I am not always what one would call the perfect state of calm. I have a lot of anxiety about the present and the future.

Also, my family, like anyone’s family, can be hectic. I could go for a walk, but I don’t often get around to it, instead getting stuck in my day-to-day routine. Being that I live in such a small place, there isn’t really anywhere all that quiet. And even if I were in a quiet place, then that wouldn’t stop the anxieties and ruminations in my head.

Listening to music and whale sounds has helped me calm down a little in the past, but what I need is to be able to keep myself from spiraling too far into my thoughts.

Thankfully, with advancements in technology, many tools are available to help me retain my sanity, even when an actual therapist is not within reach.

A couple tools that have supported me are Tripp’s virtual reality meditation program and their free mobile app. Tripp’s VR app made sense for me, being that I have found video games to be a sanctuary to tune out the anxieties in my head and get lost in another realm. This has also been the case for Tripp’s co-founder and CEO, Nanea Reeves.

“I realized throughout my journey that video games have been kind of a retreat for me at times in my life,” said Reeves. “Even the casual ones on my phone, if I am kind of just ruminating on a lot of negative internal talk, I can play something and it sort of clears my head.”

I tried out the free VR app demo a handful of occasions, when I have felt particularly at a loss. It gave me a private space, even if it was a virtual space, where I could ease my tension a little, and just be. This was thanks to an immersive, multi-sensory experience, with a serene audio track and vibrant visuals, like something out of a kaleidoscope.

The immersive nature of virtual reality is another aspect of what inspired the genesis of Tripp as a concept.

“I was an investor in the Oculus early stage of their company, and that gave me access to devices,” said Reeves. “And a lot of the early experiences were designed to make you feel afraid, you know, you felt like you were on a cliff . . . And that was really interesting to me. I thought, if you could make someone feel fear that easily what else could you make them feel?

I got treated to a surreal fireworks display on launch, then the Tripp hummingbird, who is coincidentally also named Terrence, came and visited. I then performed a short exercise where, by tilting my head, I navigated a spherical object through a path of obstacles where I had to collect coins as they went by. The voice of the application suggested seeing the gaps between obstacles as the gaps between thoughts, which is “where the joy lies,” as the narrator puts it.

The best way to explain this, as author Pema Chödrön puts it, is seeing rays of sunshine that peek through the clouds. Having this kind of visual metaphor for my mental activity was something novel to me, imagining my thoughts as physical objects, and looking between them to see the sunshine. Especially for those who tend to think in terms of images, this can be a powerful metaphor.

Another of Tripp’s tools that I have relied on is its AI assistant, Kōkua, which has recently hit the VR application.

Kokua is fairly straightforward: I type my current mood in the prompt, and the AI voice assistant, based on CEO Nanea Reeves’ voice, offers words of comfort. It then creates a short reflection – some words to guide me through dealing with the stressors I am experiencing, lasting just over two minutes. At the end, I am welcome to provide feedback on whether the meditation helped at all.

I found that, the majority of the time, the app was quite helpful. There was one occasion where the app mistakenly thought I had children, but most of the time it could understand what I was trying to say. I think that is what I needed most, to know that it was okay to feel what I felt, and to have that legitimized.

One of the reasons that Kōkua was released to mobile initially, according to Reeves, was to receive feedback from users before releasing the app through Tripp’s subscription-based VR app.

“We have a smaller audience on mobile,” continued Reeves. “We wanted to learn and see where we might have gotten certain things wrong, based on how people are interacting with it for support.”

While Tripp’s VR and mobile applications are helpful, Reeves hopes to avoid the tools being used in the place of trained professional therapists.

“We do have some connections to different support lines,” she added.

If the AI detects that someone might need real support, if they’re in a crisis, there’s a connection to real professional support.

Tripp’s tools are not therapy in themselves, but from my experience, they have helped in times of distress. If I can’t change what is happening around me, the VR app and mobile app at least help me to feel like I can deal with the challenges, that there is a calm within the middle of the storm. Life has its share of conflicts and arguments. Even if things aren’t okay, Tripp allowed me, even for a moment, to be okay.

Tripp VR is a colorful, calming experience, and while Kōkua is not a licensed counselor, it does make a big difference to at least have the feeling that someone was hearing my struggles and being empathetic, even if that empathy was coming from a computer program.

VR and AI have immense potential for improving people’s psychological well-being, and the advances in the technology could become useful as another tool set for mental health professionals.

“I and the entire industry was waiting for Apple for a decade,” said Rolf Illenberger, CEO of VRDirect, which provides company software solutions to build their own VR projects. Among their clients are Porsche and T-Mobile.

The Apple Vision Pro is branded by Apple as a spacial computer, which will allow users to clearly see their surroundings, and project apps as if appearing within the physical space.

Several companies are currently involved in the virtual reality and augmented reality space, including “Meta, Apple, HTC . . . [and]  Lenovo,” said Illenberger told Hypergrid Business.

Finance website Insider Monkey ranks Apple, Inc. at number one in their largest VR/AR companies, with a market cap of $2.8 trillion — though Apple doesn’t actually have an AR or VR product out yet. It ranks Meta at number six, having a market cap of $787 billion.

With Apple set to release the Vision Pro, VR is about to go mainstream, according to Illenberger.

“So I think now that Apple has joined the group of companies pushing this technology,” he continued, “it’s obvious that this is the next big thing. And it’s also obvious that these companies will, you know, continue investing billions in this technology, not only in the technology but also in the kind of adoption of this technology in the market out there.”

One major hurdle that the Apple Vision Pro will face is its price tag of $3,500, which may turn off many consumers.

“You have to see that the whole, let’s say, metaverse, technologies, VR and AR, we’re still that’s still technologies, very infant technologies,” said Illenberger on the accessibility of VR technology. “I would even argue they’re not yet in a state that it’s a mass market b2c thing at this point in time, you know, look at the look at the Apple headset and the price point, but also looking at the other available VR headsets. We’re not talking about devices that are tailored towards a mass market audience at this point in time.”

In a separate interview with Laptop, Illenberg highlighted that the initial goal of the first Vision Pro model is not to sell units but rather to create buzz for the product.

“A fair comparison might be HDTV, in say, 2006 or 2007. The motivation to announce Vision Pro now was to stimulate and nurture the ecosystem of app developers and content creators to invest in the new device, which was already happening once rumors about the device started to emerge several months ago. Hence, Vision Pro is already a great success for Apple.”

Meta officially launched the Meta Quest 3 during its Meta Connect event last month. Meta is also experimenting with Flamera, a VR headset that utilizes a new passthrough technology that is supposed to eliminate external feed distortion and artifacts.

Being someone with autism, I always found myself being drawn to the logic-oriented characters of science fiction movies, such as Star Wars’ C-3PO, Sonny from I, Robot, or Baymax from Big Hero 6. They tend to be extremely knowledgeable about certain subjects, but also struggle to understand concepts of human social behavior such as body language or sarcasm. This is a struggle for many individuals like myself.

Recent advances in artificial intelligence have been addressing such challenges, and they may lead to robots becoming more human than most science fiction predicts.

A form of artificial intelligence called deep learning is being used to read and interpret human body language and facial expressions — and this software could help individuals with autism become more sociable.

Stanford University is developing such software for Google Glass, a wearable computer developed by Google that the user wears like a pair of glasses. The software uses interactive applications that train the wearers to identify examples of emotions in his, her, or their environment. According to Annett Hahn Windgassen of the San-Francisco area, her son, Erik, in 2016, became more engaged with his peers thanks to this technology.

This would be an effective tool for autistic individuals. In my experience at meetups with fellow autistics, the majority of us are drawn to video games. Many individuals with autism are drawn to a special interest, a topic that the person in question obsesses about and develops an encyclopedic knowledge about. Individuals with autism would be right at home using a video game that requires the player to identify human emotions..

This software would also be an ideal fit for robots, since computers essentially think like those with autism to begin with.

At Vanderbilt University, computer science professor Maithilee Kunda and her team have developed software that functions much like the minds of individuals such as autism advocate and animal science professor Temple Grandin, whose thought processes are, according to Kunda, “much on the visual side.” The software scans visual quizzes, which it then solves.

Kunda also notes that the relationship between artificial intelligence and autism is symbiotic. Creating these programs will help researchers to better understand the autistic brain, and understanding autism will better inform software built for not only those with autism, but also others with unique modes of learning and perceiving the world.

I am excited for the potential of emotionally intelligent robots in the near future. It would be every science fiction nerd’s dream to have their very own C-3PO, someone who can quote-unquote “speak” autistic, and would not lose patience with me if I do not understand sarcasm or accidentally use body language that neurotypical humans would find offensive.

On the flip side, robots and autistic humans should not be considered one and the same.

An old adage states that “If you have met one person with autism, you have met one person with autism.” What may be a challenge for some of us may not necessarily be a challenge for other Autistic human beings. If I use Google Glass to help me better navigate social situations, that does not mean I am the same as a robot that lacks the proper software. We are not robots with machine learning, and we are not robots without it. If robots are compared to Autistic humans, it could potentially dehumanize us, making us seem to neurotypicals no more than fleshy computers.

So the question is, will deep learning help people with autism integrate better into the neurotypical community, or will we be seen as meaty robots?

The show stars Sarah Sashi (Person of Interest) as Mara Kint, a former negotiator for the police who left after she failed to prevent her brother-in-law from killing his wife and daughter.  At the start of the series, she is teaching a college course on Interpersonal Dynamics, which is basically a hybrid of theater and improv — and self-medicating her grief with drugs and alcohol.

After wrapping up class one day, her former boss, retired police chief Charlie Ventana, played by Dennis Haysbert (Mr. Allstate himself), drops in and asks her to help out at Onira Tech, a company which has developed a hyper-realistic virtual reality program, Reverie, which recreates past memories of places and people based on personal experience and information gathered from social media, and allows users to freely explore that while shutting off their consciousness from the virtual world. Some of Reverie’s users have lost touch with the real world altogether, so Mara’s job is to talk them into leaving the virtual world by entering their Reverie simulation. Essentially, Mara has to jack into the Matrix in order to get them out.

The main method of she goes by this is through empathy, which Mara describes in the pilot episode as “the most important tool.”

“We learn empathy by observing and we’ve stopped doing that,” she says as she gestures towards a cluster of young adults staring at their smart phones. “I mean look, nobody’s even having an actual conversation.”

Empathy is the recurring theme throughout season one of Reverie, a show that capitalizes on the anxiety surrounding human civilization’s near-constant dependence on computer technology.

The basic structure of the show is essentially a detective story wrapped in a science-fiction package. The viewer is introduced to the Reverie user of the week, Mara and company interview their friends and witnesses to figure out why the person is stuck in the virtual world, and Mara and her allies use this information to get the individuals out.

Nine times out of ten, the person choosing to stay in Reverie is haunted by something in the real world, something or someone that person has lost or lacks, and Reverie is fulfilling those desires. In one case, a former ballet dancer who has become paraplegic has her own personal theater and the use of her virtual legs.

The idea of people being stuck in virtual worlds has been explored before in films like The Matrix. While the virtual reality slaves in The Matrix were never given a choice, Reverie users voluntarily opt into it.

Most of the time, at least.

Reverie raises ethical questions about the potential uses and misuses of VR. Viewers are introduced to the concept of the Dark Reverie, Reverie programs used to commit illicit or illegal activities, such as practicing for a real-world heist or interrogating a Syrian refugee youth against his will, just to name a couple examples.

Where Reverie does break new ground is by introducing the concept of de-realization, the manifestation of past trauma from the user’s subconscious mind in the simulation, and outside of it as well.

Entering other people’s Reverie experience affects Mara herself, as well, with hallucinations of her niece. She virtually visits the place where her death occurred, only to find herself in the middle of the road and nearly run over by a vehicle. If VR becomes this realistic, then we could end up seeing people running in a park thinking they’re jumping on Super Mario Bros. Turtles. Oh, wait, that’s already happening.

You can watch a preview of the show below, and all of season one on Hulu and at NBC.com.