The concept I am going to talk about today is the idea that immersive therapies can be utilized in a cost-effective manner with the application of virtual reality. Immersion Therapy is a psychological method for treating phobias by exposing the patient to the stimulus. Over many iterations of this, the patient becomes more comfortable with the phobia or anxiety. This has been mostly applied to fears where immersion therapy might be either dangerous or expensive such as acrophobia or arachnophobia. With the advent of realistic graphics, it has become usable to train people on these types of fears because the level of presence has reached a critical point to feel real enough to be effective.
In CGT 515 I worked on a study which was not explicitly related to acrophobia, but we did find that the level of safety a person felt was directly related to the appearance of safety the environment provided. If this idea is applied to virtual reality video games it can be a powerful tool for not only the flow of game-play but also deepen immersion.
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