Kara Komarni – creating good mental health habits for the metaverse generation
Kara Komarni has worked in tech for ten years. This decade is important not only in her career but in her personal life. But first let us look at her tech career before the traumatic impact that changed the course of her purpose.
Komarni did not only work in tech, she worked in one of the bleeding edges of tech – Virtual Reality (VR). The utility of VR has really moved forward in the past decade both in reaction to improving tech and the desire for corporates to explore VR for their business, which got accelerated by the lockdown.
Komarni was fortunate to work with a company training some of the biggest companies in the world who were using VR to train their teams on a global basis – at a speed and scale that would not have been possible in ordinary life.
“Part of my role was to educate enterprise on the impact of VR and to provide use cases. I experimented with the medium by co-hosting the first VR podcast, interviewing executives across BBC, Disney and The Times.”
Komarni’s employer used the popular Oculus VR equipment which allowed for seamless immersion once the headset was fixed and the wifi on.
“It could be a meeting or a conference, the reactions were incredible. Recent studies show that there is up to 75% increase in retention of information in a VR environment – something that is difficult to achieve with a flat Zoom conference.”
Komarni is also consulting with a crypto company that taught her the power of decentralisation and transparency. She was involved with the biggest art auction for Covid relief and witnessed first-hand the tracking of donations across the blockchain.
“While working in these emerging technologies, I started to ask questions about how tech can be harnessed for good.”
The same ten years spent building her career were also spent with her boyfriend. Tragically last year he died from cancer and initially Komarni felt her life was over.
“It was the hardest year of my life. I lost my partner to cancer and he was very young, he’d only just turned thirty. Everything I had taken for granted was taken from me. I was forced to stop and reflect on what I was doing or maybe what I was not doing. In a weird way it woke me to spirituality and gave me the courage to start pursuing my goals – something I don’t think I would have done without this tragic grief.”
Working through her grief and her desire to find her true purpose, Komarni has established Space of Mind, personal growth space for moments of self-reflection in a world full of distraction, and time for real-talk in a world of small talk. She wanted to bring those real conversations we have in private that shift our perspective to the forefront for people to access life lessons that can help them deal with their own journey,
“I am also working with a clinical psychologist from Oxford University to distil these life lessons from the podcast into small five-minute ‘space of mind moments’, providing the tools to deal with the challenges in question.
“I want to give people the tools to deal with mental health issues. We were not taught these things in school and people are still reluctant to speak about them.”
Not consulting the manual
Komarni used the analogy of someone getting a new piece of tech but not bothering to consult the manual on how it works.
“I’m building an equivalent of a user manual for the metaverse generation, ultimately helping them demystify the gap between what makes them happy and how to get there.”
GenZ and Millennials are spending more than 50% of their awake time inhabiting the digital world, more than 12 hours per day consuming media. Komarni recognises that the tools should reside where the people dwell, in the metaverse itself.
“Interactive digital realities have been evidenced to evoke similar psychophysiological responses as regular reality – so the upside is that tools provided in the metaverse are as effective as those in real life. So we can literally recreate environments from real life and help guide people in how to cope with them.”
“While social media platforms and freemium games use psychological research to prolong screen-time, I’m looking at how we can use those same tactics of the habit loop to create better mental health habits, from grounding to self-reflection.
“I’m also looking at crypto as a way of rewarding self-work. The law of effect describes that behaviour which is followed by a reward has a higher likelihood of being repeated – tokenization can be utilized here to encourage better mental health habits in real-time.“
The first Space of Mind podcast will launch on March 21and Komarni reckons she has inspirational guests lined up beginning with Brad Gudger who has survived cancer and now connects other cancer survivors via an app.
“Every other month we want to spotlight a cause and also create a donation to that cause. We have an app under development too and that will be launched in time.”
Komarni has found her life’s purpose, crafted by her trauma and harnessing her exposure to technology-driven changes. She has another, connected love of music which is both creative and healing. She is learning to become a DJ, but like everything else she’s working on, she wants it to mean something and make a difference.
“Sound healing and frequencies – this is another tool I want to immerse myself in next.”
For more information, please visit www.thespaceofmind.com