Using virtual public transport for treating phobias

Abstract

Nowadays using and talking about virtual reality (VR) is a very popular subject. VR is an artificial world, a computer mediated environment. The user tries to enter fully into the spirit of her or his role in this unreal-world. Virtual Environment (VE) technology has undergone a transition in the past few years that has taken it out of the realm of expensive toy and into that of functional technology. During the past decade, in the field of Mental Healthcare, the considerable potential of VEs has been recognised for the scientific study. This paper shows the application of VR and presents the VR research in the University of Veszprem. The virtual worlds, introduced below, are developed for treating specific phobias (fear of travelling). VR is a computer mediated environment where one can step in, move and also create an interactive connection with. The psychological background of its effectiveness as mentioned above is not yet clear in details. What we surely know by now that one of the keywords of its effectiveness is presence. Presence is feeling real in the mediated world. It is a product of the mind, created by a complex psychological procedure. This psychological procedure is closely related to self-perception and attention preferences also play very important role. The number of fields for using VR are constantly expanding. From the first applications in games, entertainment through army applications nowadays healthcare and education turned to be in the middle of interest. They use VR for the training of the aircraft, pilots, firemen, divers, soldiers etc. In medicine, VR starts to play role in the training of surgeons, medical students and in the field of psychiatry, psychotherapy, neuropsychiatry. The latest applications are pain reduction and physiotherapy, rehabilitation and scientific researches. In neuropsychiatry learning memory dysfunctions, learning and improving cognitive dysfunctions, helping Parkinson-patients with movement-induction, the rehabilitation of post-stroke patients are the most improving fields. In children's psychiatry researches have been shown in the field of improving children with autism, ADHD and other attention disorders. In psychotherapy VR is already proved to be effective in the therapy of anxiety and body-perception problems, PTSD and phobias. Next to clinical experiences many controlled clinical researches have already proved the equal effect of desensitisation with VR and regular psychotherapy. Wiederhold and colleagues have published the analysis of a long term, prospective research with the biggest sample yet. It e.g. shows the already mentioned equality between the two kinds of therapies but also shows that those therapies where next VR bio-feedback was also used were even more effective and what is really interesting and important that only 4 % was the dropout during the 4 Years of data collecting.