If you go through an almost always stressful daily drive or if you’re soon going on a pretty long and possibly tense ride, Waze wants to give you a way to help manage the stress. The “Drive with Headspace” experience is a partnership with meditation app Headspace that can make your ride mentally healthy if you have to go through things like traffic, rude drivers, long, endless drives, etc. The integration should be able to help drivers (and maybe even passengers) “find more joy and meaning on the road”.
The Drive with Headspace experience will let users choose from five different moods: aware, bright, hopeful, joyful, and open. They didn’t give many details about what you’ll get with each mood but the names probably speak for themselves. You will also be able to listen to a custom Spotify playlist that includes music and content from Headspace. You can access this through the Waze audio player that supports Spotify.
If you also want to imagine that you’re anywhere but there inside your vehicle, you can exchange the in-app car icon for that of a “serene ride in a hot air balloon”. Hopefully, your mind won’t drift away though as you need to focus on driving your actual vehicle. The experience will also offer custom navigation prompts from Headspace’s director of meditation, Eve Lewis Prieto. She’ll be saying things like “Keep right and enjoy the journey” and “Exit left, focus on the path ahead.”
Waze has been bringing not just new navigation voices but also various driving experiences that can help entertain while giving the usual navigation information. They recently launched pretty varied experiences like Paw Patrol, Fraggle Rock, and Pride. They have also been adding integrations to other subscription services like Spotify, Pandora, iHeartRadio, and of course Google’s own YouTube Music.
The Drive with Headspace experience on Waze is now available for a limited time only in English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. You can tap My Waze to see the banner or click on this link to activate it.
