Why use Virtual Reality Therapy

http://centerforanxietydisorders.com/virtual-reality-therapy-for-phobias/

Many patients attend therapy session in order to talk about their phobias and possibly get rid of them. With "cognitive behaviour therapy patients recognize the thoughts that are causing negative feelings surrounding their fears". "Once the thoughts have been identified, the patient learns how to replace them with positive ones." With in-vivo exposure therapy patients experience what they fear in a controlled way and in small doses. With small steps they can confront and gradually conquer their phobia. With virtual reality exposure therapy it combines cognitive behaviour therapy and in-vivo exposure. It allows the patient to face their fears in a safe, controlled environment.

When the patient puts on the VR headset they are immersed into a simulation that is aimed at their particular fear. The patient might be aware that it's not real but there is still enough "realism to trigger their emotional responses to their phobia". "According to this article 83% of people who have tried VR therapy have managed to put their fears behind them".

VR therapy benefits

• "Allowing the patient to try the therapy without as much anxiety.
• Experience the phobia without having to travel to the location. Can exposure small triggers for your phobia.

• confidentiality for the patient.
• therapist can control the situation.
• the therapy is more realist and effective. 
• Sessions can be repeated in order for the patient to conquer a small portion of their fear."

Virtual reality used in Psychology

VR used in Psychology treatment

https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1131318.pdf

"potential use in relation to training and inter- personal skill development, also perhaps in clinical diagnosis and therapy"

In this article they discuss VR being used in psychology as a means of research. The environment can be adapted and they can research behaviour and responses to the environment. More specifically treatment of phobias. "The particular benefits of using virtual environments  in treating anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder have been documented for several years". "It can be used with patients who have difficulty visualizing scenes and with those patients who are too phobic to experience the real equivalent situation. The VR allows the patient to experience/challenge their fear while remaining in a safe environment. The results showed that the user showed the symptoms of fear. 

https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/know-your-mind/201605/how-virtual-reality-could-transform-mental-health-treatment

Evolution of Virtual Reality

In 1957 filmmaker Morton Heilig invented a "large booth-like machine called the Sensorama". It was intended to give users the illusion of being in a 3D immersive world, complete with smell, stern sound, vibrations and atmospheric effects like wind. In 1960 he developed his idea to create the first head-mounted display which he patent. Alas he never created this idea but the idea helped lay the groundwork for future VR.


"Sword of Damocles"

In 1968, computer scientist,  Ivan Sutherland created the first VR head-mounted display (HMD). This versions connected to a stereoscopic display from a computer program which depicted simple virtual wireframe shapes. These shapes changed perspective when the user moved their head. These shapes were also displayed on a real background so it could also be considered the birth of augmented reality. However due to the headgear being to heavy, it never developed more than just a lab project.

"The super Cockpit 1970-80s"

Around the same time military engineer, Thomas Furness developed the "Super Cockpit". He created "a training cockpit with computer generated 3D maps, infrared and radar imagery as well as avionics data into real-time 3D space". This device allowed trainee pilots to control an aircraft using "gestures, speech and eye movements."

Sega was one of the first companies to attempt to launch a VR headset. Development started in 1991. "The design has a sleek black plastic design that concealed LCD displays, stereo headphones and internal inertial sensors for tracking head movement."

In 2010, 18 year old Palmer Luckey created the first prototype of the Oculus Rift. It had a 90 degree field view. It raised $2.4 million on Kickstarter and was purchased by Facebook for $2 billion in 2014.

In 2017 many companies are working on their own VR Headsets such as Google Cardboard, Apple, amazon, Sony, etc.


https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/history-of-virtual-reality/

How our brain processes images and VR

https://www.brainfacts.org/Thinking-Sensing-and-Behaving/Vision/2012/Vision-Processing-Information

"Vision begins with light passing through the cornea and the lens, which combine to produce a clear image of the visual world on a sheet of photoreceptors called the retina"

"The information from the retina — in the form of electrical signals — is sent via the optic nerve to other parts of the brain, which ultimately process the image and allow us to see."



The reason I researched this is because I want to know how our brains process objects in front of us. Then how VR HMD trick our brains into think it's real.

How our VR works on our eyes and brain

https://www.wareable.com/vr/how-does-vr-work-explained

"VR headsets used either two feeds sent to one display or two LCD displays, one per eye. There are also lenses which are placed between your eyes and the pixels. The lenses focus and reshape the picture for each eye and create a stereoscopic 3D image by angling the two 2D images to mimic how each of our two eyes views the world. "

Head tracking

"The picture in front of you shifts as you look up, down, side to side or at an angle. A system called 6DoF (six degrees of freedom) plots your head in terms of your X,Y and Z axis to measure head movements. "

Headphones can be used to increase the sense of immersion.

Our brain and processing images

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/is-your-brain-culture/200903/your-brain-movies

"Uri Hasson and Rafael Malach conducted a method of hypothesis-prediction-experiement-conclusion. The had five subjects what the first 30 minutes of The Good, The Bad and the Ugly while lying in a MRI scanner. Their hypothesis and prediction was that they were trying to predict how similar brain activity of each viewer would be between each viewer. What they found was that the viewers brains behaved alike (about 45% of the neocortex) in the occipital, temporal, and parietal lobes. These regions are involved in primary sensory perception plus some multimodal complex response functions."





"Specifically viewer's brains behaved alike in the primary visual areas of occipital and temporal cortex, Heschl's gyrus ( auditory region), Wernicke's area ( language processing) , Some limbic areas (emotion), the fusiform gyrus (face recognition) and the association cortices that partially integrate primary sensory data. Their summary was that the viewers data was similar at the level of sensory processing and simple comprehension of the plot of the film. As a contrast the viewers brains behaved differently when it came to advanced areas of info processing. They did not share activity in the supra marginal gyrus, the angular gyrus and prefrontal areas. The first two of these are polymodal areas where our brains put perceptions together to achieve a complex perception of a while environment. The prefrontal areas presumably directed the viewers emotional and intellectual understanding of what they are seeing.

Basically our brain takes in the image(s) in front of it and processes what it is seeing. The brain is designed to pay attention to what's new in the environment so we remain focuses on the movie because it's constantly providing us with new information. The viewers brains behaved alike in some visual and auditory areas and in a region (lateral occipital cortex) active in object recognition. We process the basic sounds and sights the same way."


The reason I read and researched this article is because I am researching VR used in psychological  treatment. It's the mind I am examining and how an artificial world can be used to treat phobias. The first thing I need to understand is how our brain works when processing images.