Boosting Athletic Performance with NEUROPILOT's Virtual Reality App
Virtual reality (VR) has the potential to revolutionize the way athletes train, and the NEUROPILOT app is a prime example of this.
NEUROPILOT, a virtual reality (VR) app that helps athletes manage anxiety and boost confidence, is based on the “The Desire therapy” method by psychologist Maia Tskitishvili. The app has been developed to offer athletes a relaxing and immersive experience that aims to improve their overall training and performance. The co-founder of NEUROPILOT, Nikoloz Gogochuri, shared insights into the inspiration behind the app, the research process, and plans for its future.
In an interview, Nikoloz explained that the inspiration for the NEUROPILOT app came from Tskitishvili's success in managing anxiety in athletes using her "Desire therapy" method. Tskitishvili had been working with athletes for over five years, helping more than 4,000 people manage anxiety, and she felt that her method could benefit more people if it was digitized. "The Desire Therapy" is based on visualization exercises, and VR is a perfect medium for this purpose.
Nikoloz Gogochuri, who is also the CEO of VRex Immersive, a VR startup in the travel marketing industry, saw the potential for VR technology to improve basic human needs, leading to the collaboration between his company and NEUROPILOT. He said that the content created for the app helps users to relax and calm down, and, more importantly, helps athletes gain confidence, lower anxiety levels, and be more productive during workouts and games.
To use the NEUROPILOT app, athletes first fill out questionnaires on the mobile app. They then put on the VR goggles and enter a VR experience based on the "Desire therapy." The session consists of two parts, each five minutes long, and athletes complete the cycle within a week. The human brain then does the long-term heavy lifting itself.
The research process for NEUROPILOT involved analyzing over 700 past sessions, creating extensive descriptions of the images imagined by athletes, and creating a median version of all of that. Concept artist Maka Zedelashvili then brought this to life in the visual form. After the visuals were done, an experiment was conducted with the initial group of athletes. The results showed that the majority of athletes had medium to high anxiety levels before the therapy, but during the sessions, their anxiety levels dropped from severe to low. Even after ten days, the level remained low.
In terms of the future, Gogochuri said that NEUROPILOT's mission is to build VR software that will help different people tackle various challenges and improve their lives. He added that the team would keep iterating and adding new content, new features, and functionality to the app as they go. The first version of the NEUROPILOT app is aimed at helping athletes manage performance anxiety, but in the future, they plan to add other sessions aimed at other challenges and user groups worldwide.
NEUROPILOT app is a promising new tool that uses VR technology to help athletes manage anxiety and boost confidence. As the app evolves and expands to meet the needs of different sports and disciplines, it has the potential to revolutionize the way athletes train and perform. As Nikoloz Gogochuri put it, "The main purpose of any technology is the betterment of life," and NEUROPILOT is a perfect example of this in action.
He also added: "We want to make a change in people's lives, and the fact that we're using technology to do that is exciting." With NEUROPILOT, the future of sports and training is looking brighter than ever.