During his popular 2015 TED Talk, immersive artist, entrepreneur, and director Chris Milk suggested that virtual reality could potentially be the “ultimate empathy machine.” This is something Milk learned from experience earlier that year, when he collaborated with the United Nations on the VR film, Clouds Over Sidra, which takes you inside the life of Sidra, a 12-year-old Syrian refugee. At that point, stories of the Syrian refugee crisis dominated the news, but often failed to reach many Americans on a deeper, more human level. But one thing VR can do that the nightly news can’t (not yet, at least) is give viewers intimate access to the experiences of others, creating an immediate, almost disarmingly real understanding of another’s world. It’s as close to walking in someone else’s shoes as you can get without literally putting them on.
Milk isn’t the only one who believes that in VR, we have the potential to become better listeners, caretakers, and global citizens, using pixels and haptic tech* to tap into a shared universal experience. As enthusiasm for VR’s gaming capabilities wanes, curiosity about its applications to the fields of mental health, rehabilitation, and community-building has only grown. Dozens of projects and research studies currently under development are breaking ground in areas ranging from opioid addiction and substance abuse to physical therapy and PTSD, all of which have the cumulative effect of potentially overhauling the entire field of patient care.
Before VR was a tech conference sideshow, professor Patrick Bordnick, dean of Tulane’s School of Social Work, was exploring its therapeutic uses. Bordnick has studied addiction treatment and VR since the early ’90s, when he created an immersive VR project known colloquially as the “heroin cave,” a series of wall projections set in a sensory-controlled room where subjects could re-enact a series of role-play scenarios aimed at treating substance dependency during early stages of rehabilitation.
The team’s custom-designed VR system didn’t work like the Oculus Rift or Gear VR. Instead, it utilized goggles that transformed images projected onto the walls into a 3D HD experience. Once inside, patients could be trained, with the aid of a therapist, to identify and resist triggers. (For example, in one scenario a participant walks through a house party and bypasses a group snorting heroin.) The project is based on traditional cue-reactivity therapy, in which exposure to a predictable trigger activates a patient’s addictive behavior hoping that, through controlled exposure, patients could modify their reactions.
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VR is also being used outside of traditional clinical settings. Doctors Without Borders (DWB), who recently experimented with 3D printing and VR technology to design field hospitals, has also been using VR to help train doctors and recruits to deal with potentially devastating real-world scenarios like mass casualties. “Training was the primary purpose for our embrace of VR,” says Negin Allamehzadeh, a VR producer for DWB. “It’s become a way to help people who haven’t been to the field or dealt with a mass casualty incident get a sense of what it’s like, both in terms of the chaos and unpredictability, and the stress of actually experiencing that.” She explained that seeing and feeling events from the perspective of someone who’s just been injured are less effective when it’s outside of VR, for example on a computer or by way of a dry powerpoint projection. “You just wouldn’t get it as viscerally on a desktop.” (You can still watch the VR documentaries of their progress without a VR viewer, but it goes without saying that the experience just isn’t the same.)
Another powerful use of VR in service of greater empathy has been designed by artist Heeju Kim, who attempts to recreate “the experience of autism through design” in her VR Empathy Bridge for Autism Toolkit. Designed to enable people to experience the visual, auditory, and speech differences that come with autism and, hopefully, to engender greater understanding of a sometimes mystifying set of behaviors, it is also surprisingly lo-fi.
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Source: 99 u adobe