and you feel much closer emotionally to the experience then you would be if you were observing the content through a monitor or TV screen. Keep in mind that taking an experience designed for a flat screen does not merit porting it to VR. All content in VR should be unique and specifically designed to transform and empower the user.

When building a VR experience, game mechanics that are based on challenge-reward systems create much more value for the user if they incorporate your senses. Adding a 360 visual experience may not be enough to trigger personal, real-world change. Adding 360 audio to that experience brings us closer, but is still not enough. By adding the ability to use your body, such as walking around and touching virtual objects, to influence the content, our team realized that we could create a world where consequences could have just as much impact on the “player self” as incentives. What’s more, if we incorporate at least 3 senses, this combination activates the memory centers or the brain. With the right experience, a player may create an association between something he/she experiences in VR, and a similar experience in his/her real life.

So, we knew we had to make a room-scale experience, and we knew we wanted it to leverage game mechanics that could change a player’s mood. The obvious choice for platform was the HTC Vive. But what about the content? I volunteered that for a prototype, we should keep things simple and demonstrate that we could achieve a basic goal. We wanted to transform a user’s mood from a negative or an indifferent position into a positive one. However, going through a sequential experience in VR, will usually not improve your life on exposure alone. In the real-world (or what we perceive to be our reality), we can usually learn any skill and master it, by practicing it over and over again. In our VR prototype, we needed to do the same. We decided that if we could create content that would teach our players some moral or zen-like lesson. A takeaway. But then also provided an opportunity to apply it, then we could create real personal growth.

Our “Self-Compassion Buddy” vision was born. In our prototype, we essentially introduced our users to their avatar self by literally creating a virtual mirror. The system tracked each of the user’s arms and mimicked his/her movement through the avatar that was reflected in the mirror. Our research showed that in order to strengthen the bond between the player-self and the avatar game-self, our users would need to interact with their mirrored reflection for approximately 70 seconds. This seems like a long time for a prototype, but in a future, commercial version of our product, the interaction could involve a game mechanic with a reward incentive. Next, we focused on the story ingredient. We did not require an elaborate story to demonstrate our vision; only a simple scene based on some narrative context. I believe that in order to create positive change or at least to invoke positive feelings, you need to have contrast, and that means placing the user into a negative situation – for a very short time of course. Then, follow it up with a positive environment filled with good energy. By placing the user into a slightly distressed state, and then moving him/her into a comfort zone, you can generate a sensation of emotional gratification. Games also apply a similar approach when they create a difficult challenge, in which a player must learn a new skill to overcome it. Once the skill is learned, the obstacle is easily navigated, and the player moves on to claim his/her reward. But more importantly, in your own life, when you undergo challenging times, and not only survive them, but learn to be stronger as a result of them, you then undergo positive change within yourself. Through overcoming these challenges, you may either improve your level of independence and self-sufficiency, or you may grow more carefree by successfully navigating stress and becoming familiar with it.

The Prototype Phase
We applied this to our “self-compassion” prototype. Imagine being immersed in a dirty, poorly-lit, virtual environment that exhumed negativity. You find yourself staring at your reflection in a mirror. You move, it moves. After a lengthy exposure to your reflected avatar, your avatar aka “buddy”, starts moving independently of you. It steps out of the mirror. Charges at you, invading your personal space. The result. You start feeling threatened. Your “inner bully” points his red finger at you and verbally abuses you, calling you “a loser…and a failure in life”. After a few moments of this, your brain switches to panic mode – a sort of fight-or-flight response. We kept the user in this state for about 7-10 seconds before interrupting the experience with another friendlier avatar. Any longer than that and we would have risked spoiling the whole experience and alienating our user.

buddy1

The friendlier avatar, a nurturing female guide appears and rushes to your rescue. Freezing the bully in action, she explains to you that the bully is you. Recap: by belittling yourself, you lose confidence in yourself. The female guide then offers words of encouragement to rebuild your confidence. Her words manifest in a new scene in which soap bubbles shower from the sky. Some of the bubbles contain cute gifts such as adorable stuffed animals and pets. We introduced a bit of the fun factor in this scene. When the user pops one of these soap bubbles containing a gift, the female avatar aka your “guide” offers words of encouragement with a positive message, ie: “Lots of people care about you.” Each time you pop a bubble, the gift item inside goes into your collection, and new positive words materialize. In the next scene, you have an opportunity to apply these gifts and redeem yourself. We call this the “pay-it-forward phase.” You observe three couples, standing at surrounding points around you. These couples each reveal a virtual buddy figure matched with his respective inner-bully avatar. Similar to your initial case, the bully verbally terrorizes his victim. This continues in an endless cycle, until you interrupt the buddy, and hand out gifts from your previous scene’s collection. Each time your gifts are received, the words that were initially associated with the gift, retrigger audio playback again. The buddy’s inner-bully vanishes and the buddy then begins playing the ukulele. When all three avatar buddies receive their gifts and play the ukulele, a well-known song begins playing, lifting the mood even more and embracing a sense of relief and closure. The three playing buddies merge into one buddy enclosed behind a giant mirror. And you are once again faced with your own buddy reflection. The simulation ends when the environment cross-fades into a sunny sky, and you find yourself standing on Cloud Nine. Literally.

Post-Analysis Phase
We quickly discovered that when a user goes through this VR experience, they feel better coming out, then going in. Our research also suggests that if we had ended simulation after the initial soap bubbles were popped, gifts received, and words of encouragement heard, then the effect would have been short-lived. By adding the “pay it forward” scene, where the user returns the favor and gives a gift to his surrounding buddies, we essentially teach our users to apply their acquired skills and pay them forward. To share. Therefore, our users resolve to help themselves, feeling a sense of contribution and meaningful value. Generosity in VR impacts our users in the real world and has longer lasting effects on their mood. It builds confidence and self-love.

buddy3

Our biggest challenge in building this first prototype was testing it. I relied on using Unity as our main game engine development tool. Unity not only has established partnerships all over the world, and is compatible with 27 target platforms, but it is also free to use for development. Due to our limited resources and limited access to the HTC Vive, I ended up building our prototype using game object placeholders to represent both the HMD and the two game controllers. I then parented OpenVR’s game controller objects under these placeholders. When I repositioned the placeholder game objects in Unity’s simulator, I was able to estimate fairly accurately how the HTC Vive’s game controllers’ movement would impact the VR environment around them. On a weekly basis, under limited time and limited test access to the shared hardware, I methodically validated and tested our experience on the Vive hardware, tweaking and improving our prototype step by step. Unity is not quite WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) when it comes to the built-in development simulator. That’s why end-to-end testing is so important, especially in VR. I set up a mode that would allow me to switch between my mocked game objects and the hardware game objects in the scene project. Doing so, allowed me to execute a series of tests on our shared hardware device while continuing development in our mocked Unity environment.

Our second challenge was getting our 3D buddy avatar to move correctly in our initial mirror reflection scene, used to build an identity association with your inner buddy. I solved this by building a mimic-engine that tracked the delta positions of the mocked, game-controller-object placeholders. The engine then inverted these vectors and applied the new deltas to a basic, rigged stickman model. I added constraints on the limbs of the stickman and locked the lower limbs so that only the upper body would be affected to move freely. And it worked. Additionally, since the Vive is a room-scale experience, the position and orientation of the stickman (aka our buddy reflection) needed to map to my HMD game object’s position, such that when I moved left or right, my reflection (facing me) would move in the opposite direction. And because the mirror image itself has borders all around, our 3D stickman was piped through a render-texture camera, that projected the image onto a 3D mirror game object as a texture. The mirror game object itself had no reflection, but projecting the stickman as a texture on top of it, gave the illusion of a mirror reflection.

No matter how you choose to implement your own VR project, remember that VR is highly immersive. Due to VR’s transformative nature, the underlying purpose of your content should support a key responsibility for contributing to social goodness, and hopefully, empower our users to live more fulfilling lives.

Eiran Shalev is an experienced technical, hands-on leader with 18 years of professional expertise overseeing top teams on mobile, social, and web technologies for products ranging from multi-player mobile & social games, to streaming video ads to interactive television and more. He comes from Disney Interactive, where he established the technical vision, and helped to scale and deliver Disney’s mobile technology platform to all game studios. Before that, he spent time at Koolbit, Kabam, and RockYou! He has built more than 50 games. He joins NewPathVR as CTO.

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Can Virtual Reality Sidestep The Time Travel Paradox?

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There are two technologies that humanity has been looking forward to for decades. One of these technologies is time travel. The other is virtual reality. You may want to throw ‘flying cars’ up there somewhere as well, but some people haven’t seemed to realize that planes essentially are just that. Regardless, of all of these technologies that humanity has wished for, only one of them has come to pass so far: virtual reality. The thing is, with virtual reality, it may be possible to experience the other technologies through it.
Granted, virtual reality will never be able to truly, physically send you through time and space to exist in a different era. But, with the power of virtual reality, it may be possible to experience the past and future in every sense besides the legitimate physical.

Imagine, for instance, virtual reality that lets you experience the American Revolution firsthand. As a soldier perhaps, or even one of the commanders. Or perhaps you would just be present in an ethereal sense, watching everything from the safety of virtual reality. Or consider the opposite. What if you could go into virtual reality, and experience a programmer’s idea of the world in the year 3000? While you can’t claim any accuracy to what people think is the future (though Back to the Future did an uncannily good job with their Cubs World Series prediction), you could still experience what people believe the future will be like, from flying DeLorean’s to those hover boards we never got when we were supposed to.

Obviously, none of this will truly take you to the past or the future. You will still physically be present in the world of 2017, but, the real question is, does it make a difference? If you experience something that is so real to your senses that it may as well have been, does it really matter if it actually happened? To some people it might, but to many others it does not.

If you could use virtual reality to experience say, sky-diving, would it not be the same as actually sky diving so long as it was realistic? The same notion can be held to the idea of pseudo-time travel through virtual reality. Maybe you didn’t really travel in time back to the Crusades, the American Revolution, or one of the World Wars. Maybe you didn’t really travel to the year 3000 and witness the future. But if the experience is real enough, is it not the same as though you actually did?

It is something that is yet to be seen, but highly anticipated by all. Moreover, the potential is nearly limitless. With this kind of virtual reality, will the way history is taught change? Will students be able to experience renditions of the history they are learning first hand? And what of religion? Rather than read the Bible or the Quran, will you be able to experience every part of it from the perspective of someone who was actually there? You very well could, provided that a programmer desires to make it so.

In the end, virtual reality is one of the most exciting things to happen to humanity in decades. And though we may never truly travel through time, who knows what we could one day experience through the power of the technology we now have. I’ll meet you there or, rather, then.

Original post on SpiritualVR.com

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Mindfulness and Technology

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Originating in Buddhist philosophy, mindfulness is becoming increasingly popular in the West as the incidence of anxiety, depression, and stress-related disorders plague the undercurrent of our fast-paced industrialized way of life. Recent scientific research on mindfulness has demonstrated beneficial effects on several holistic aspects of personal health, including the mind, the body, and behavior.

Mindfulness meditation has been proven medically effective to decrease stress and improve well-being when practiced consistently. Yet many people still struggle with the concept or application of mindfulness-based therapy. A new wave of delivery is emerging which is combining this ancient practice with modern technology to bridge the gap and appeal to a modern generation of meditators. Studies show not only relaxation, but important shifts in cognition, emotion, biology, and behavior that may work synergistically to improve health. There is also emerging evidence that mindfulness training is associated with greater meaning and peace in one’s life (spirituality), as well as enhanced relationships with others (Carmody et al., 2008; Carson et al., 2004)

Imagine you are sitting peacefully on a beautiful beach. You can hear seagulls against a backdrop of pebbles clinking together with each breaking wave. You take deep belly breaths and listen to your meditation teacher as she sits beside you and guides you through the film roll of anxiety and consciousness unfolding behind your eyes. Now imagine that you take off your virtual reality headset to discover you in fact never left your own living room (and saved hundreds of dollars on a flight to a meditation retreat in India.) This is an example of one scenario that modern entrepreneurs are envisioning the marriage of mindfulness and technology to enhance the effectiveness of well-being and relaxation intervention. Virtual reality devices can be combined with health tracking technology such as Provada Health‘s iOS app; “…incorporated into (the) app (is) the ability to link health-tracking wearables, such as the Apple Watch, to quantify the effects of a meditation session on, for example, your resting heart rate. Or look at how your sleep is being affected by taking time out to meditate.”

Modern gaming technology is another avenue where it seems there is potential for mindfulness to be cultivated. Take for example one gaming app available via Play Store called ‘Pause,’ which was created through the principles of mindfulness meditation and Tai Chi. The creator Peng Cheng explains, “It started with my own severe experience of stress and depression. I gave myself 6 months, I practically didn’t do anything but I meditated and practiced Tai Chi with the goal to do nothing but staying in the here and now as much as possible.” The simple game involves a little blob which follows your finger across the screen and facilitates focused awareness by growing in size as you maintain a slow concentrated speed. “Most of our stress only exists in our head and absorbs all our attention. To break this pattern, I need to focus on what is physical and tangible and actively put my attention in the moment.”

Cultivating focused attention in the present moment is the core foundation of mindfulness practice preached hundreds of years ago, in ancient India, and today via a squiggly blob on a hand-held screen or through a high-tech headset. Proper use of technology has the capacity to transform the quality of our lives and the delivery of ancient therapies such as mindfulness which are being lost on a section of the modern generation unaccustomed or afraid of ‘spiritual mumbo jumbo.’ Many trials of research have found that people with higher levels of mindfulness – even without “formal” meditation training – report feeling less stressed, anxious and depressed, and more joyful, inspired, grateful, hopeful, content, vital, and satisfied with life (Baer et al., 2006; Brown & Ryan, 2003; Cardaciotto et al., 2008; Feldman et al., 2007; Walach et al., 2006).

Another benefit of mindfulness is the ability to recognize and accurately label emotions (Analayo, 2003). More mindful people appear to have a greater ability to control emotional reactions in the middle part of the brain (the amygdala and the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex [ACC]) by engaging the front part of the brain (the prefrontal cortex [PFC]), which is associated with attention, concentration, and emotion regulation. This means when you’re practicing mindfulness you’ll better be able to control your emotions and correct unpleasant mood states.

Believe it or not, there is increasing scientific evidence to support the therapeutic effect of mindfulness meditation training on stress-related medical conditions, including psoriasis, type 2 diabetes, fibromyalgia, rheumatoid arthritis, chronic low back pain, and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder.

Several new technologies, including brain imaging, wearable tech. and virtual reality, are being used to look at and extend the potential health benefits of mindfulness. Finally, research is beginning to prove what mindfulness practitioners have known for centuries…that greater focus, awareness, acceptance, and empathy can make for more flexible, adaptive responses to stress, which, in turn, can help free us from suffering and realize greater well-being & happiness.

Original article