Архив рубрики: digital wellbeing

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Cozy houseplants and self-care: How one startup is reimagining mobile gameplay as a healing activity

Mobile well-being apps topped 1.2 billion downloads last year, while leading meditation app Calm alone pulled in $118.2 million in revenue, data from Sensor Tower indicates. That may leave some to believe the digital well-being market is essentially solved, but a new startup, Lumi Interactive, believes the opposite is true. The Melbourne-based, women-led company has identified a under-explored niche in the mobile market that involves translating offline, self-care activities into games as a means of reducing our collective stress and anxiety.
While most mobile games focus on having users compete against one another or achieve some sort of goal, the startup’s forthcoming title Kinder World’s main aim is to help users relax. It accomplishes this through short, snack-sized sessions where it asks players to care for virtual houseplants by taking care of themselves in the real world.
In the game, players are encouraged to perform simple acts of kindness — like practicing daily gratitude, for example — in order to improve their own well-being and that of the game’s wider community. The game features a variety of non-stressful activities — like watering houseplants, interacting with animal neighbors and decorating a cozy room with plants, among other things.
Image Credits: Lumi Interactive
In some ways, this recalls how many of us spent months in creative play during the height of the pandemic engaged with games like Animal Crossing, the popular Nintendo game whose pressure-free environment helped many relax and pass the time under COVID-19 lockdowns. In Animal Crossing, players designed indoor and outdoor spaces, shopped for outfits and home accessories, planted flowers and chitchatted with animal pals.
As it turns out, the pandemic played a big role in Lumi Interactive’s founding, too, the company told TechCrunch.
“In late 2020, we were a small team of three, exhausted by the pandemic and a hard year for the business,” explains Lumi Interactive co-founder and CEO Lauren Clinnick. “We decided to take two weeks to refresh ourselves with a game jam to make something totally new, and mental well-being was very much on our minds. We’d also all become closer to nature over the harsh Melbourne lockdowns and wanted to examine why houseplants had become part of a self-care routine for so many people we knew,” she says.
That gave rise to a question as to whether houseplant care could be brought into the digital world, and the team prototyped Kinder World as a result.
“It had a spark of something special after just two weeks, and the concept tested very strongly with our target audience straight away,” Clinnick says.
Both Clinnick and Lumi Interactive co-founder Christina Chen had a background in gaming before founding their new company and had known each other for nearly a decade. Clinnick first entered the games industry as a marketing consultant for games like Crossy Road, co-founded a boutique games marketing agency, then moved into direct games development. Chen, meanwhile, had a technical background that saw her working on payments at Xbox Live and later as a senior producer at PopCap in Shanghai before co-founding games publisher Surprise Attack (now known as Fellow Traveller).
The duo had bonded over their mutual love for data, underserved player communities and the new opportunities they believed were still on the horizon for mobile gaming, Clinnick says.
Image Credits: Lumi Interactive
As the team investigated the idea for a more collaborative, self-care-focused title, they discovered that many of today’s consumers weren’t finding satisfaction with mainstream well-being apps.
“When we actually interviewed users — especially Gen Z and millennial women and nonbinary folks — we found that 97% had dropped out of apps like Headspace and Calm, citing they ‘felt like work’ or became another thing for them to fail at,” says Clinnick. “Instead they often have fragmented relaxation hobbies such as gaming, houseplants, Squishmallow collecting, crafting and ASMR. These are mostly distraction activities that helped their short-term anxiety but didn’t help them build important resilience skills in the long term,” she says.
Lumi Interactive responded to this feedback by making sure their game was designed in a way where you couldn’t fail, no matter how you played. For instance, all the activities in the game are optional and the virtual houseplants will never die.
“We’ve consciously made these choices to prevent a burdened feeling for players,” says Clinnick. 
In keeping with a strategy to co-develop the game along with their community, the startup turned to TikTok to test various elements, like game design, the art style and to find out what interested their users.
Now a full-time team of 12 and growing, Lumi Interactive closed on $6.75 million in seed funding in March in a round led by a16z — which it’s officially announcing this week. Other investors include 1Up Ventures, Galileo Ventures, Eric Seufert’s Heracles Capital and Double Loop Games’ co-founder and CEO, Emily Greer.
The startup is using the funds to grow the team so it can further develop the larger concept it calls “crowd healing,” informed by Lumi Interactive’s full-time well-being researcher, Dr. Hannah Gunderman, Ph.D. The company believes the idea — which references sharing kindness with others through self-care style gameplay — could become a new gaming category.
Lumi Interactive, of course, is not the first to imagine games that aren’t goal-focused. There are games that are interactive stories or graphic novels or other indie projects, but they often still have the gamer play through the experience to come to a conclusion. Kinder World, meanwhile, would be something players come back to whenever they need to relax, which is why the company is considering a subscription offering, in addition to standard in-app purchases. It’s also exploring online-offline experiences with physical items that could unlock certain game benefits or activities. 
Kinder World is currently in alpha testing on iOS and Android and aims for a full release later in 2022.
Cozy houseplants and self-care: How one startup is reimagining mobile gameplay as a healing activity

Android update delivers new ‘Bedtime’ features focused on improving sleep

At Google’s 2018 I/O developer conference, the company debuted a new suite of “digital well-being” aimed at helping Android users better manage their screen time. At its 2019 event, it expanded its tools’ capabilities and improved the related parental controls. Although Google I/O isn’t taking place this year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the company is once again refreshing its well-being toolset. This year, the focus is a timely one, as Google will roll out new bedtime tools to help people get better sleep.
Google reports seeing a rise in sleep-related search queries like “insomnia” and “can’t sleep” in April and May, as the coronavirus crisis led to increased stress and anxiety, which can disrupt sleep.
Android’s “Bedtime” mode, previously known as “Wind Down,” uses Do Not Disturb to silence calls, texts and notifications, while grayscale fades the colors on your phone to black and white, to reduce the draw to your screen. With the updates to this feature, Google is making it easier to customize when and how Bedtime mode is enabled.
Based on your bedtime schedule, you can now opt to have it automatically turn on after your phone is plugged into its charger. You can also add Bedtime mode to your Android phone’s Quick Settings, to instantly turn it on or off with a single tap. And if you need a few more minutes, you can choose to pause Bedtime mode without needing to adjust your schedule.
The update to Digital Wellbeing, which included the ability to automatically enable Bedtime mode when the phone is charging and add it to Quick Settings, actually rolled out earlier in May. But Google is announcing the features today as part of its other Bedtime mode changes.

The Clock app on Android is also being updated with a new Bedtime tab.
Here, you can set daily sleep and wake times. In the app, you’ll be able to see a preview of your calendar for the next day, and then tally the total number of hours of sleep you’d get. This way, you can adjust your bedtime if needed to sync up with tomorrow’s schedule — even if that means diverting from your typical bedtime schedule.

In addition, users will receive a reminder before bedtime and have the option to play calming sounds from Calm, Spotify, YouTube Music and other sources. If they have Digital Wellbeing installed, they can pair with Bedtime mode to limit the interruptions during sleep.
The app will also display how much time you’re spending and which apps you’ve used after your set bedtime.
Google additionally suggested users looking for better sleep can try the “Sunrise Alarm” option that gradually brightens your screen to help you wake up more gently. This visual alarm system will begin 15 minutes prior to your audio alarm. Users can also set their favorite songs as an alarm to make the alarm less jarring, Google recommends.
The sunrise alarm was first introduced with the Pixel 3 and Pixel Stand in 2018. But with the update, you will no longer need the stand to use the feature — it’s a part of the new Bedtime tab in the Clock app.

Related to today’s launch of new bedtime features, Google noted it recently added new YouTube bedtime reminders. It also supports a daily bedtime schedule in Android’s parental controls feature, Family Link.

The updated Bedtime experience is launching first on Pixel devices starting today, and will roll out to the Clock app and on other Android devices later this summer. Pixel devices will be getting a handful of other updates, as well, including Adaptive Battery.

Pixel 2 devices and newer will notify the user when the battery is set to run out, while throttling background usage to save on life. The excellent Recorder app can now be triggered with a “Hey Google” and transcripts can be saved directly to Google Docs.
The Personal Safety app introduced on the Pixel 4 is now coming to all devices, while the Pixel 3 will get car crash detection. There’s also a new Safety Check feature designed to send out alerts in potentially dangerous situations. Per Google:

For example if you’re about to go on a run or hike alone, safety check will make sure you made it back safely. If you don’t respond to the scheduled check-in, the app will alert your emergency contacts. In the event that you need immediate help or are in a dangerous situation, emergency sharing notifies all of your emergency contacts and shares your real-time location through Google Maps so they can send help or find you.

The Personal Safety app will also let users set notifications for crises, including natural disasters and other public safety concerns.

Android update delivers new ‘Bedtime’ features focused on improving sleep