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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Make the World Your Canvas with Virtual Reality

In recognition of Inspire Your Heart with Art Day, observed annually on January 31st, NewPathVR is launching a Monthly Art Campaign to showcase the powerful capabilities of art therapy in virtual reality. Art therapy is integral to the company and is used in workshops and programs, including the recent Explore Tech Event, and a current partnership with Tech in The Tenderloin, which delivers an 8-week Youth VR Program to the Boys and Girls Club of San Francisco.

Inspire Your Heart with Art Day encourages individuals to explore and immerse themselves in the power of different art forms. The ability of art, especially that produced with VR, to help express, visualize and understand emotions is the inspiration behind the Monthly Art Campaign. CEO of NewPathVR, Lisa Padilla explains “We often think of our emotions as our identity. When we say “I am angry.” or “I am anxious.” When, in actuality, feelings are temporary and they change and pass. VR art therapy allows people to externalize a feeling through art and by doing this, they can begin to observe and address it with a different perspective. National Inspire Your Heart with Art Day is a perfect day to launch our campaign to bring awareness to innovative therapeutic tools like VR.”

Padilla is at the core of this initiative, and has over 25 years of experience as a multimedia artist, specializing in VR. Her works have been globally recognized and featured in art shows, magazines and the Journal of Contemporary Painting. Reflecting on the piece she has produced for the January Campaign, she says “I took January’s piece as a challenge to express the concept of ‘anxiety’ and while colorful and exciting, as ‘good’ anxiety can be, this representation shows sharp edges which also reflect how unapproachable I feel when I’m in that state.”

About NewPathVR
NewPathVR is the creator of digital behavioral health applications in virtual reality. With an aim to evoke positive change through conscious technology, the company uses research-based methods from its proprietary Active PsychologyTM library to create wellness applications for VR. They also teach accredited courses in VR Psychology and power the world’s first VR wellness portal - RenewVR.com.

Contact:

Monica Shakeri
Marketing and PR
NewPathVR
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
(415) 882-6873

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

NewPathVR Youth Program Explores Practical Applications of VR for Community Education

San Francisco, (Issuewire.com) - SAN FRANCISCO, CA, January 30, 2019 - NewPathVR, a digital behavioral health company, is introducing its first official 8-week VR Youth Program, in partnership with Tech in the Tenderloin (TNT) at the Boys and Girls Club of San Francisco. The new TNT Tech Club will launch at the Boys and Girls Tenderloin Clubhouse on January 30 and will run until March 13, 2019. The Program encourages participants aged 10 through 16 to experience a different virtual reality theme each week including art, music, games, and travel.

In sharing her hopes for the program, CEO of NewPathVR, Lisa Padilla highlights community education as a core goal. She says, “we hope that these immersive experiences inspire boys and girls to think differently about themselves and the world around them. Introducing virtual reality as a therapeutic tool, something to create art and music with, that’s a real eye-opener, but add the wonder of young minds and it’s just beautiful. For example, we’ve created an application that allows you to embody influential characters in your life and role-play scenarios that might have gone healthier in an effort to change the behaviors created from a memory.”

Tech in the Tenderloin is a non-profit that connects low-opportunity youth and families with high-opportunity tech through fun events and activities in the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco and beyond. “We love partnering with tech startups like NewPathVR to bring cutting edge tech education to organizations like the Boys and Girls Club. It’s a great way to make tech fun for the kids, connect them with the tech ecosystem, and expand their career imaginations about what’s possible for themselves and their families,” say co-founders Julia Beabout and June Sargent.

In terms of the many benefits the Program offers, Padilla says “VR affords you the ability to learn and understand information at an accelerated rate, and the effect on behavior is a positive one when presented with the appropriate content. There are several studies that show that multiple types of VR experiences reduce depression, anxiety, and PTSD and that’s merely the beginning.”

About NewPathVR
NewPathVR is the creator of digital behavioral health applications in virtual reality. With an aim to evoke positive change through conscious technology, the company uses research-based methods from its proprietary Active PsychologyTM library to create wellness applications for VR. They also teach accredited courses in VR Psychology and power the world’s first VR wellness portal - RenewVR.com.

Contact:

Monica Shakeri
Marketing and PR
NewPathVR
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
(415) 882-6873

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

VR Provides Opportunity for Community to Participate in Immersive Experiences

SAN FRANCISCO, January 25, 2018 - NewPathVR, a digital behavioral health company building virtual reality experiences to address mental health issues, is participating in the first ever Explore Tech event from 12:00 pm to 4:00 pm on Saturday, January 26th, 2019, at the Visitacion Valley Branch of San Francisco Public Library. The event is open to the public, and includes, inter alia, informational sessions on library apps, experimenting with programming, virtual reality, and stop motion animation.

The Visitacion Valley Branch Library hosts regular events and workshops to promote online access and technology skill building to reduce digital disparities within the community. Similarly, Lisa Padilla, CEO of NewPathVR recognizes the fact that “While the San Francisco and Bay Area lead in so many ways with technology, there are large and visible disparities in many neighborhoods and with populations who have little or no access to these resources. Our community work aims to change this unfortunate reality.”

In anticipation of the upcoming event, Lisa Padilla, CEO of NewPathVR said “We feel honored to be part of Visitacion Valley Branch’s event and have the opportunity to introduce people to family-friendly virtual reality applications, such as music and art therapy. Our hope is that it will diminish the mystery around virtual reality and show people how wonderful and transformative an experience VR can be for youth and adults alike. Visitacion Valley Branch is the second library in the San Francisco Library system to showcase VR for the community, leading the way in closing the digital gap for edge populations with a wide diversity of generational and racial backgrounds, where we see a great concentration of mental health conditions.”

Branch Manager of Visitacion Valley Library, Barbara Daniels added “we are so excited to have VR here for the first time at the Visitacion Valley Library. This is a first for the library, and for many residents. We hope to show our community all of the amazing technology that is emerging in our society, and show them at their own local library.”

In a research paper published in October 2018 by Frontiers in Psychology, researchers said “Digital arts, as new mediums of creation have produced new forms of expression for art therapy,” “The unique characteristics of VR experience, compounded by the novel possibilities of artistic expression in VR further expand these therapeutic possibilities (Brown and Garner, 2016; Lohrius and Malchiodi, 2018).” “Moreover, when using art therapy in VR, clients create their own customized environment in the processes of therapy. Thus, circumventing a limitation of previous approaches to VR based psychotherapy. We suggest that VR based therapy, combining individualized creative processes in the unrestricted VR environment forms a therapeutic environment which can be well-tailored to the clinical needs of each individual.”

About NewPathVR
NewPathVR is the creator of digital behavioral health applications in virtual reality. With an aim to evoke positive change through conscious technology, the company uses research-based methods from its proprietary Active Psychology^TM library to create wellness applications for VR. They also teach accredited courses in VR Psychology and power the world’s first VR wellness portal - RenewVR.com.

Contact:

Monica Shakeri
Marketing and PR
NewPathVR
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
1390 Market Street #2710
San Francisco, CA 94102

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