Not Just For Gaming: Virtual Reality Technology is Bringing Helpful Tools of Endless Potential to Society

in #technology • 9 years ago


Virtual Reality (VR) technology is known best for video gaming, but it's breaking new ground in other areas that might be beneficial to society.

With this blog I would like to go over a few of these things that might be great.

Virtual Reality to Help with Depression

There's been a recent study published in the British Journal of Psychiatry Open where they found that VR therapy can reduce the symptoms of depression. They found that by encouraging compassion for one's self and also reducing self-criticism helped significantly with those depressed.

“Self-compassion is important in soothing feelings of distress, and without it distress can escalate and become unbearable,” Dr. Chris Brewin, a professor of health psychology at University College London and the study’s lead author, told The Huffington Post in an email. “We now know that many patients with depression and other disorders have real problems in being compassionate towards themselves, although they are often very good at being compassionate to others.”

15 adults with depression volunteered for the study, and other volunteers who were not with depression were also compared.

While wearing the VR headsets they underwent 8 minute sessions where they had to express compassion with an avatar of a child who is under distress. When the patient talked calmly to the child, trying to calm it down, the child would react to what the participant was saying and would calm down and stop crying. Then as the child calms down the participant then becomes the child and the adult talks to them expressing compassion towards them.

Participant as the adult comforting the avatar child

After a month of 3 weekly sessions, the participants were asked about how they felt. 9 participants expressed their depression was reduced. 4 participants expressed their depression dropped significantly.

“By comforting the child and then hearing their own words back, patients are indirectly giving themselves compassion,” Brewin said in a statement. “The aim was to teach patients to be more compassionate towards themselves and less self-critical, and we saw promising results.”

“We think the responses people have to the [virtual reality] scenario are automatic and may bypass resistance to experiencing self-compassion, or to accepting compassion from a therapist,” Brewin said. “VR can also be accessed remotely and may be useful for people who don’t want to see a therapist or feel too ashamed to do this.”

“Virtual reality can offer new types of therapeutic experience that are potentially very powerful through the process of embodiment in avatars,” Brewin said. He noted, however, “We also need to develop the technique further based on what our initial patient sample have told us.”

Read more about the study here

Virtual Reality to be the Future of Communications

With VR being known for video gaming, it's come up that this may also be great for communications.

Can you imagine being able to see and hear who you're talking to. You could see 3D avatars of yourselves and get a better feeling of "being there" with the one you're talking to. Not only would this be great for business meetings, but good for families are are apart from one another who could get a better sense of being around the ones they love or hang out with friends at a VR bar.

Recently, Oculus VR CEO Brendan Iribe was interviewed and he had the following to say.

"It's going to go far beyond just games. We really believe the ultimate application for this is actually social communications. That's where it's long-term going to go."

"I want to have this conversation with you face-to-face, and I'm in Irvine, [Orange County] and you're in San Francisco or New York or wherever you live. And you believe I'm here and I believe you're there and we have this kind of interaction, but if I went like this [swipes hand forward], I can put my hand through you. But aside from that, my brain would say we're really in whatever space we wanted to be in.

"And when we hit that, and we'll hit it soon, when we hit that, it can fundamentally change communication. Billions of people communicate, and want communication devices, so that's where we see it going."

VR Tech Doesn't End There...The Possibilities are Endless

We'll be seeing this technology go far in benefiting society. We'll also be seeing it replace chunky computers, but be able to do the same and more using a headset and finger sensors to be able to have virtual computers.

Social media will be changing with this technology, as well as many other realms of life like medicine, engineering and more.

There's no end to all of this. We are just beginning to see things become a reality (pun intended), and we will be seeing things evolve in ways we're just beginning to imagine.

News link: How far away is VR for your brand communications?

Resources: 1, 2, 3

  • Image sources: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

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     9 years ago 

    Yay minority report :| I'm growing more and more disinfranchaised with all these techy advancements , a few days ago I watched some "Asian Aliens" (a friend is a big fan and I hate him for it ) , so anyway they got a quote from Tesla:

    "There is a difference between development and technology, one is good for man the other can destroy him " or something along those lines .

    This will probably be the "next big thing" and many companies are capitalizing on this tech , with the current trends there is probably no stopping it.

    I have one question to ask , all those scientists , what does it do to imagination?
    Where will be the place where we can go and rest from all this technology and web of wifi , why are we so into getting more and more caught up in "products" , will we see the disstopias portrayed in so man movies , games , like Dreamfall for instance , where people can share dreams ,but become addicted , or that one movie with Sylvester Stalone and dunno , where basically sex is a virtual experience and people have lost "touch" .

    Where will there be a place for old hillbillies or amish , can they coexist with this world :D ?

    [-]
     9 years ago 

    I completely understand your fear. I think this all about balance. Some will go too far and destroy themselves. Others will learn from that and go towards not ending human life. This has been a human challenge for 1000's and 1000's of years. Look just a few hundred years ago when the gun was invented. It's been very destructive, but it's also been very useful in defense and hunting.

    yin/yang

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     9 years ago 

    Pretty much , the LSD and the Atomic bomb were discovered around the same time , is what afriend once told me , I'm not a fan of either but they are similar , one s for the world another for consciousness.
    Haven't tried LSD , tho I might have been irradiated from Chernobyl :D

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       9 years ago 

      Excelent buddy. Upvote and Follow

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       9 years ago 

      This post has been ranked within the top 80 most undervalued posts in the first half of Jan 09. We estimate that this post is undervalued by $4.66 as compared to a scenario in which every voter had an equal say.

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         9 years ago 

        VR is also used for this purpose
        It's really cool.
        Upvote and follow~ ^^

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