Reconnecting With The Emotional Self Through VR with Sarah Ticho

Welcome to The Future of You.

In this episode, I'm talking to Sarah Tico, founder of Hatsumi, and co-founder of XR Health Alliance about the fascinating intersection of virtual reality, immersive media, health, and wellbeing. Sarah's work focuses on using VR to create human-centered immersive experiences that redefine how we understand emotion, memory, and identity. We discuss Sarah's pioneering projects, including Soul Paint, an immersive project that invites and enables users to map their emotions through body mapping, 3D drawing, and movement, giving people a brand new way to think about their emotions and process their feelings. SoulPaint won the XR Experience competition at this year's South by Southwest Festival, a huge and deserved accolade for Sarah, who really is a pioneer in this intersection between art, technology, and health.

I've known Sarah for quite a long time.

We've worked together more than once, so it was great to catch up on on SoulPains, but more generally just chat about how immersive technologies are reshaping our understanding of identity and memory and emotion, as well as potentially revolutionising mental healthcare, pain management, and much more.

Enjoy. Sarah Tico, welcome to The Future of You.

Thanks so much for having me. Yeah, I've been really looking forward to Good chat.

Why don't you explain to people, well, I didn't even know what to call it, VR, XR, spatial computing, augmented reality. Where are we, Sarah, and what are you doing in this area? And what do you call it?

I think the field that I particularly work in is in virtual reality. I feel like XR has become just an easy term for the catch-all mixed reality, augmented reality, virtual reality. I think there's consensus in the community that we all hate the word metaverse.

I purposely didn't use it. I thought it might be the case.

Yeah, just because I think no one really knows what that means yet, and it just felt like this attempt to, to rebrand. But I am— I think I'm mostly interested in the world of interactive experiences, and that isn't just technologically mediated. I love public art installations. I love the different ways that we can use technology to create two-way conversations. But I think the, the field particularly that I work in is around virtual reality and how it is both an incredibly powerful storytelling tool, but how it can also be applied in health and well-being. And I think a lot of it just comes from accidentally discovering that technology has a therapeutic value in it and being shocked that more people didn't know about that. So I guess over the years I've become like a, a maker, a director, a producer, but also do a lot of policy work in terms of how do we make these experiences accessible to the public and how do we support collaborations between creative industries, research, fix, and philosophy and kind of making that available to patients through hospital settings, but also more kind of public-facing experiences as well that can play a role in our preventative care, as well as once problems already have manifested.

It is one of the most interesting aspects of your work, I think, that there's a lot of doomerism and narrative out there at the moment that technology is separating us away and divorcing us from our humanity, and that actually technology is not helping us with any of our emotional problems or even intellectual problems. And what you're doing is bringing technology and humanity together again. What was your first sort of experiment in this? How did you even come across this sort of intersection as a potential space for, for work?

Completely accidentally. I mean, I think my introduction to immersive was actually working in an arts organisation here in Brighton called Fabrica. And so they commission all these like large-scale installations, site-specific installations in this former Regency church. And I was a volunteer there, and it was this amazing exhibition about grief. And I lost my dad not that long ago, and I just remember people just talking to me about their own grief and loss, and I just thought that was incredible that an immersive experience could do that, and the role that arts can play in kind of creating, creating these conditions where people can talk about things. But I particularly became interested in virtual reality when I moved to Australia a few years later, and someone was talking about, about how it can play a role in, in reshaping our identities and our perception of self. Yeah, an amazing kind of scientist called Jordan Nguyen. He was one of the first people that kind of did a full kind of 3D capture of himself in VR and about how he was seeing himself in a different way and how he could see this changing how we relate to each other and how we form memories in the future. And so I just started volunteering at VR exhibitions and festivals and then became a curator at an arts and health festival. And that was really an opportunity to dive into this space where I was finding there was lots of VR experiences that were really about creating like first-person experience, like the whole kind of empathy machine era, supposedly. Very critical over how, how true it is that VR can create meaningful empathy, but the whole idea of being able to put yourself in the shoes of somebody else even for a short period of time. But through that process also discovered pieces that were being used therapeutically and just thought like, wow, that's so interesting. And then it kind of built on from there.

I remember years ago you told me about FreudMe. Do you remember that?

FreudMe.

It's not called that now anymore. It's called Converve Yourself or something. And I still use that today to sort of explain to people, you know, you know, this, this ability that VR can potentially give you to alter your perspective on a situation or encourage self-talk from yourself in different positions. And so, yeah, I don't know how they're doing of FreudMe. I, I quite like that name.

For people listening, I'll try and, I'll try and explain FreudMe. So first of all, it comes from this idea that, you know, it's really hard to see your own problems objectively, right? Because you're always in them. And so it's a fantastic researcher called Mel Slater. He's based in Barcelona. Owner, and he created this experience where it starts and you're in a room and it's kind of got full body capture, and you're standing opposite Freud and you're invited to tell Freud your problems, and then it records it, and then suddenly you have— you, you swap body, so you're embodied in Freud and you're seeing yourself from this other perspective telling yourself your problems and asked to respond as if Freud would, and then you swap bodies again and you hear your advice to yourself And they did some really interesting research around how it transformed people's sense of self-efficacy, their own ability to have control over their situations, creating deeper compassion for yourself and seeing yourself as another person. And like, I think his, his work is, is really interesting and how that it's expanded into other realms as well. I'm sure we could talk about, but they made other versions of it as well. So they had Steve Jobs Me. And they have Michelle Obama me. Then I asked, how does that change the kind of advice that you would give yourself if you're embodying these different characters? And they said they didn't really know, but I feel like that is a study that should happen.

Yeah, totally. I mean, you're right, the insight is we're quite good at giving other people advice about their lives or issues or problems, but we're not so great giving that advice to ourselves. So let's put ourself in that different perspective or position. Fascinating, simple insight that actually, it goes to show just how well you can carry it out in sort of an immersive environment that you perhaps couldn't do in sort of like an analog or physical world. So yeah, so after that you moved into sort of this realm of arts and health, which I think you, I don't know many people in this area. So again, still that intersection's pretty innovative and pioneering. Tell us what you've been doing since then, because I know you've done a lot of work on sort of pain management, health pathways. There was that piece that you did for the NHS as well that came out a couple of years ago. So tell us a little bit about that.

So I guess to follow the thread a little bit, so I started as this curator at this festival, and it was around that time that I discovered this kind of fascinating arts and health research method called body mapping. That's this amazing process that invites people to trace around their body on a big piece of paper and imagine, you know, where do you feel different emotion and feeling and sensation in your body. And so that was like the real kind of link into, okay, I want to make my own thing in virtual reality. And I was fascinated by how this experience could be brought into a VR context where instead of drawing on a 2D outline of your body with a couple of crayons and pencils, like what happens when you can take that into an immersive environment and draw on the skin or inside the body or even outside the body? And so this project was going to be a PhD. It ended up not being a PhD. And there's like probably a whole story there about the kind of things that happened in between of kind of working in academia and being involved in some, some really interesting research. But it's all kind of accidentally unfolded, I guess, the way it has that I wanted to make this VR piece and came back to the UK and was looking at like what kind of interventions are people creating in virtual reality for healthcare contexts, but also how does that link with this wider world of arts and health and this kind of new field of prescribing artistic-based experiences and seeing this gap between the amazing analogue work that is happening, but also this role that digital can play in creating new forms of, of digital storytelling, how it can be applied in narrative medicine, helping people look back on their lives and see themselves from a new perspective. And yeah, I was fascinated to learn how virtual reality is used in things like pain management as well. And so as this project developed from what was going to be a PhD to a company, but also being an art project and working out my identity within that and what I was actually going to make and who I was going to make it with, then just came across so many other people that have been trying to work that out as well, and people trying to bring their projects into the NHS, but there's not a strategy or an infrastructure in place for that. And so have kind of just been in this in-between space of working out, but also trying to work with decision makers to think about, well, how do we make this widely accessible for people? So over the last 8 years, I've been making SoulPaint, but also working with the NHS and UK government around how can we just create a new form of distributing these experiences, but also creating the conditions where you can bring together games designers and artists and researchers to together to co-create things as well.

So we'll talk about SoulPain in a minute in more detail, but you've highlighted an interesting insight there about how do you access the NHS to even offer it any of these sorts of innovations or creative solutions. I mean, you have had some success with it, so how did you manage to do that, and what are the further challenges that still exist?

I think over the years there's been so many examples of great things that have been developed, but they happen in these little pockets. And I remember someone saying to me, you know, everyone thinks the NHS is one big whale, but it's actually a huge school of fish. And I think it's just finding like which fish is actually already active in this space or already sees the potential. And is creating the conditions for these kind of interventions to thrive. Like, my first job in the NHS was referral management, and that was like 2013, and we were using fax. So the idea of kind of moving from fax to virtual reality in 10 years, less than that, is challenging. But, um, I think, yeah, just finding these really great pockets. So for example, in Torbay and Devon NHS Trust, they've had a virtual reality lab running since 2015, and so they've always seen that potential and have been bringing projects into the hospital. They now have their own development studio and are co-creating things in there. So been working with Nick Perez, who, who oversees the hospital there, for some time. So it's just been the case of Finding the real champions that are in these spaces that see the potential rather than going, hey, I really have to convince you of this, and then you need to convince other people that— it's just finding those little pockets, and then more people find out about it, and then they become interested. But it's still, it's small people championing this technology and its particular uses across the country, and I think the need is to find ways of bringing them all together so that not everyone's creating their own Tower of Babylon alone.

Yeah, I always thought that NHS X was supposed to be like one of the gateways for this. What do they actually do? Are they a possibility?

So they were. So in 2020, then we created this report called The Growing Value of XR in Healthcare in the United Kingdom. Can't you report? And with that, we co-created that with NHSX. So NHSX were the technology arm of the NHS, and we're also working with Health Education England, who have been using virtual reality in simulation and training for a really long time. And that report was created with people that are delivering VR for healthcare in loads of different contexts across the country. So they were really involved, but they were basically folded back into the NHS, and then a lot of that department has now disappeared. So yeah, shifting structures all the time. Even Health Education England used to be something separate, and now they're all folded into NHS England as well. So it's just shifting structures and finding the right people to speak to and the champions at the top. But we did work really closely with them for a while, and they were real champions from that work, and we actually took some of them on a trip to the West Coast. We were on the first flight to California after the travel ban, and we were taking them to hospitals across the West Coast and showing like how VR is being delivered at scale. And that was an amazing moment, having the kind of head of NHSX giggling with a headset on and holding like a bird on his hand, just like, this is amazing, was, yeah. A really great moment.

Oh, fantastic. So let's talk about Soul Paint then, because you've got a beautiful website. You can tell people the website address, but of course I'll put it in the show notes, which does explain a little more of it and gives the video. But in your own words, um, and congratulations by the way on the award at South by Southwest. It's incredible, it's fantastic. Yeah, so, so explain to us a bit about Soul Paint and specifically how it allows people to explore identity.

Yeah, so I guess as I sort of alluded to a little bit earlier, I've been, yeah, kind of fascinated by this, this arts and health research method, body mapping, for some time. So it was the only reason I ever wanted to do anything in VR in, in the first place. But I was fascinated by this idea that, you know, we have this whole hidden world of emotion and feeling and sensation hidden within us. And we often lack the ability to describe it or make sense of it. And yet when you give people this kind of space to think about, oh, how would you draw it? How would you locate the feeling of anxiety in your body, for example? Like, do you feel that in your chest or your stomach or your head? Does it fizz? Is it orange or green? Like, you know, what, what is that kind of sensorial quality? And so initially the idea was just that, yeah, just draw it in VR and that that could be a way of facilitating a conversation with your healthcare provider. I think the statistic is on average about 11 seconds to describe how you feel before you're likely to be interrupted.

Is that right?

Wow.

And what happens if English isn't your first language? Struggle to articulate how you feel. Like, how do we talk about these complex things? And so I'd started to develop it for some time, but it was only in the last few years that it's, it's really taken shape. And I started to work with my co-director Nikki, who I was working with on another piece called Deep, which is this breath-controlled VR experience.

Yes, I love that. Yeah.

Oh, me too. Yeah, it was, it was the first piece I showed as a curator, and then I ended up joining them as a producer later on. But I loved how they embodied this kind of artist-led approach that had a scientific foundation to it. And one night we were talking and I was saying like, I've made this kind of prototype so far and you get to paint how you feel, but I feel really stuck with it because it just feels like that's sort of it. And he'd made this piece called Copy Paste Dance. That's this amazing virtual reality piece where you are invited to dance and move and use all those embodied qualities of VR. And then copy and paste yourself into having this dance party of yourself. And then we just started asking this question of, well, what if you could dance with your sadness? How could you bring kind of movement and embodiment into the piece? There's lots of layers to it because it's still quite an open piece, but basically kind of bringing together these ideas of embodiment, of visualizing embodied experience. We've created this piece where it's a 20-minute guided experience currently where you meet a guide voiced by Rosario Dawson, which is wild, and she kind of introduces you to this world of feeling that, you know, we have butterflies in our stomach, you know, a stiff upper lip, like our spines tingle. There's all these things about our language and how do we visualize that.

That's perfect. Have you ever been lost? For words, this palette is your new language. Why don't you try some of the different colors and brushes? Just dip your paintbrush into the palette to select. Imagine drawing how you feel. What textures and colors would express joy? Or how about being exhausted?

So in the piece you're given a paintbrush and a palette, and so you can paint with different colours and textures. You can paint with a heartbeat or a fizz or a kind of pulsating line. I made about 20 different kind of colours and textures, and at the moment you're just asked this very broad question of How do you feel today, or is there a memory you'd like to explore? And you have this body that's created in front of you, so you get traced into the experience, and you have this ethereal body which you then have a moment where you step out of. So taking some inspiration from Mel Slater and thinking of how you could like Freud yourself, but you have this out-of-body experience, and then you're invited to paint on this 3D body, so inside the skin on the body, or interestingly outside the body as well. And you get to describe what you've created, like what that means to you, what those brushes represent. And then you get to re-embody it. So you have this moment where you step back into your avatar and you get to wear it and see yourself in the mirror. And I think that was a really interesting kind of thing for us to play with, of not just acknowledging this hidden inner reality we have, but also how we can renegotiate our relationships with it, and how movement and embodiment and interaction is so transformative. So you see yourself in the mirror and it starts to react to how you move, and then there's this moment where you're invited to, to shake it all off. And so you see all these pieces kind of falling away from you, and it's really playing with this idea that almost all, or most feelings, are ephemeral and shifting and changing And I'm really interested in this idea of like having illnesses versus like being an illness and how we identify with these things that we see as part of ourselves. And then in the final scene, you get to meet other people that have gone through the experience as well. And so the cocoon that you were in throughout the piece sort of breaks away and then you get to hear all these other embodied stories. And so with this piece, we're creating this ever-expanding archive of human stories. I think we've got about 1,500 different artworks so far. And so in our current iteration, we have an installation alongside it where you can see, see those artworks and, and hear their stories. And I, and the anthropologist within is, is kind of interested in what can we learn about how people see themselves, how do things like language and culture inform the way that we think about our own embodied emotional and sensory experience, but also looking at things on like a time-based basis as well. If we were to create drawings every day, how would we see our experiences shifting over time?

Well, it's interesting you say that because as you were explaining it, I was thinking it's like a very much more sophisticated way of journaling, isn't it? And not everybody can journal by writing, but to get into that habit of revisiting how one feels in the morning if you're doing The Artist's Way or something like that. And it's obviously much more immersive and multidimensional. You've suggested that obviously there were lots of learnings and insights. What are the biggest revela— or what was even one revelation that somebody may have found within themselves, or it's challenged them to think about something or feel their emotions or treat their emotions in a different way from having been through the Soul Paint experience?

It's interesting how differently people approach it, and I think there are lots of people that were quite apprehensive. I remember there's one lady that we interviewed, and she was saying that she was really nervous going in because she thought that she would just find a lot of darkness in her. It's like, I just thought it was going to be all black. And that she was like, oh, it actually felt really peaceful in there, and that actually things were much calmer than I realized. I think it surprised me how much people bring to it that they wouldn't expect, or kind of acknowledging parts of their experience that they hadn't talked about. Like, there was one person that wrote a really kind of beautiful piece for us about kind of losing her mum not that long ago, and that she'd not really acknowledged that experience in her, that she'd been, you know, carrying a lot. And that experiences like grief, you always have to be this like warrior through it, right? Of like, I've just got to get through and do all the things. And that she was like, I never really had a moment just to actually think about it and create space for it. Because I think, yeah, a lot of creating this was kind of from my own experience of grief and having a very similar thing, and just that it can have such a hold on you. So just to acknowledge those things are there has been a really special thing to be able to share with people and just say, hey, we don't need like all this fancy technology to remind ourselves of that as well, that this is a thing that you can always take with you and, and reflect on. And you don't need a headset. You can just do a little drawing on a piece of paper or just have a moment to think like, where am I feeling things? How would I draw it? What do I want to do about that as well? That I think has been really lovely to see.

How did you recruit people for it then? You mentioned some people had a bit of feeling of trepidation, but presumably they wanted to do it because they'd been recruited to do it. So talk us through that.

So that was actually part of our development phase. We had some funding, so we were funded through the Dutch Film Fund, so we had VR funding.

Did the UK fund any of this?

A little bit. So our first, our first prototype was through something called Creative XR that was funded by Arts Council and Digital Catapult. But then this kind of new iteration, once I started working with, with Nikki, who's Dutch-based, then we had funding through the Dutch Film Fund and then through something called Unity for Humanity, which is how we kind of came across Rosario Dawson. And then the last piece of funding was through Story Futures Academy here in the UK that were doing this pilot called Connect XR, and it was perfect for us. So the project, it was funding and development, but it was this kind of research project looking at the role that virtual reality could play in improving public well-being through libraries. And so this was a really valuable opportunity for us to do that user testing and get— getting public feedback. Um, this is the first piece that I've ever really like properly made and been involved in, and the amount of iteration and user testing and refinement was so much more than I expected and so valuable. So basically we had this like version that was like almost there, and we made it available in Maidenhead Library for 2 weeks, and then also took it to a college in Devon, South Devon College, through our connection with Devon NHS Trust. And so that was really informative of just showing a whole range of people, and it was amazing to see, you know, who comes into libraries regularly, but that is a space for storytelling, reflection, that they do so much work to support people around health and wellbeing already, and that there is a lot of work now around digital inclusion. So that was our first sort of opportunity to make it available to a very broad section of society and use that to inform the kind of final tweaks and make it as accessible as possible. So we premiered it at South by Southwest in March. And then since then, we've been mostly touring it to different festivals around the world. So we took it, we won Best Health and Wellness at Games for Change Festival, and then just one special mention at Kaohsiung Festival in Taiwan. And so it's really interesting for us in this kind of limited release version that we can actually take it to different places around the world and see how is this resonating. We just showed it at the United Nations a couple of weeks ago as well, about with this special event run by Games for Change, all about how games can help achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. But it's still not publicly accessible yet, and that's the thing that we're working on, is pitching it to arts organizations and lots of kind of social impact institutions to say, like, how can we work together to make this widely available to the public. And I think our strategy is now kind of spilling out into a series of different pillars of how do we do this and what kind of impact do we want to create and what avenues make the most sense, essentially. So we're in this kind of liminal space of just having limited festival release, but also working out that strategy and the best people to make it available with.

Yeah, because do you see it ultimately being part of sort of mainstream mental health or emotional health therapy for people? Because it's bigger than— I mean, obviously it started there through arts, but it's bigger than that, isn't it?

Yeah, exactly. And it's the thing that drives me insane and keeps me up at night, but also I'm standing like firmly that I believe that it should be in all those places. So we're continuing to set up collaborations with hospitals and creating a version where it can be sent home to patients, particularly of chronic pain. And we're going to be tweaking it to turn it into a journaling experience where it can be a way of doctors monitoring how their pain is shifting and evolving and how it can support in that patient-doctor communication, looking at how it can create a deeper sense of like embodied awareness as well. So that's sort of like one version, which is, yeah, healthcare version. Is that something that people use at home, or is there another version where you go and see your, your doctor, but maybe you do it in the waiting room before your session so you can take that drawing in? And we want to see, like, does it help a doctor understand you faster and at a deeper level? So that's like one version. With a few versions probably within it of healthcare. But then I think in the pandemic we really wanted to have this an artist-led experience because through working with the NHS I realized like how long stuff like this takes and how slow it can be and how limited the amount of people that you can reach. And so that's why going down this more creative route of, of launching it at festivals and touring it this way then a big part of our strategy is creating it as this global touring experience where it can be in large cultural institutions, but also filtering down into libraries and creating this installation that accompanies it where we want to create these terracotta armies of embodied stories. Think about how we can develop research around it to look at, you know, are people in Vanuatu drawing grief in the same way that people might in Chile? How can we create conversations between people in different parts of the world about this shared pool of humanity, but also what are the things that make us different?

You mentioned about memory, actually. What did you mean when you said, you know, allows us to explore memory and the role of memory and identity and with understanding and being able to articulate your emotions?

So, I've always kept a journal and I hate it because it always feels like a chore, but I also love it because you look back and you realise that there are so many parts of yourself that you forget. But it's so easy when you're using language that it becomes this, this very matter-of-fact thing. Today I went to work and I spoke to this person and then did this thing afterwards. And what I, I really find fascinating about just the process of body mapping is that it's looking back on memory in a very different way, that it's like this sort of embodied memory. So another avenue that we're, we're preparing for is how we can turn it into a journaling experience that anyone can have, and how it can be a way of looking back on your experiences over time. And I think one of the reasons that I feel particularly passionate about this is that one of my best friends growing up has really severe body dysmorphia and OCD and health anxiety, and she tested a really early prototype and created this drawing. She had two drawings, like one about how she kind of experiences her BDD, but then also like how she felt on a good day. And we looked back on it together last summer, and I think kind of seeing someone else looking back on their kind of drawn memories. And I remember her saying, like, God, I remember feeling that way, and I forgot how bad it was and how much things have changed for me. Oh God, it still just like gives me chills thinking about it. But like what this could play in looking back on moments in our life and creating these, these kind of moments of embodied memories that we can reflect on. It does feel like it does play into this whole quantified self thing, which sometimes I feel quite uncomfortable about as well, but it does create this, this new perspective that I think I'm just intrigued in how that can be impactful, as well as how can it be not helpful as well. That I think, you know, we can run at things because they seem exciting and interesting, but I think that's where collaborating with the right people to think about, like, what are the implications of creating this embodied museum of yourself? Does it become this kind of navel-gazing activity of You know, is this like the new selfie?

Oh, that's interesting. But it's giving people access to the interior world, isn't it, that we're not really taught how to access particularly well as we grow up? And also that we learn bad habits—you've alluded to a bit of that—of how to either ignore it or cope with it or whatever rather than explore it. I mean, the quantified self is so transactional, rational, it feels to me, a lot of the time. And this is so much more emotional. But actually, it made me think of a question there: where does all the data go? So like sometimes with the quantified self, especially if you're using sort of Fitbits and whatnot, I always think, well, the data— yes, you're sharing the data with me, but it's not collected by me, it's not captured or collected by me, it's not stored by me. You know, where is it and what are you doing with it? And I think we've seen— I mean, if we're looking at the potential sale of things like 23andMe, all this sort of really personal, really personal data— and this is incredibly personal because it is your interior self, it's your emotions, it's your perspective on your own emotions. Where's the data captured, stored, and what can you do with it? Or can people just access it themselves?

So at the moment, then, people at the end of the experience have a choice of what they want to do with it. So they can delete it or they can share it to the archive. And even if they share it, they have the ability to contact us and we'll delete it afterwards. We've got like basic functionality for sharing, so if people want it sent to them, then we can do that. But what we're working towards is a future where everyone just owns their artworks and that you can have your own kind of private collection you maintain. Because yeah, I think I do take issue with the idea that other people can own it. I think being able to give informed consent of what that's used for, because of course I am really interested in researching that, but researching what these artworks can, can mean. But I think for that, that would be in a particular study where people know what they're consenting to. But I think this is where I'm not an expert on blockchain, but I'm really interested in the role that blockchain could play in something like this for ownership. And one of the things that we're looking towards in the future is, for example, is this something that could be embedded within electronic patient records in the future? And what does that mean for ownership? And is that something that then the NHS owns, for example? Or how do, how do you empower patients to have control over it if it is in a healthcare context? And how does that overlap with how patients are able to control how their medical data is also stored? So I think there's, there's lots of things we're still working out, but we're being very slow and reflective about what that process is.

It's interesting, isn't it, if you propel ourselves into the future to think about— I mean, if we do go down the digital identity sort of verification authentication route, and actually there's a whole load of identity attributes, if you like, that are sort of mixed and remixed depending on what you need to prove in whatever context. What if some of those attributes— because to date they're all physical attributes, you know, like your age, maybe your location, maybe your qualifications— but what if it was to do with your emotional states or perceptions around that thing, you know, feelings? What if some of those identity attributes were feelings? That would be extraordinary, wouldn't it, that you could mix and remix them together with like the more transactional functional bits about your identity. And that's—

oh, that's so— that's like research project in itself, because also I guess like, ah, emotional states are not necessarily fixed. Yeah, what that could mean is— so I feel like I need to go away and like sit in a dark room and digest what that, that could be. I know, just take—

when you said about blockchain, just occurred to me that actually the mix of like the transactional functional attributes, I mean, that's fine if you want to prove that you need access to some sort of location or permission to enter a building or whatever. But actually, if you're going to something and your feelings in a particular context have some sort of impact on who you are, who you think you are, how you want to present yourself, I think it would be fascinating. I don't know how you'd research that.

Judges is going into the courtroom angry that the door's just shut down going, no, you're not going to make informed decisions. Yeah, exactly.

Or no, you're not getting in the car, or whatever.

What is the optimal emotional state to go in? And then you just get, you get like led into a, like a sensory chamber to kind of alter that. Like, and who, yeah, who decides what is appropriate? Yeah, I think that's a really interesting question because when you think about how all of our decisions are so emotionally driven all the time, right? And I think to be talking to you about this the week after the American elections as well, where it feels like there are a lot of emotions and lots of people that have made wild decisions based on bigger emotions about what is happening in the world. I think that's actually probably one of the most important questions that we can be asking right now of how do we feel about the world and how is that changing the way that we are behaving in ways that feel kind of dangerous, that now I think the world feels a little unsafe there.

Well, it's interesting because the last podcast episode was around information and really like the new network distributed sort of information landscape and how do people arrive at decisions and the way in which it's more sort of group resonance rather than official consensus now and all that. And actually, that information landscape needs to be mapped over onto sort of an emotional landscape, doesn't it? And, uh, yeah, difficult to do, but interesting times. I think we're going in such an interesting horizon for all of this sort of intersection between our behavior, our decisions, our emotions, technology, our identity. But what, what do you want to do next with Soul Paint then? What's— if you can share some of it, where do you want to take it next? Yeah, I guess all the above, really.

I think the kind of the idea of it as a touring installation that is a way of having a two-way conversation with people about how are we feeling, what is going on, and how we can use that as a way of creating cross-cultural dialogue, learning new things about the human experience, bringing it into hospitals to empower patients to feel heard in a in a space where often people can feel really unheard, turning it into this journeying experience for at home as well.

We were talking about care homes, weren't we, before we pressed record actually? Wouldn't be an amazing thing in care homes where sometimes people can't necessarily articulate properly how they might be feeling, but they might be able to express that in another way? What an amazing augmentation that would be to like a care home experience. Absolutely.

In fact, before this call, I spoke to someone else as well, and we were talking about the value of care homes and like, why, why VR? Because I think that so many people, including me, are really critical of technology. Why do we want to spend more time in technology and strap this uncomfortable thing to our faces? But I think care homes are, you know, places where people are often, you know, stuck there. They're bored. They want to go see the world and be with people. And the idea that you can take people out of that world and relive some memories. Yeah, that you can, you know, you can go into Google Maps VR and show someone where you used to go dancing when you were young, that you can kind of escape and go to these places and, and share that with people and learn about ourselves through that and, and reduce people's experience of pain. Within that, I just think is such an amazing, um, opportunity. And yet so many people go, oh, it's just for young people, it's for gamers, and it's just— it's something so deeply human when delivered in the right place with the right people, and just brings a bit of joy when it feels like, you know, there are so many moments that people are, are without that.

Yeah, yeah, there's this narrative that this that technology today is very isolating and atomizing. But I think, you know, you have taken us on a journey of all the ways in which it doesn't have to be. And actually, if used in the right way and it is the right technology and applied in the right way and you're doing the right sorts of research to improve it over time, it can be completely connecting both to other people and to yourself. Tell us a bit more about where we can find out more about your work. And is there anything else you wanted to mention? Because you did mention DEEP a bit, because I know you've got lots of fingers in lots of VR pies or immersive pies.

Yeah, I'm in lots of places. There are not very many Sarah Tico's on the internet, so you can find me on LinkedIn, Instagram. Yeah, our website is soulpaint.co.uk. My website is hatsumi.co.uk. And yeah, always interested in how, how these things resonate with people. And then through my other company, the XR Health Alliance, then we also support other people to develop works in this space as well. So we consult on projects and also help with that kind of infrastructure design of how do you bring technology. And I guess with technology and saying this in the broadest term of like playful media. I think that's what this is really about, that like, I think tech can feel like this very pragmatic thing, but it's like, how can you bring storytelling and play and design into these experiences that can help people live well is the thing that I'm, I'm really interested in, as well as being critical over the ways that technology can not do that as well. And kind of, yeah. Facilitating that conversation between.

That's a beautiful point to end on, Sarah. Thanks for joining me today. And I want to try this. I want to do the body mapping. I want to do soul paint.

Thank you for listening to The Future Review hosted by me, Tracey Follows. Be sure to check out the show notes for more info about the topics we covered today. If you enjoyed this episode, please like and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And if you know someone who would love this episode, please share it with them. For more on the future of identity in a digital world, visit futuremade.group/thefutureofyou. To explore the future of everything else, head over to futuremade.group. The Future of You podcast is produced by Big Tent Media.