Can a computer headset cure your fear of heights?

This writer thinks she’s teetering over a 30ft drop. In fact it’s just virtual reality – the new sci-fi therapy for beating phobias

Are YOU scared of heights? It’s one of my biggest fears. My kids tease me mercilessly about it and over the years have offered me all sorts of incentives to go to Alton Towers, but it’s never happened.

Nor is it ever likely to. One winter holiday our family went to Qatar and stayed in one of those skyscraper hotels overlooking the desert. They upgraded us to a room with floor-to-ceiling windows on the 55th level. I spent most of the time plastered in terror against the opposite wall, yet irrevocably drawn to the edge. Thinking about it still makes me queasy.

Yet here I am in a disused building, about 30 ft or more above the ground, standing on a platform being told to walk across a narrow wooden plank.

There’s no safety net. Below me is a deadly drop like a filthy elevator shaft with no elevator. One duff move could send me plummeting.

As someone whose balance is so bad she can barely ride a bike, I can’t bring myself to take the first step, but after some encouragement, shuffle one foot out an inch, then the other, arms out for balance.

We are complete with or without a mate, with or without a child JENNIFER ANISTON

Should I be crawling across on all fours? Someone dares me to jump off the plank and I freeze. Not helpful. Not helpful at all.

Though this is only a simulation — I am in a room at Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Laboratory (VHIL) in California experiencing all of this in Virtual Reality — it feels almost realer than real.

When I eventually make it to the other side, legs quivering, heart flailing around like a caged bird, headset, ankle and wrist sensors off, I feel an overwhelming sense of achievement — even though I knew the whole time that all there was beneath me was patterned carpet.

Welcome to the world of VR, or more accurately VR-assisted therapy, a method by which therapists can treat their patients’ phobias, anxieties and past traumas in a way that traditional CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, a widely practised type of psychotherapy in which a patient is encouraged by a therapist to frame negative thinking patterns into positive thoughts) never can.

In a nutshell, by repeatedly exposing us to high-quality, recreations of anxiety-provoking situations; by encouraging us to confront our worst fears in perfectly safe virtual environments with positive therapeutic guidance, our brains can be tricked more rapidly and more effectively into forming new neural pathways, ultimately prompting ourselves to make better, healthier choices in the outside world.

THeoReTICaLLyif I walked this plank, say, 30-60 times (the approximate number of times it takes for VR exposure therapy to kick in), I should be cured. Who knows, it might make a tightrope walker of me.

I’m here at Stanford University, courtesy of the team at Limbix, a virtual therapy start-up company in Silicon Valley, on whose board sits VR pioneer Professor Jeremy Bailenson, who founded this groundbreaking lab in 2003.

as Bailenson points out in his book experience on Demand, VR-assisted therapy, is not new. We may associate it with the gazilliondollar video gaming industry (Call of Duty, Fortnite etc), in fact it has been used to treat PTSD in trauma survivors and war veterans for more than 20 years.

But because the technology has been so prohibitively expensive until recently (in the mid-Nineties, lab headsets cost more than £35,000) not to mention unhygienic, clunky and uncomfortable (early adopters will be familiar with ‘virtual reality motion sickness’), it has never gone mainstream.

The perfect storm of lower prices in consumer VR (a headset such as oculus Rift now costs £199 at John Lewis), newer, better technology and the huge global escalation of mental health issues (58 per cent of us are afraid of heights — now Britain’s biggest phobia — while more than a quarter of us are nervous of getting on a plane) has given rise to a growing number of new companies getting in on the game.

Take oxford VR, a spin-out company from oxford University, co-founded by Daniel Freeman, professor of clinical psychology at oxford University. Freeman, who has been studying VR for 16 years, has developed a programme for those like me who suffer from acrophobia, as it is called. Unlike Limbix, the therapist coaching you while you look over the edge of a skyscraper in Freeman’s scenarios is virtual, not real.

‘our ambition is to greatly increase access to the very best psychological therapists using automated VR treatments,’ he says. ‘We’re now putting treatments into NHS hospitals, but with no need for a trained therapist to be in the room. The eventual idea is to put mental health services directly into people’s homes.’

But no company is pushing the technology to quite the same extremes as the Stanford University lab. Limbix was co-founded by Benjamin Lewis, a successful entrepreneur who worked at Google and later at Facebook soon after it acquired oculus.

Though the start-up is not yet two years old, it is based on two decades of evidence-based clinical research. addiction, autism, body dysmorphia and all sorts of phobias are all conditions which past studies show respond faster, and potentially better, to VR-assisted therapy than more traditional treatments.

It may be more palatable, too, for those of us who are resistant, for one reason or other, to traditional talking therapies. according to one study published in the latest edition of The Harvard Review of Psychiatry, 27 per cent of phobic patients refused ‘normal’ therapy while only three per cent refused VR exposure.

My young, energetic host is chief operating officer Jon Sockell, now showing me around the company’s airy ground floor headquarters in Palo alto. Posted on one wall is a cartoon of