016 - "Fear runs deep": exposure therapeutic experiences with Fearless

Hello and welcome to episode number 16 of ResearchVR podcast! Where we dig deep into Virtual Reality with Cognitive Science and Economic Research.

For those of you joining us for the first time, ResearchVR is a weekly podcast dedicated to breaking down years of Virtual Reality Research into a digestible form, and discussing the current economic trends of the industry around the world.

Azad is joined by Tim Suzman from Fearless to discuss exposure therapeutic experiences in VR
What is Fearless?

Co-founded by the current CEO Tim Suzman, our guest, Fearless is a VR application to overcome fears, such as spiders, snakes, needles, or any other. It is based on the concept of Exposure therapy, otherwise also known as Systematic Desensitization. In core, this method is about going from marginal to greater and greater exposure to the object of fear.

Unique features of fearless

Most of the exposure therapies are In Vivo: if you are scared of heights, you go for a field trip with your doctor somewhere very high.

Fearless is based on the same concept, but instead of brining the object of fear in real life, it uses VR to build exposure scenarios.

Advantages:

scenarios not possible in RW, e.g. a cartoon spider in 3D environment
train at home without psychologist there at all times

The key feature of exposure therapy is Exposure Hierarchy: dividing the particular fear type into what is the final fear and what are smaller versions of it. After building a universal hierarchy for a specific fear type, it can be further customization for each user. Parameters include things like size, proximity, number, speed, realism, etc.

Roadmap of therapeutic experiences

Currently Support for GearVR & Rift is available. However, already running on Cardboard & Vive, but those two are still in house and need just few more adjustments before release.

The whole idea is based on the fast field of research on exposure therapy, but considering VR is a new medium, clinical tests are already planned. The goal is to compare VR to classical exposure therapies.

Contact

Thanks everyone for tuning in to another episode of ResearchVR. Hope you enjoyed listening to it and learned something new.

Thanks to Tim Suzman from Fearless for sharing his expertise with us and our listeners.

If you would like to hear more from Fearless, or request an app for your fears, do not hesitate to contact them: [email protected] and fearlessvr.com.

Topic Suggestions, Guest Invites, and all other all feedback are helpful! Feel free to contact us under [email protected] or via twitter

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@azadux
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Special thanks to Mellody Strahan, our new intern, for post-processing audio for this episode. Welcome to ResearchVR family, Mellody!

Special thanks to Nerses Balabanian for the intro and outro music! Find him at here