IFGworld

1 in 5 adults in the U.S. experienced mental illness in 2017, and 58% of them went untreated mainly due to lack of access to quality services. Urban residents experience 40% higher rates of depression, 20% more anxiety, and considerably more loneliness, isolation, and stress. Traditional treatment for mental illnesses through therapy or medication can be costly, inaccessible, and in some cases ineffective at addressing the root of the problem.

IFGworld is developing innovative VR content to make holistic, preventive and accessible mental wellness solutions. While the cost of VR hardware has gone down over the years, the quality of experience has skyrocketed. Our application, WORLDS, incorporates scientifically validated methods to improve mental health and wellness. The accessibility of our solution makes it easily scalable to address the rapidly growing problem of mental wellness in cities worldwide and to empower millions of people to take control of their wellness.

46.6 million adults in the United States experienced mental illness in 2017. 58% of them went untreated chiefly due to lack of access to quality services. Moreover, 80% of U.S. workers feel highly stressed, with losses of up to $300 billion in productivity resulting from mental health issues. On a global scale, 1 in 4 people will experience mental problems in their lifetime, and depression alone is the leading cause of disability worldwide.

Urban communities are particularly at risk. It is estimated that by the year 2050, 68% of the world's population will live in urban areas. Due to the lack of natural spaces, support networks, and other protective factors, urban residents experience 40% higher rates of depression, 20% more anxiety, and considerably more loneliness, isolation, and stress compared to rural residents.

As cities continue to develop around the world, billions of workers have become vulnerable to mental health issues. Current community mental health infrastructures cannot sufficiently address the rapidly growing needs of urban populations. A shift towards community-focused preventive and promotive care is needed in order to increase accessibility, alleviate the burden on current health services and lower healthcare costs for individuals and employers.

Our technology aims to serve individuals in urban communities who are at risk of developing mental health issues. While interest in preventive mental wellness is growing in these populations, accessibility is not. Many urban residents do not have enough time or money for meditation workshops or nature retreats, which can also be intimidating to people who are unfamiliar with wellness. The significant barriers to entry for existing programs reinforce the need for mental wellness solutions that are accessible, approachable, and low-commitment. 

User experiences play a central role in our design process, which focuses on creating an easy, enjoyable product that also provides real wellness outcomes to users. We are continually conducting research studies and working with different populations to collect user feedback and assess the effectiveness and acceptability of our technology. 

We aim to introduce WORLDS through institutional partnerships so that users can access mental wellness services without committing large amounts of money or time. VR is also approachable because its newness and interactivity appeals to people of all ages, abilities, and backgrounds. We believe that this will attract the large number of people who do not currently utilize alternative mental wellness services despite the potentially transformative benefits. 

Our solution to the problem of mental wellness in urban communities is WORLDS, a virtual reality application that is compatible with the Oculus Go headset. Through VR, users are immediately transported into multiple worlds, whose visuals, sounds, and interactions have been specifically designed to cultivate mindfulness and promote relaxation. One unique feature of our product is our wellness plans. Wellness plans are specially curated guided experiences that encourage and support users to reach their own wellness goals.  These plans are backed by psychology and science, using elements that have been proven to promote mindfulness, relaxation, awareness, and other aspects of mental wellness. WORLDS utilizes the structure of the wellness plans to provide clear direction and facilitate habitual behavior change, which are necessary for managing mental health issues. WORLDS currently has 10 scientifically validated worlds and 75 days’ worth of structured wellness plans. 

IFGworld aims to provide preventive, holistic mental wellness services that will be easily accessible to urban residents. The WORLDS app is designed to not only help those who suffer from anxiety and depression, but also to help users build mental and emotional resilience in order to prevent mental illness. This sets WORLDS apart from many other curative mental wellness interventions and is part of what makes our solution so scalable. Because our application is built for everyone, we strive to make it accessible to everyone. Our current medium of delivery, the Oculus Go, is affordably priced compared to traditional VR headsets and will continue to drop its costs as hardware advances. Additionally, we can easily publish our content to new headsets as hardware improves. Another important part of our solution is our institutional partnership strategy. Partnerships with employers, schools, and medical centers in urban communities are critical in allowing us to provide our services at low or no cost to individual users. These partnerships will extend our reach while decreasing barriers to usership and improving accessibility. At IFGworld, we recognize that community wellness can be as important as individual wellness. Like they say, the chain is only as strong as its weakest link. We hope to strengthen all of the links in the chain through community-targeted wellness programs supported by these partner institutions.

Our solution is innovative in its focus on community care and building emotional resilience rather than just aiming to cure individuals. By caring for communities, we strengthen the individual as well as their social network, which promotes sustained happiness and wellness for everyone. Our technology also incorporates elements such as mindfulness that are proven to increase resilience rather than just decreasing short-term stress. With this innovative approach, we hope to improve the mental health of millions of urban residents.

Even the most scientifically validated interventions will not be effective if they have a low adherence rate. We used behavior change theories to help us create a mental wellness intervention that people would actually want to do. Other VR ‘relaxation’ solutions either build nature scenes and give no further direction, or they integrate meditation techniques into VR without taking advantage of the immersive medium (i.e. having users close their eyes while in VR). The first approach doesn’t provide clear value, while the second approach doesn’t justify the use of VR. WORLDS provides structure through ‘wellness plans’ that package relaxing activities in a simple manner so users can return on a daily basis and be motivated to continue. These plans are integrated into the visually stunning environments in seamless and scientifically validated ways, making them feel fun and easy while also being effective. The sense of structure and overall attractiveness of this product are important factors that will lead to increased adherence, and subsequently increased usership and mental wellness outcomes.

WORLDS harnesses the power of virtual reality (VR) to deliver relaxation and mental wellness. Our worlds are built using Unreal Engine 4 and distributed on the Oculus store. 

There is growing evidence that practicing mindfulness and meditation significantly improves mental wellness. VR is an especially powerful medium for mindfulness because it provides a sense of presence and focuses one's attention on specific stimuli in the virtual world. A 2019 review by Roche, Liu, and Siegel provided promising evidence for the effectiveness of virtual reality as a medium for mental wellness interventions. Our solution, WORLDS, harnesses the revolutionary medium of VR and optimizes its potential to promote mental wellness.

Our research team comprises scientists with backgrounds in cognitive science, psychology and public health. They have worked closely with the design team to ensure that WORLDS actually affects parameters of mental wellness. The app incorporates elements that have been scientifically validated to promote different aspects of mental wellness such as stress reduction and affect regulation. Our research team also continues to conduct studies assessing the effectiveness of our technology. After using WORLDS, 75% of NCAA Division One student athletes reported feeling relaxed, and 90% reported they would use it again. Additionally, 89.7% of cancer patients indicated they would use WORLDS as an adjunct with chemotherapy and at home. Furthermore, by partnering with institutions to introduce WORLDS into wellness programs and initiatives, various populations would be able to access mental wellness on a daily basis without having to sacrifice large amounts of time, money, or energy. The widespread accessibility and scientific foundation of this solution make WORLDS an incredibly effective solution to the problem of mental health in urban communities. 

We currently have 544 active users and 757 installs 2 weeks after release. Our consumer acquisition cost so far has been 0, and we plan on ramping it up.

At a base case, in one year, we forecast serving up to 25,000 individuals through the consumer market and 1000 more people through the enterprise/hospital/university market. 

In five years, we plan on scaling up rapidly and hope to approach over 1 million users. In five years, we believe VR will have achieved a certain degree of widespread adoption amongst the consumer market, thus rapidly ballooning the number of people who own a headset and thus we can deliver content to.

Within the next year, we want to focus on building our content library, polishing our experience, adding features, and truly understanding our users and those we wish to serve – finding Product Market Fit.

Within the next five years, we want to scale up, partnering with hospitals, corporations, and universities to serve those in urban areas and beyond to deliver a solution for mental wellness. Our mission is ultimately to help people, targeting populations as diverse as paralympians to children’s hospital patients. Specifically, we would like to open up our ‘wellness plans’ and create an API for members of the community to create their own wellness plans in the worlds that we have. 

Financial 

• Virtual reality development is expensive. Even though the marginal and variable costs are typically low for software, VR is a new field that requires constant innovation. We believe that to approach a level of critical adoption, we will need to invest resources in areas such as multi-player, continual releases, and community-driven wellness plans (thus a platform).

Technical

• The technical challenges around platform, consumer adoption, and killer-app development are high, and we need an elite team of technical minds to solve them.

Market

• Consumers have been a bit slow to adopt VR technology over the last several years. The outlook has been more promising recently, with the Oculus Quest selling out in stores during launch. Market adoption will continue to dog VR applications, as users need to ‘cross the chasm’ and understand the value that VR provides. VR hardware needs to become more affordably priced (currently $199 for the Oculus Go), and VR software needs to continue to adapt to the improved technical specs that allow developers to push the boundaries. We hope to become part of a ‘killer-experience’ that drives consumer adoption to the VR market. 

Research

• We want to make sure that WORLDS actually works. This requires a dedicated research team running longitudinal studies with various populations and control groups to evaluate long-term impact on mental wellness using validated scales.

Financially

• While a large capital allocation is required to truly drive growth and scale, we can certainly bring a polished product to the market before the growth stage. We plan on selling both B2C and B2B (ultimately B2B2C, as adoption picks up) to demonstrate the value that WORLDS can provide individuals and institutions from a wellbeing and productivity standpoint. We want to use these case studies to raise further financing rounds.

Technically

• We have an incredible talented lead developer who has worked as the lead AI developer on NBA2K for over 10 years. We also hope to partner with institutions like MIT, Stanford, and USC, who are at the forefront of this space, to leverage resources to tackle challenging technical solutions. Additionally, we hope to partner with Oculus/Facebook (as mentioned below) so that we can stay ahead of their development cycle by understanding how they plan on advancing their technologies and platforms. 

Market

• With the help of institutions and corporations, we can offset price for consumers that will likely pay dividends in productivity in the long run. We also hope to partner with Oculus for resource and exposure after demonstrating the value we provide to both users of their community and to bringing new users on.

Research

• We will pursue research partnerships and grants to run longitudinal studies across various populations.

7 full-time staff

1 part-time staff

3 interns

We are content creators with deep industry knowledge across games, film, and media – physicians with years of experience in the healthcare system – talented researchers – and medical and tech-focused entrepreneurs who have a proven track record of building successful companies in similar fields. 

Our research team includes individuals with various scientific backgrounds from top-tier universities such as Georgetown, Tufts, University of Pennsylvania, Brown, and Harvard. Our content team has a long history of experience in games and entertainment, having worked on titles such as NBA 2K, Contagion, and Call of Duty. We also have an Emmy-award winning sound designer who’s worked on films such as The Beatles: Eight Days a Week and Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again. All team members have had personal or professional VR experience before joining IFGworld. 

Our founder has a wealth of experience in both the medical/technology fields in addition to being an entrepreneur. He worked as a physician for 20+ years, seeing firsthand the benefits of preventative health, before founding, operating and advising a plethora of businesses to several multi-million dollar exits. 

We’ve conducted research studies at

• The Sarcoma Oncology Center of Southern California (Santa Monica, California) 

• Dini Tandya, DDS – General Dentistry (Los Angeles, California) 

We are in partnership with the following organizations:

• Curing Childhood Cancer Foundation (Los Angeles, California)

• Ivy Child International (Boston, Massachusetts)

We plan on selling to both the consumer and enterprise markets. For both sectors, users would simply download WORLDS on the Oculus Store to their Oculus Go device to use our product. 

Consumer

• We plan on selling with a base download fee, downloadable content packs with future world releases, and a differentiated product for a subscription service. We’re still in the midst of finding our most valued customer segment and want to use this grant as an opportunity to find PMF. 

Enterprise

• We plan on selling B2B to corporations, hospitals, and schools, putting a focus on those in need and targeting higher profile corporations (such as well-known banks) to get a stamp of recognition in the market. 

Our product is simple to set-up and deliver, with WORLDS being available on the Oculus Go store and an implementation team on the enterprise side. 

We also want to serve those in need and will be providing discounts to those with disabilities, the elderly and students. 

We have raised a friends & family and seed round that will give us enough burn rate to last until we can begin selling and raising revenue to cover operational costs. The benefit of being SaaS and having mapped out our business model is the revenue compounds as we get more customers. Our goal for financial sustainability is to ultimately drive users to the subscription model, increase retention through improved plans and reduce churn.

We're currently facing financial, technological, and research barriers. Through the Solve network, we would be able to partner with organizations and researchers who can help us advance our technology to improve user adherence and outcomes. We also hope to get in touch with companies and academic and medical institutions that may be interested in piloting research studies and purchasing our product to implement VR-based wellness programs. The exposure that we could gain through increased media and speaking opportunities would be invaluable for reaching the most potential users and help them improve their mental wellness.

We’re interested in partnering with the MIT’s research network, particularly the MIT Media Lab and the MIT Game Lab. Their expertise in innovative technology would aid us in conducting studies on the efficacy, safety and acceptability of our product. Technology experts from these labs as well as from organizations such as iRobot and Medtronic could provide valuable consultation on how we could improve our product. We’re also interested in networking with community member companies such as Google, General Motors, Save the Children, HP, and Starbucks to implement our technology in institutional wellness programs and increase our usership.