“Before founding Tripp, Nanea Reeves held various high-level roles throughout the games industry and became persuaded that games have therapeutic power. It’s why so much of Tripp can feel game-y at times. Those birds, for instance, that I was guiding with my head? They were collecting coins.

‘I found a lot of mental health benefits from playing video games as a younger person under stress,’ Reeves said. ‘You feel a sense of agency over the environment. That was the mind-set that informed us. Can we capture your awareness through concentration? That’s a little different than destressing, which is about connecting to your breath and deeper thoughts.’

Tripp attempts to do both throughout its various modes, and I think that’s the reason it helped me with focusing. Games, after all, demand that one be fully present — they are, in a way, a dialogue between player and creator. In the case of a VR meditation app, even some lifelong scholars of meditation argue that play-like trappings — as well as the mix of visual and audio cues — can give us the illusion of a tutor, a crucial ingredient in learning the art of meditation.

In its first two years of release, Tripp says, users have logged more than 5.5 million meditation sessions in the app. The VR social community EvolVR (now owned by Tripp) reports that more than 40,000 people attended its online meditation sessions in pandemic-heightened 2020.”

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