VR education and rehabilitation
Communications of the ACM
The annotated VRML 2.0 reference manual
The annotated VRML 2.0 reference manual
A Virtual Airplane for Fear of Flying Therapy
VRAIS '96 Proceedings of the 1996 Virtual Reality Annual International Symposium (VRAIS 96)
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Exposure therapy is a clinical treatment based on gradual and systematical exposure ofthe phobic people to the feared object or situation a little at a time. Through the repeatedrehearsals, their fear decreases little by little and they become more comfortable with thestimuli. For this purpose, we developed V-Theme Park - an immersive virtual environment, inwhich the patients themselves construct virtual worlds with the stimuli bothering them in thereal world. Our V-Theme Park includes virtual environments of flying, driving, diving andvirtual objects of spider, snake and so on. This involves exposing the psychologicallydisordered patients to a virtual environment containing the feared stimulus in place of takingthe patients into a real environment or having the patient imagine the stimulus. Due to weakbackground on this medical field we don't have well-established clinical results yet. Thispaper describes the considerations and implementation of a treatment system with virtualenvironments and its authoring tool for fear diminishment and the feasibility tests that wereperformed to a panic patient in mild symptom. The user can test the fear about the authoredenvironments by himself through the Internet, because V-Theme Park is saved as a VRML file. We constructed bungee jump, road, and elevator contents and in our study VR exposuretherapy was shown to be very effective in reducing the fear of diving, driving, and highelevation.