I talk with StoryUp XR CEO Sarah Hill about an experience that they collaborated on called Healium XR in order to use biofeedback with VR to train positive thinking. They’re using a commercial, off-the-shelf EEG Muse headband to detect the asymmetrical gamma activity that’s correlated to optimism, and they’re using this signal as a “story steering wheel” within a virtual reality experience where your positive thoughts controls a drone that’s flying up a waterfall. I talk to Hill about her experience, and the potential for biofeedback VR experiences to help provide people a brain break, and to relax and nurture some skills to be able to better cope with the enormous amounts of stress that are in our society today. The Healium Wellness app is available for the Oculus Go.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.412] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR podcast. So I'm about to head out to the Oculus Connect 5 conference, where Oculus is going to be announcing either some of their latest hardware that they've been working on, or some of their latest experiences, and to get a sense from Facebook and Oculus to see what the overall trajectory of where the immersive spatial computing is headed, both with virtual reality and augmented reality. They haven't announced anything specifically with augmented reality, but it'll be interesting to see if there's any new hardware or whatnot. But Oculus Connect is also a great time for me just to connect to different developers within the community. It's kind of an opportunity for the larger VR and AR community to come together and for me to kind of just see what's happening in the XR ecosystem. So I've been continuing to go to all these different conferences and I have about 200 interviews or so that I haven't published yet. So I'm going back to last year's Oculus Connect 4 conference and airing this interview with Sarah Hill, who's the CEO of StoryUpXR. And StoryUp has been working on these 360 videos to do honor flights for different veterans and just using virtual reality as a storytelling medium. They've also been starting to look into health and wellness, and so they've created this application called Helium Wellbeing, where you use the Muse headband, and the Muse headband is reading your emotions, and it's able to detect whether or not you're thinking positive or negative thoughts. Specifically, it's the asymmetry in the gamma brainwaves that tends to be correlated to optimistic, positive thinking. And so they've wired that as a story steering wheel into an experience where the more that you're thinking these positive thoughts, the more that you progress through this virtual reality experience of a drone flying up a waterfall. And if you want to get to the top of the waterfall and see the entire waterfall, then you have to kind of train your brain to be able to think these different positive thoughts. So I had a chance to try out this demo at Oculus Connect 4 last year and talked to Sarah Hill about it on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Sarah happened on Thursday, October 12th, 2017 at Oculus Connect 4 conference in San Jose, California. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:02:31.380] Sarah Hill: My name is Sarah Hill. I'm the CEO of StoryUpXR, and we create immersive media experiences in hopes of making people more positive for areas of acute situational and occupational stress.
[00:02:44.687] Kent Bye: Great. So we're here at Oculus Connect 4, and you just showed me a demo with a Muse headband that is reading my brainwaves. And I've done a number of these different experiences where the intention is to somehow read your brainwaves and have some sort of experience that is reflective of your state of mind. So maybe you could start by telling me a bit about your approach to doing that. Because a lot of them that I've seen, it's been difficult for me to know whether or not it was working or not. And I think that giving that feedback as well as giving some sort of mechanism to be able to show that it's working is something that I've seen that's very difficult to do. And I feel like you're taking a new approach to it that felt like the closest that I've seen to actually responding to my state of mind. Maybe it's my state of mind is not perfectly have that quick feedback loop to know exactly like, okay, I'm going to control it by thinking of a bad thought and then see an instant reaction. So it's still not at that point of feeling like it's immediately reactive to my brain, but it was still like showing enough of an average over time to show a pattern and trajectory of getting more present and mindful.
[00:03:52.825] Sarah Hill: Yeah, absolutely. We often don't know what it feels like to be less stressed or what it feels like to be positive. And so we wanted to create an experience where you could actually see your brain relax. You could actually see your brain react to different thoughts and feelings that you have. EEG, you don't always have the opportunity in a hospital or situation or anything like that to see your thoughts control your brainwave patterns on the screen. So that's what we've done. We've imported an individual's brainwave patterns into the virtual reality experience. so they can see what their positivity does to those brainwave patterns and then use that brainwave pattern to manipulate different assets in the unity environment. So for instance, my colleague, my co-founder, Dr. Jeff Tarrant of the Neuromeditation Institute, he's also a neurofeedback specialist, he tells us that positivity is measured as your left asymmetrical frontal gamma. And with that Muse meditation headband, we're measuring that gamma activity, assigning it to a value in the immunity environment, and using that as what we call a story steering wheel, if you will, to control the experience hands-free. We know in immersive computing environments that hands-free thoughts and brainwave control of environments are becoming more and more popular. Neurogaming has been around for quite some time. And so it's taking all of those aspects that have been learned over the years from neurogaming and EEG for decades. and turning that into a steering wheel of sorts for an immersive media experience. So in this particular experience called Positivity, the more your positive thoughts or your specific kind of gamma activity gets to a certain threshold, the higher you go up on this beautiful waterfall. And when your gamma activity is not reaching that threshold, the experience stops, the background turns red, and you get a voice prompt that comes in and guides you back to that certain state. So it's not meant as a diagnostic or any kind of treatment tool. What it is, is meant to make us more self-aware that our thoughts have the ability to control things, not only in the virtual world, but the real world as well. And you really see that when you're watching your brainwave patterns on the screen. It's kind of mesmerizing. It's like you're seeing your neurological reflection for the very first time. And some people, once they get in there, that's just all they want to do. They just want to sit there and watch those waves float across the screen.
[00:06:27.069] Kent Bye: Yeah I had the chance to like shut my eyes and try to really focus on a bad thought and it was like a positivity thing and what ended up happening is it was like the highest that I had for any other experience and it had peaked out but it was a consistent enough peak timed and correlated to when I did that that it was like oh wow like just sort of like really focusing in that way was enough to have a reaction and I think that that was enough of a correspondent to say, okay, well, these brainwaves that I'm seeing actually is tied to what's happening. I just don't know how to control what's happening in my mind to then have that feedback. And so it seems like it's a training process for you to calibrate yourself to what's happening inside of your mind to then see what's happening and what can be recorded by this Muse headband.
[00:07:16.258] Sarah Hill: Absolutely. And a lot of people are skeptical once they put it on. They don't think it's their brainwaves. So I usually, I'll shake them, or I'll say something in their ear that startles them, and they see the brainwave pattern react in that way. And so that's helpful for them to understand. But it's like we're learning how to ride a bike for the very first time. I mean, we as humans are not necessarily self-aware of what our brainwave patterns do. So the ability to become more conscious of that, and this has been done for many years, but with neurofeedback. For instance, 15 years ago, I did a program to help me sleep at night where I had to keep this little airplane below a certain threshold level with your thoughts and quieting your mind. It really takes some skill and it's not something that you put it on instantly and you're able to know how to navigate it. It's with that repetitive process. And with that repetitive process, it makes you more self-aware that, oh, you know, this is what it feels like. This is what my brain is supposed to feel like. When I do these things, we have a lot of people tell us, gosh, when I put it on for the very first time, I didn't know what to think to try to make that positivity go up. And again, you know, it's sad in a way that, you know, we've lost sight of those memories that we can recall or things that we can recall. But once you learn what they are, then once you're out of the headset in the real world, perhaps that makes you more self-aware of, okay, I'm able to recall that happy memory or that positive memory, and perhaps that can guide you through a difficult situation.
[00:08:50.200] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I also really loved the drone shot that was of this 360 video of a waterfall that you are rising up and looking at and if you are below the threshold in the line it stops and that you have to have it above the line it seems like for some average amount of time it's not like you can pick it up and it's like a little bit more of over time if you're really able to sustain that state of mind. And so when you go into this experience, are you able to, on command, make it go up or down and be that in control of your thoughts?
[00:09:24.033] Sarah Hill: For the very first time, no, I wasn't. When I first did it, I was like, how, you know, how does this work? And I should also mention, too, that beautiful drone shot that you mentioned is courtesy of I Am Real Life, and they make some amazing images, Lee and Darren Bledsoe there as well, and also Everywoah in Spain, was one of our partners as well. So it was a joint project between Everywoah, StoryUp, and then I Am Real Life. But to your question about control, no, it's like we have to learn how to guide these experiences all over again. We know that Facebook is building the brain mouse. And so hands-free, computing and navigation with your thoughts is going, and specifically when it's just a headband. I mean, this is not any EEG cap that requires messy gels or anything to put on. It's a headband that is going to be baked into these headsets over and over and over again. We know that LuxaLabs is baking EEG sensors into their headsets. You know, HTC's partnership with Neurable is allowing you to control immersive environments with your brain. The low form factor, much like the low form factor of VR headsets that have allowed for the proliferation of this medium, the lower form factor of these brain-computer interfaces are allowing creators like ourselves to harness that power of brain activity and positivity and allow you to guide experiences with your emotions.
[00:10:54.507] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I had a chance to try out NURBL at SIGGRAPH, where I was able to train the system to be able to think a thought whenever there was a cue of a dot that was blinking. So then I was able to discern a little spike in my brainwaves. And I was able to start to pick up objects and move them around. And it was like I was training myself to become telepathic within the context of this environment, where I'm able to really focus my mind and my thoughts in the context of this virtual reality environment. And the thing about Norable is that they have these dry conductive nodes that don't require gel, but they're able to have a special system that's able to connect to your scalp in order to get enough contact points to get higher resolution. So that's the other thing I found with this. brain control interface is that there's this trade-off between having a lot of contact points on your head, the comfort level of that, but also the cost and the ease of use. The Muse headband is not necessarily designed for the Gear VR, so it's a little bit of like having to hack it and It's not completely intuitive to be able to put on. You may need help putting it on, but what I found from doing some other experiences with the Muse and the Gear VR was that it was a little like, it wasn't designed for each other, so there was like a little bit of a mismatch. But this, I don't know if this is a new model or not, but it felt like it had a little bit better of a comfort fit that I was able to actually have the VR HMD with the Muse headband at the same time. And that just those couple of contact points, I don't know how many of them there are, but that seemed to be enough to get some connection point to my brainwaves, but that in the future, it's this trade-off between having enough contact points to get the resolution and to be able to really dial in to the more subtle nuances of your brainwaves.
[00:12:37.396] Sarah Hill: Yeah, which would be great if all of the headset makers would bake in these sensors into them to make it really easy for content creators that it doesn't have to be an external device. And you know, with the Muse, it's just strictly measuring the frontal portion So there isn't every kind of thought and emotion that we're able to use in these experiences. For instance, in the back of the head and with the anterior cingulate, Dr. Tarrant tells us, you know, if we were able to get more sensors around, we could create additional feelings that you could essentially train for inside the experience. But we know it's another input, just as audio was an input, haptic was an input, touch, vestibular audio, brainwave activity is, as we say, a story steering wheel.
[00:13:24.469] Kent Bye: Yeah, I've gone to the Experiential Technology Conference for the last two years, and for one thing, they used to call themselves a Neurogaming Conference, but because the instant feedback of controlling a game with your brainwaves, for a number of reasons, that's difficult, and there's not a lot of engaging gameplay, or if there is, it's very frustrating, because maybe we just don't have a good control of our minds yet. but they rebranded to the Experiential Technology Conference because I think they're trying to look at these technologies in the context of medicine and healing. So, the other thing that I would say, you know, when you mentioned that it'd be great to have these on a headset, I think a caution there is that we are going to be headed in that direction, but at the same time, there's going to be a little bit of what are the privacy implications of being able to have access to our brainwaves that could have a unique digital fingerprint of our brainwaves to identify ourselves. And so there comes all these other different ethical questions of being able to read our minds and capture all that data and then how that's sort of feeding into all these existing business models with, you know, the surveillance-based capitalism that we have. I think that to me, is what is the most concerning. It's exciting technology, but I think there's deeper ethical questions for what happens to that data? Is it recorded? And then where's it going? Because I see the potential for all these healing applications, but yet there's all these deeper ethical questions that I think I just want to put out there as a bookmark that I don't necessarily think that we've come up with the exact alternative model and business model to do something different, but that given the current assumptions of our culture, then the trajectory is that more and more of these biometric data are going to be built into the system. And then there's like these deeper ethical questions where things used to be in a medical context, but now they're in a consumer context, which is enabling new possibilities that are super exciting. And that's what you're looking at. But there's also like these deeper concerns.
[00:15:20.232] Sarah Hill: Yeah, and we are very cognizant of those ethical implications, which is why we don't record any of that data or store it in any way. And in fact, if you'll notice on our app, you don't even have the ability to live stream in our app because we don't know, is that a HIPAA violation? And we certainly don't want to allow someone to broadcast some kind of biometric. So all of these questions for content creators that really need to be answered, and until they're answered, We're staying in the safe zone with that. We're using it as a steering wheel, as you heard us say. It's not meant to be any kind of treatment tool, although it is a self-awareness tool and a reminder that your thoughts have the ability to power things in the virtual and the real world as well. Our experiences are used for people who aren't able to get out and experience the world, not only in assisted living centers and nursing homes, but in areas of occupational stress, so first responders. call centers, police departments, those kinds of areas that need a break, need a brain break, that you can go somewhere for three minutes and that you can take a moment and relax. And we also measure what these experiences do to the brain. And that's another, you know, ethical implication that is probably for another episode. But what are these experiences that we're putting on our bodies doing to our brain? And are they injecting trauma? Dr. Tarrant has studied extensively before and after experiences, specifically with a beta activity or the stress reaction in the brain, and how media changes those brainwave patterns for how long, we don't know yet, but there is a shift and a change. And while that's good with a positivity experience or with a calming media experience, Not all of them are like that. And just making us all become more self-aware of, do we need to be really taking a step and measuring what are these experiences doing to your emotions?
[00:17:24.286] Kent Bye: Yeah, it's great to hear all those considerations of privacy. And I think that is a safe approach to not record any of the data and store it. That's sort of like, as a default, something that's going to put you in a better place.
[00:17:35.971] Sarah Hill: And we have warnings like you see on there. This is a recreational experience. It's not meant to treat or diagnose in any way. And again, we want to reiterate, this is a steering wheel, not necessarily a treatment device. Your first mode of treatment should be seeking a professional. Yeah.
[00:17:54.982] Kent Bye: And so being at the Experiential Technology Conference and SIGGRAPH, I've had a chance to try a number of different brain control interfaces. And the thing that I find is that depending on the different configuration of the sensors on the brain, you get access to different signatures of the brain that are able to then allow you to do different things. And so with the Muse band, what are the things that you have access for? What are the different brainwave states that you're able to measure and then use as an input into some of these experiences?
[00:18:25.598] Sarah Hill: Right now we've only started with frontal gamma because that's what's accessible via the Muse. There isn't any kind of anterior activity that can be captured. And Dr. Tarrant is probably the best person to chat about this because he's a licensed neurofeedback specialist as well as being a psychologist. But there's alpha activity that can be measured. So for instance, the more relaxed your brain is, the higher your alpha activity. So you could create an experience in the future for that. But right now for the Muse, we're strictly focusing on that gamma activity because that's the one that we know that we're able to accurately capture. in the frontal portion of your forehead.
[00:19:04.533] Kent Bye: And so what is that gamma? Is it just thinking positive thoughts?
[00:19:08.270] Sarah Hill: Yes, and it's left frontal gamma. So, for instance, I don't know what allowed you to bring up those waves, but I think of my kids being born, and so that, to me, drives me up the side of the mountain, repetitively, over and over again. That's a thought that I can recall in my mind that makes it go up. I'm not sure what it is for other people, and it's different things. And that's another thing that's important, too, is that not everybody's body or brain are the same. So that experience affects people differently and what's going to be, we have three levels, easy, medium and hard. What's going to be easy for you might be hard for someone else because it just depends on your own physiology.
[00:19:49.118] Kent Bye: Yeah, and at the end of your VR experience, you actually had some footage of showing your Honor Flight footage to different veterans. And I'm just curious to hear how that work's been received in terms of, I know the last time we talked, we talked about those VR experiences that you'd created, and I guess an update in terms of what's been happening with that since the last time we chatted.
[00:20:10.343] Sarah Hill: Yeah, so we have a waiting list still of veterans who are waiting for headsets to see their memorials and we ship them out as fast as we can. But thousands of veterans all around the nation have had the opportunity to virtually visit their memorials if they're not able to physically go on an honor flight. We're affiliated with Central Missouri Honor Flight and so the veterans who aren't able to go on their physical flights, they let us know and we either take a headset to them personally or we ship it to a family member who's then able to share it with them. But if there are any individuals in your area who are listening who have VR headsets, It's a free app. StoryUp is a free app. You can download it and show them not only the World War II and the Vietnam Memorial, but we just finished an experience for the Women's Memorial at the base of Arlington National Cemetery. It's called Changing the Face of Courage. And so any female veterans who aren't able to physically travel can see it in virtual reality as well. So each one of our experiences that are powered by your positivity, after the experience is done at the base of the waterfall, for instance, you have an opportunity to see a story about how thoughts and emotions were able to create change in the real world. And again, making us more self-aware that those feelings and those thoughts have power, not just inside a headset, but outside as well.
[00:21:28.303] Kent Bye: And so are there any other projects or initiatives and demographics that you're working with with virtual reality?
[00:21:35.119] Sarah Hill: As far as projects, we're still getting this one out the door, and you can imagine with the things that are required with figuring out that algorithm of what makes something do something, that takes quite a bit of work. Our next experience is involving a sonic sculpture. It's a gamelotron. Some of you might have seen it as an in-residence experience in LA not too long ago, but we'll be allowing people to use their positivity to control this sonic robotic sculpture. So the more that gamma activity gets higher or reaches that certain threshold, you hear the gamelotron play.
[00:22:18.883] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I know that you're connected to different communities within the VR community, whether it's VR for Good or other initiatives for medical VR. I'm just curious to hear of the different groups that you identify and kind of what's happening in the larger VR for Good uses for virtual reality.
[00:22:35.401] Sarah Hill: Yeah, and I am not a medicine. I have no medical background. I'm a storyteller and a journalist. You know, my co-founder is a psychologist, so he represents the medical aspect of it. But since my background is journalism, Journalism 360 is a great organization for any immersive journalist out there who is looking to gain the knowledge, equipment. They also give grants to immersive storytellers, and it's a joint initiative between the Google News Lab, the Knight Foundation, and the Online News Association, or ONA. And if you go to medium.com slash journalism 360, you can sign up for that program. You can see all of the blog posts where they discuss in detail ethical implications. How do you interview someone from your hidey hole, cameras, equipment, all of those things that immersive storytellers need to know. So I would definitely encourage people to check out that. VR for Good is a great program that Oculus puts on. that I had the opportunity to be a part of last year where we teamed up with a charity called Love Has No Labels and we created an experience about implicit bias and allowed people to step inside the stories of a handful of different individuals of different races, religions, sexual orientation to develop a closer relationship with them and to physically be closer to them and look in their eyes and better understand their stories. So VR for Good, they have a website as well and they also routinely pair up with filmmakers for grants, and they pair them with a charity, and that filmmaker is then able to carry out that charity's vision by creating a virtual reality project. So there are lots of great groups out there that are really enabling immersive storytellers to use this medium in a positive, positive way.
[00:24:14.841] Kent Bye: Yeah, I think I had a chance to first see Love Has No Labels at Sundance this past year, and what has happened to that experience after that? How has it gone with the charity being able to use that?
[00:24:27.100] Sarah Hill: Yeah, so it is currently on Gear VR right now, and we're in the process of getting it in some other distribution networks as well. And that would probably be a better question for Love Has No Labels. You should have them on and have them talk about how they were able to use virtual reality as an educational experience. But, you know, for our perspective, we were deeply honored just with the opportunity to tell their story. They do really important work. And as we know, flat media has value, but immersive media has far greater value as far as emotional impact and the amount of time that individuals spend watching those programs.
[00:25:07.294] Kent Bye: So, what do you want to experience in VR?
[00:25:10.329] Sarah Hill: That is a good question. I would love the ability to go back to my childhood home that was destroyed by a tornado probably 15 years ago and just be in my room again and look at that flowered wallpaper and the cracks in the ceiling and hear the creak of the wood floor and all of that kind of stuff. That to me would truly put me home.
[00:25:36.372] Kent Bye: Yeah, I think just looking at the different techniques that are out there photogrammetry and reconstruction I think there it may if there's the problem is that a lot of those techniques you need like a lot of photos and a lot of coverage to be able to really get a whole sense but if you have a photo that just has enough of that perspective I think that it's already I've seen some examples of people that have done this taking a photo and then extrapolating out the geometry and kind of shaping it into a place so I feel like That's something that is on the near horizon. But yeah, I think the last time we talked, that was something that you had mentioned as well as something of that connection to home and family and memories. And what do you think that is? Or what do you think that you're searching for through that type of experience?
[00:26:17.050] Sarah Hill: I'm just incredibly nostalgic. I'm 47 years old. I have a 22-year-old, a 19-year-old, and then a 52-year-old. He's my big baby. And as you get older, you just long to go back to some of those places that you've lost. And when our home was lost in a tornado, it was traumatic for us because it was taken away from us so quickly. But just the ability to revisit those things that life passes far too quickly, and you look back and think, I would really like to go back some of those places that I wish that I had savored more in my youth.
[00:26:55.025] Kent Bye: Great. And finally, what do you think is kind of the ultimate potential of virtual reality, and what it might be able to enable?
[00:27:03.893] Sarah Hill: I think the ability to allow people to unlock not just watching a story and not just using immersive media for entertainment or information, but to actually use it to shift their emotions and to allow them to feel stories in a unique way. not just feel them with haptics or spatial audio or vestibular audio but that you can literally put on a headset and hopefully someday you'll be able to press a button and not only press a button and say I want to feel this way but to be able to search for that kind of content. That you can go to Google and just as they tag videos, that they are tagging experiences on the basis of emotions, on the basis of what does your brain wave pattern look like after you watch this experience and how are you wanting to feel today? To me, that would be the ultimate virtual reality experience. For instance, if I was going through stressful situation. I was on a submarine or something like that in the middle of the ocean and I didn't have the ability to see nature and I needed an escape. The fact that I could put on an experience, I could put myself in nature and feel a certain way and not only that but have people inside that experience give me affirmations. A lot of people don't have the ability to have affirmations or somebody who is right in front of you saying, you are going to get through this and you will power through it and be better than you ever before. So to me, that's the ultimate reality to allow people to shift their emotions and feelings. And with that power becomes a great responsibility for creators to make sure that we're doing it responsibly and that consumers don't get confused. that things that are meant for recreational purposes are any kind of treatment for any kind of medical condition.
[00:29:05.296] Kent Bye: Anything else left unsaid that you'd like to say?
[00:29:07.438] Sarah Hill: Just appreciate your work and keeping us up to date on all the happenings here. It's a great event here at OC4. I've learned a lot and excited about DASH and all of the announcements that they've made. So the industry is moving really quickly and we truly rely on creators like you to keep us informed. So thanks for being in the trenches and bringing us back all of that important information.
[00:29:30.737] Kent Bye: Awesome. Thank you. Yeah.
[00:29:33.779] Sarah Hill: Yep. Thank you very much. Have a great day.
[00:29:36.001] Kent Bye: So that was Sarah Hill. She's the CEO of StoryUpXR. And she was talking about the Helium Wellbeing application that was using the Muse headband to be able to read your brainwaves and be able to have this biofeedback experience that is aimed towards trying to reduce your stress. So, I have a number of different takeaways about this interview. First of all, it looks like the Helium Wellbeing application is on the Oculus Go store. You can get it for Gear VR and Oculus Go, I think. It has the option for you to put on the Muse headband. I think you can actually do it without the Muse headband because not everybody has access to that technology. It's a bit of a synthesis of two pieces of technology that I think in the future it's going to be a lot better when these things are just integrated into the headset. It's going to be less awkward, I think, to use two different pieces of technology that really weren't designed to work together with each other. And so there's various different issues when you're using them both at the same time. But once it's built into the headset, I think we're going to see a lot more of these different types of applications. I think that the implications are is that you have all this biometric data that's radiating from your body. How can you capture that and interpret it and give it as a real-time immersive experience within either virtual or augmented reality technologies? And I think this is gonna be a huge trend for applications that are using within virtual reality and augmented reality, just because it just is so compelling and it works so well. It's also just something that we've not been able to do so much before. I think it's going to train us to be able to be a lot more sensitive to our inner signals of our body. We're going to have like visual feedback by translating these biometric markers, and we're going to be able to see them as a feedback loop. But I think what that is going to be doing is that it's going to be able to connect the dots between this invisible data that's being radiated from your body, and it's going to train your brain to be able to maybe subconsciously be able to pick up on that data without you even having to explicitly look at it. It's going to be able to create this feedback loop within your brain. And I think that is what is so exciting is that it's kind of like this consciousness hacking potential for you to use this data that's radiating from your body to be able to be more centered, more present, to have more of a witnessing consciousness, to deal with stress a lot better. And a lot of what the story of XR is this healing and well-being is just saying that like stress is one of the epidemics of this 21st century. And Imagine being a firefighter or people in these very intense high-stress situations and this type of application is going to allow them to get a break and to change their context. If they're in a work context and they need to escape for a moment to be able to go to a place that's going to allow them to reduce their stress, I think virtual reality technologies is going to be a huge help for people who are in these types of high-stress situations and instead of maybe escaping into their cell phone, they'll be able to actually be completely immersed into these different environments and be able to build up some of these different skills so that they create, using the principles of neuroplasticity, create a little bit more resilience to be able to handle these types of high-stress situations. And the other thing that I was glad to hear is that StoryOp XR is not going to be recording this data. They're not even going to be broadcasting it. There's a lot of implications for capturing this types of health data. And once these types of biometric sensors are integrated into these systems, then there's going to be a huge question as to whether or not you're going to be broadcasting and storing this type of data on these third-party servers, which I think that there's a lot of privacy implications for that. The third-party doctrine says that any data that is given over to a third party is no longer have a reasonable expectation to marine private and a lot of this biometric data could potentially kind of be this Mapping of your unconscious and having third parties have access to this type of data. I think is a huge privacy risk and there's actually going to be a VR identity and privacy summit that I'm helping co-organize at Stanford University on November 8th 2018 bringing together a lot of these different big players in the industry to be able to talk about some of these different biometric privacy implications because there are a lot of huge implications and You know, this is something I've been covering on my podcast some of those risks that are out there but there has to be these deeper questions about the ethics that are around these types of technologies because as VR starts to move forward we're gonna have access to more and more data and And it's going to be able to do amazing things like StoryUpXR is doing with their helium well-being application, but there's also a lot of risks to go down a more dystopian path with using this data to be able to hack our consciousness. And the way that John Burkhart, who's a behavioral neuroscientist, said it to me is that the line between predicting behavior and controlling behavior starts to blur once you have access to a lot of this biometric data. So it becomes this unknown ethical threshold at the point where you don't really know whether or not you're predicting behavior or controlling behavior. And that's sort of the difference between, you know, advertising and mind control and thought control. and I think that's the the risk here with some of this biometric data that having access to that that ethical threshold starts to become a lot more blurry and there just has to be a lot more tighter ethical considerations for you know how we're even dealing with this and so in some ways I think this is a larger topic that's happening within the entire culture right now through many different angles around ethics in general and the technology is a mere reflection to what it is requiring us to look at what are the ethical implications of virtual augmented and immersive technologies as well as artificial intelligence and how do we you know kind of navigate this new technology that is reflecting some of these deeper ethical questions that have always been there they're just make it much more explicit and clear. So, that's all I have for today, and I just wanted to thank you for listening to the Voices of VR podcast, and if you enjoy the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends, and consider becoming a member of the Patreon. This is a listener-supported podcast, and so I do rely upon your donations in order to continue to bring you this coverage. So, you can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. Thanks for listening.
