43 VR Start-up
arkness. Then a nameless sound, behind you, above you, encircling
TEAM TRIPP The company aims to bring their experience in gaming to the world of film and TV
you. Which becomes music. Then there’s light. Colour. You float through clouds of energy, a thousand feet above a crimson ocean. You feel relaxed, safe, focused, empowered… No, you’re not at the peak of an ayahuasca experience. You’re just having a Tripp. Tripp is a California tech start-up harnessing the power of VR to bring people mood-enhancing experiences on-demand. Employing every tool in the VR paintbox – stereoscopic imagery, music, virtual space, interactivity and even binaural beats – Tripp’s vision is to use VR as a tool for everything from stress relief to consciousness raising. “VR introduces some really great opportunities to innovate,” says game industry veteran and Tripp CEO/ co-founder Nanea Reeves. “It introduces some attributes that we really haven’t seen in content. It has deep eects on the emotions as well as neurological and physiological responses, and it becomes a kind of multiplier. We know there are sound frequencies that aect people in a certain way, we know music can aect your mood. And when you put that in the immersive environment of VR, it has a multiplying eect.” We have heard over and over from every quarter of the industry: I love VR. I just don’t know what it’s for. Reeves and her team have worked hard to find out what VR does best and are focused on enhancing that in new and unusual ways. She sees our traditional ways of thinking about story and the content experience as dead-ends when it comes to developing VR. “I don’t think that Hollywood has figured out how you tell a story in VR. You can’t have that ‘detached observer’ experience, the POV of a spectator. There is no spectator. You have to incorporate the viewer into the narrative.” Reeves and her co-founder, company president Zachary Norman, both came out of the gaming industry. Reeves had been COO of gaming video site Machinima and an exec at gaming giant Electronic
WHY WOULD I GO THROUGH ALL THE TROUBLE OF GOING INTO VR FOR SOMETHING I COULD DO MORE CONVENIENTLY ON MY MOBILE?
Arts. She and Norman worked together at several companies including mobile game developer JAMDAT, which Norman founded in 2000. The gaming world is many years ahead of the film and TV world in thinking about interactive and immersive storytelling, where the story is not a delivered narrative, but an experience. “When we have looked at VR, we have hit that same storytelling wall,” says Reeves. “We would build a VR solitaire game where players could explore the space, and find a little sub-plot storyline, but truthfully it’s a lot less friction to play solitaire on your mobile phone on an app. Why would I go through all the trouble of going into VR for something I can do more conveniently on my mobile? People might say ‘This is cool! I
love this!’, but they don’t go back to it. “We started to think ‘What could we do where VR is really needed? We began by thinking of our own experience of VR, where going into VR felt like a retreat or a respite from real life, and we started to lean into that more. We had this idea of trying to stimulate dierent responses in the user, rather than trying to simulate the real world.” GAMING THE NERVOUS SYSTEM Reeves and Norman began to employ their game development experience from the start. They knew that some of the best games can trigger a flow state in players. The craving for that experience of flow can bring people back again and again. That ability of games to trigger deep emotional responses got the team thinking about
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