Noah Robinson’s Inner World launches today on the Quest Store after slowly cultivating an engaged peer-to-peer counseling community that is providing affordable mental health interventions across multiple social VR and 2D platforms on Mac, PC & iOS. Robinson is getting his Ph.D. in clinical psychology, and Inner World is a research project studying how the effects of what he calls “Cognitive Behavioral Immersion,” which is an adaptation of Aaron T. Beck’s Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Model. Robinson took inspiration from Dennis Greenberger and Christine A. Padesky’s “Five-Part Model to Understand Life Experiences” that includes Physical Reactions, Thoughts, Moods, Behaviors all within an Environmental Context that was first published in their 1995 book Mind Over Mood: Change the way you feel by changing the way you think. The main idea that your feelings are difficult to directly control, but that you can alter your mood by changing your thought patterns, behaviors, embodied physiology within the context of a different environmental context.

Robinson has found some powerful anecdotal evidence that providing mental health interventions within a social VR world can lead to some profound transformative moments as it provides a significant shift in environmental context that can lead to different thoughts, physiological reactions, and behaviors that ultimately can shift someone’s mood. He’s in the process of conducting three randomized-control trial studies to provide more scientific evidence on the impact of immersive environments on these types of mental health interventions, and is collecting lots of anonymized data within his social VR app to study what works and does not working within the process of peer counseling.