Skip Rizzo, associate director for medical virtual reality at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies, has been working with the U.S. Army on ways to use Virtual Reality (VR) to treat soldiers’ Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder for over a decade. His system, “Bravemind,” initially funded by the Department of Defense in 2005, can accurately recreate an inciting incident in a war zone, like Iraq, to activate “extinction learning” which can deactivate a deep-seated “flight or fight response,” relieving fear and anxiety. “This is a hard treatment for a hard problem in a safe setting,” Rizzo told me. Together with talk therapy, the treatment can measurably relieve the PTSD symptoms. The Army has found “Bravemind” can also help treat other traumas like sexual assault.
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Skip Rizzo created the “Bravemind” VR program for the Dept. of Defense to help treat PTSD.
Rizzo has long believed in the potential of VR to treat phobias and other mental illnesses, but when he started his work in the mid-1990s a head-mounted display rig cost over $50,000. So, for the first ten years of his research, Rizzo relied on the PC to create the simulations he needed to treat patients.
Oculus founder Palmer Lucky was Rizzo’s intern when he hacked an old Sony Personal Viewer (made for watching DVDs) as a head-mounted (HMD) display for VR. “We were using Emagin HMDs and wanted something more comfortable and immersive. Palmer was working in Mark Bolas’s lab. We asked him to crank out a better prototype for possible use for ‘Bravemind’. Was sort of a primordial Oculus, but needed a lot more time and money to really make it usable. The last time we spoke, he was setting up a Kickstarter campaign.”
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Source: Forbes