Life may be going virtual
and dental procedures, from chemotherapy to taking blood.
Rose and his colleague Ari Hollander left academia to form Firsthand Technology where they built Cool!, which Rose describes as “a sort of next generation of what we learned in Snowworld”.
Featuring more interactivity and a wider variety of environments, it’s more open-ended, he says, “a kind of playground”.
I tried it myself at the PCET clinic. A few seconds after slipping on the headset, I was floating along a river with grassy banks. There were mountains in the distance, and a blue sky with scattered clouds. Along the water’s edge, fluffy brown otters stood greeting me on their hind legs. Using two hand-held controllers, I threw fish to them and they rolled over in delight, changing colour to zebra stripes or flamingo pink.
To my brain, this world wasn’t simply something I was watching, but a place I was actually in.
When I passed under a rocky bridge, I flinched.
When snow fell, I felt the exhilaration of clear, cold air.
VR is undoubtedly effective at shifting attention, but Rose argues that it works on other levels too.
“We know that if people feel anxious and helpless then their suffering from the pain is much greater,” he says. Mentally taking people to a distant, safe place reduces their anxiety, he says, and interactivity — the ability to move around an environment and throw snowballs, for example — helps them to feel more in control.
He’d wondered whether these attributes might help patients with
Plos One.