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Cheap, useful, user-friendly hardware that could become mainstream

In this blog we explore the not-so-hidden potential of VR, and we will learn how it can be adapted into the realm of therapy, mental health and diseases.

Since its conception, virtual reality and augmented reality have aimed to separate the tethers between a player and their environment and immerse them in a new one. Through this abstraction, perhaps, you could manipulate this environment to one’s betterment.

VR will change everything in future. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://demo.deothemes.com/deoblog/vr-will-change-everything-in-future/

Helping people solve the problems that matter

With true control over your environment you can manipulate or even expose specific kinds of stimuli to create specific scenarios; this is were the treatment use-cases come in. VR-assisted treatment has been seen for conditions such as autism, memory loss, anxiety(studied by university of Colorado left image), PTSD and various motor impairment such as cerebral palsy and chronic pain(VRHealth center). Most of these studies conducted on Oculus products(right image)

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University of Colorado Boulder. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.colorado.edu/(left), XRHealth. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.xr.health/(center),  Oculus. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.oculus.com/ 

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Alzona, A. (n.d.). We come from the future. Retrieved from https://gizmodo.com/

Issues

Problems still reside in the methods of implementation while some are strictly to do with headsets themselves other derive from the consistency there is to treat problems in vr such as autism or anxiety consistently. In respect to the user and the headset there are limitations even Oculus themselves have. A main deterrent for new users being motion-sickness, sickness can ruin new experiences. One common physical issue being limited by things such as IPD(interpupillary distance), this is the distance between your eyes, for Oculus there is physical slider to line your eyes to the lens in front of them and can cause dizziness if not adjusted correctly in the headset. There are various other aspects that can lead to sickness, including mismatched motion(Groen,2008), viewing angles(Abi-Rached,Parker,2002) and motion parallax(Kazuhiko,2011). Additionally, the length spent can increase the presence of sick symptoms(Ruddle,2004). Will be especially prevalent for older individuals unexposed to technologies rivaling vr like modern gaming; any kind of dysphoria can severely limit the experience for an individual, invalidating the product altogether. Timing can also be an issue, first time users will need to take many breaks to avoid disphoria mentioned above. This