Are you scared of heights? How do you feel about trying to cure those fears by taking a trip to the top of New York’s One World Trade Center, the tallest skyscraper in the Western Hemisphere? Perhaps counterintuitively, such a terrifying scenario may actually be one of the best ways to overcome acrophobia, according to a treatment known as exposure therapy.
This therapy is something that Lithuanian software development company TeleSoftas wants to help with, courtesy of its “VR Inner Child” software, an immersive virtual reality tool created to help psychotherapists treat phobias. The VR experience involves a hyper-realistic simulation in which patients face a child version of their virtual selves, who then guides them through the dizzying rooftop scene under a therapist’s supervision.
“The so-called ‘inner child’ interacts with the patient, gradually helping him or her overcome a specific fear — in this case the fear of heights — by tapping into the patient’s free inner child ego state,” Vytautas Kemesis, TeleSoftas’ chief technology officer, told Digital Trends. “While interacting with our inner child, we challenge our deeply held beliefs that form in early childhood, before our critical receptors are mature.”
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Source: Digital Trends