Flow recently did a two week pilot study in collaboration with NOVA in Iceland at their headquarters in Reykjavik. NOVA is Iceland’s second largest telecom provider with the slogan “Stærsti skemmtistaður í heimi”, or “The biggest party place in the world”.
These results come from our pilot with 19 participants at NOVA as well as a workshop and debrief at the end of the pilot involving 10 of the participants. There were six headsets placed throughout the building on different floors for the staff to use.
During the pilot close to 80% of participants answered that they felt a positive effect from using FlowVR while at work.
We also asked users to rate the effects of FlowVR on different areas on a scale of 1–7. The biggest effects reported by users were feeling more relaxed and calmer with increased happiness coming 3rd.
Each measured category showed some improvement from the use of FlowVR.
Most of the participants used FlowVR two times a week and reported that they wanted to get into a routine of using it more frequently. When asked they noted that the addition of a mobile app with notifications would help remind them.
Most participants used the Breath and Focus mode while LetGo and Move were used least. During our debrief participants reported that they were not comfortable with using those modes in a public space but would be interested in using them in private. They also said that those were modes they were not necessarily looking for at work.
We are using the findings from this and other studies we have recently been preforming to help us design FlowVR 2.0 and the Flow mobile app set to release soon. We have also used these studies to get a better understanding of best practices regrading the use of Flow at the office to share with our current and future clients.
During our last session at NOVA with a live meditation workshop and debriefing session we asked the participants how they felt before and after meditation. These are the results:
There was a clear trend of participants finding it helpful and even necessary to be able to have access to meditation at work to be able to escape the stress of a busy workplace for a few minutes every day. We were interested to learn that 40% found our 4 minute meditations enough but 60% would have preferred access to longer meditations or length options. We will keep this in mind when designing future content.
These findings are in line with our previous pilot studies and help us greatly in designing our future products. We are currently working on version 2.0 of the VR app and 1.0 of our mobile app. These will address key issues we have seen in our studies so far and improve further on what our participants like about our product.
We hope you found these findings as interesting as we did and we look forward to all our users reaping the benefits of these studies in later this year in the new versions of Flow.
On behalf of the FlowVR team,
Magnús Norðfjörð CTO