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Wellness tech company Tripp announced its AI meditation beta experience Kōkua XR is now available on the Tripp app on the Meta Quest virtual reality platform.
Trained across over 11 million global wellness sessions, the beta version of Kōkua XR leverages Tripp‘s mood data to deliver individualized meditative reflections based on user feedback in real-time.
Initially available on Tripp’s mobile app, the offering expands to VR to meet the demand for personalized wellness experiences in XR. Tripp itself is the name of the company’s meditation app and is available across VR, AR, and mobile devices, including Meta Quest, Apple Vision Pro, HTC Vive Flow, Pico 3 & 4, PSVR 2, PSVR, and Rift/Rift S, iOS, and Android.
But Kōkua XR is starting out as an AI experience on the Tripp app on Meta Quest and will move to other platforms later. When you enter the Tripp app, there’s a catalog of offerings users can choose from. Kōkua XR is a new experience category.
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Named after the Hawaiian concept of selfless care and support, Kōkua XR leverages Tripp’s arsenal of mood data to generate hyper-personalized, interactive AI-powered reflections in real-time. Since its beta release on mobile in February, Kōkua XR has increased session engagement by over 100%–showcasing the robust appetite for tailored wellness experiences and the power of AI in unlocking hyper-personalization with real-time experience generation.
“This is rapid evolution. I am finding the team is actually now very energized by it. They all feel very proud of this work. I think for everyone in our company, it feels like one of the most revolutionary products they’ve ever worked on,” said Nanea Reeves, CEO of Tripp, in an interview with GamesBeat.
She added, “We’ve pumped it up with a lot of analytics and are excited to see how people interact with it. Now, there will be a big beta tag all over it. But yeah, it’s exciting. We’ve had it live on mobile for a while in a rudimentary form. Our VR audiences are a lot more active. So for me, it’s a defining moment for us because I’ve always had this vision of this mood on demand. Being able to adapt to you in real time.”
How it works
With Tripp, you speak to it and give it a request. You can look at the response and create a conversation to center yourself and listen to the support. The app gives you calm and peaceful visualizations with colorful lighting. You can ask it to tell you a joke and it will do so.
The proprietary tech enables the app to be agnostic to large language models (LLMs) and so it is connecting to ChatGPT4, Gemini, Claude and more. There will be a Llama integration too. It responds in Reeves’ own voice. Over time, you may be able to modify the voice, perhaps including your own voice.
Tripp uses a scoring method based on the request to determine which LLM is going to return the best response for the user. OpenAI definitely has been winning more than the others, Reeves said.
It takes a few seconds to respond, given latency in the network. Reeves asked it for a meditation to help her go to sleep. It can also create a bedtime story.
“Imagine yourself in that screen for us. Surrounded by the towering trees and the gentle nature. Take a deep breath,” Kōkua XR responded.
The app has multiple environments for you to choose from.
“Without any hard coding, if I change the environment to an underwater environment, it will tell me to notice the fish or notice the coral,” Reeves said.
Tripp is working with GGWP to make sure the community is properly moderated and that the AI is behaving with the proper guard rails. It does so in a privacy preserving way, Reeves said.
“It’s a fascinating new world,” Reeves said. “It’s a really cool use case to use technology to help someone feel better. We don’t have to try to be everything to everyone. We just err on the side of support and how we support the user in the moment.”
Investor feedback
Tripp has been on this journey for years.
“From the very start of the company years ago, the Tripp team has been envisioning personalized, dynamic and immersive experiences that learn and adapt to each user’s state in realtime,” said Tim Chang, venture partner at Mayfield who led Tripp’s seed round in 2017, in a statement. “Tripp has always been methodical about building a data and technology foundation in anticipation of emerging AI capabilities to tailor and optimize mindfulness and consciousness expanding experiences to unprecedented levels.”
Chang added, “Tripp’s breath detection models now paired with their real-time AI generated meditations show the power of how hyper-personalized experiences can be used for positive impact as well as mental and emotional wellness.”
Tripp’s breath detection can be experienced today on Tripp’s “Breathe” category that is powered by AI and focuses solely on breathing exercises. It is currently available on the Tripp app across VR platforms. The breath detection technology uses a gyroscope from the headset to identify your breath pattern.
Built on 11 million sessions
Kōkua XR is a first-of-its-kind approach to wellness that uses AI to not only deliver individualized reflections but continues to evolve with each session to better support its users. The offering is built on mood data from over 11 million Tripp sessions, where users are asked to self-report how they are feeling before and after each experience.
The result is Kōkua XR’s AI interface that is built from Tripp’s patented and proprietary wellness-focused data environment designed to deliver experiences that benefit the people using Tripp’s apps on multiple platforms. Kōkua XR and Tripp’s AI platform are truly powered by the Tripp community.
Tripp’s technology is backed by a number of patents. In this release, the company is calling out two specific patents, the first “adapting a virtual reality experience for a user based on a mood improvement score” (patent here) and “adapting media content to a sensed state of a user” (patent here). These patents are for adapting experiences customize wellness experiences based on a user’s mood and kinematic data like heart rate and breathing patterns.
With each interaction, Kōkua XR learns how to better support its users — individually and collectively across the entire Tripp community. First available on mobile and Meta Quest, Kōkua XR will be expanding across Tripp’s platforms in the coming months.
“The people who use Tripp have played a unique role in shaping this technology by sharing their feelings with us. Each session allows our members to embody the collaborative and selfless spirit of Kōkua, enhancing support for themselves and others,” said Reeves. “No path to wellness is the same, and with Kōkua, we’re ensuring your journey to supporting your mental and emotional well-being is as unique as you are. It’s not just an upgrade; think of it as a whole new way to approach wellness…personal and able to be accessed and shared across multiple platforms.”
Tripp uses two established patents to dynamically customize wellness experiences, responding immediately to changes in a user’s mood and key physical indicators such as breathing patterns collected from the headset itself.
The system collects mood data, breath movement data, and generates scores from user surveys before and after sessions to build a mood and emotions vector database, enabling AI to generate tailored meditations.
Thanks to pending patents, Tripp ensures accurate user input with a unique interaction system that allows corrections, cancellations, and interruptions and delivers snappy, context-rich responses by treating voice as dialogue lines rather than an audio stream through a proprietary atomic delivery method.
This unique approach allows Tripp to continually refine its offerings, providing users with the most effective and relevant content for their well-being.
“It’s no secret that generative AI has profoundly changed our experience with everyday interactions and experiences, and our approach to wellbeing is no exception,” said Malte Barth, founding partner at Bitkraft who led Tripp’s Series A round in 2022, in a statement. “Nanea and the Tripp team have spent the last 5 years building one of the most powerful engines to deliver meditation and wellness experiences that are unparalleled in personalized touch and commitment to users. Her vision has been lightyears ahead of most.”
The announcement comes on the heels of several milestones including being named among the Best in Spatial Computing on the Apple Vision Pro and Founder and CEO Nanea Reeves recognized as a finalist in the Women That Build Awards 2024.
Tripp has also received over 2.6 million five-star ratings in-app on its experiences and is also the most reviewed mindfulness app on the Meta Quest platform.
Future improvements
Based on the feedback so far, users are creating prompts to deal with communication challenges and friendship Issues (makes
