Wednesday, 1 December, 2021 UTC
Summary
Virtual Reality Helps Destroy Your Fears, Studies Find
Numerous studies have found that Virtual reality helps you face your fears, from heights to driving!
Image source: immersive-technology.comIntro
These days, technology for virtual reality has gotten so much better than the failure that was the Nintendo Virtual Boy. Virtual reality is fun to play with, can help you get fit, and now numerous studies have found that VR can help you face your fears.
It’s almost as if there’s no more reasons not to switch to vr.
This is a list of the top 3 fears that virtual reality can help you overcome, starting with number one:
Heights
Ah yes, the ultimate fear: fear of heights. 3-5 percent of everyone in the world has a fear of heights (Acrophobia). That means ~1 in 20 people need to overcome that fear, and could benefit from VR!
A study published in 2021 found that VR can help sufferers of acrophobia overcome their fear of heights.
They were placed on a virtual “platform” one meter above the ground. Slowly, the platform began to rise higher and higher. The platform kept going up until the participants felt too scared to go any further.
By doing this, it exposed acrophobia sufferers to being high in the air. Over-time this made them less fearful and more comfortable with heights, which the study concluded by testing if they still had a fear of heights in the real world. They (mostly) didn’t.
The “moral” of this study is that VR exposure to heights can help acrophobia sufferers overcome their fear of heights.
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Driving
Using a virtual reality device to transport participants into a virtual driving world, a study in 2009 found that VR can help people with a phobia of driving face their fear in a more safe, controlled way than driving in real life.
Some people develop the fear of driving because of traumatic events like a car crash in the past. Others have no apparent reason. Some are only afraid of driving on bridges, or during construction, but driving on the road isn’t scary.
Whatever the case, VR exposure to driving allows you to directly face your fears, but in a virtual world, overcoming them in a way that you know wont endanger you.
All and all, exposure to driving in VR can help people overcome the fear of driving.
Eating disorders
This study: sciencedaily.com, which was published in 2020, discovered that VR headsets helped eating disorder patients accept the size and shape of their body. If body shape and size is a large concern for you, VR could be useful to you.
The study put eating disorder patients in a game where they chose an avatar that was meant to be (almost) identical to their own looks.(Including shape, size, “imperfections”, ect.).
They then went through exposure therapy sessions with a virtual therapist, in which they had to expose themselves to looking at their avatar, and were told to try finding all the “imperfections” and “problems” with their looks.
In the short term, doing this produced high anxiety for the patients, but in the long term it allowed them to accept their bodies and not be shameful of their looks.
Fearless VR + ZeroPhobia
There’s an app for the Oculus go called fearless VR. It’s designed to help you face your fears. The game has especially helped people reduce their fear of spiders, and other bugs like bees and wasps.
There’s also games like ZeroPhobia that you can download on a phone, which has a similar premise to fearless VR, including reducing the fear of heights. They are currently working on a version of ZeroPhobia to reduce your fear of spiders as well.
Conclusion
VR has been making waves! It is affordable, fun, and useful. One big use for VR, as studies have found, is that it helps in overcoming fears, from heights to driving. If you have any fears you want to overcome, you can download one of the numerous apps in VR that help you overcome your fears, and reduce them.
Thanks for reading!
Source(s):https://www.sciencedaily.com
https://www.zerophobia.app/
Fearless
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https://medium.com/media/1e1f2ee7654748bb938735cbca6f0fd3/hrefVirtual Reality Helps You Destroy Your Fears, From Driving, To Heights, To Spiders was originally published in AR/VR Journey: Augmented & Virtual Reality Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.