Monthly Archives: July 2017

The service is also designed to provide treatment in other ways, like taking patients to the top of a virtual skyscraper so they can face a fear of heights or to a virtual bar so they can address an alcohol addiction.

Backed by the venture capital firm Sequoia Capital, Limbix is less than a year old. The creators of its new service, including its chief executive and co-founder, Benjamin Lewis, worked in the seminal virtual reality efforts at Google and Facebook.

The hardware and software they are working with is still very young, but Limbix builds on more than two decades of research and clinical trials involving virtual reality and exposure therapy. At a time when much-hyped headsets like the Daydream and Facebooks Oculus are still struggling to find a wide audience in the world of gaming let alone other markets psychology is an area where technology and medical experts believe this technology can be a benefit.

As far back as the mid-1990s, clinical trials showed that this kind of technology could help treat phobias and other conditions, like post-traumatic stress disorder.

Traditionally, psychologists have treated such conditions by helping patients imagine they are facing a fear, mentally creating a situation where they can address their anxieties. Virtual reality takes this a step further.

We feel pretty confident that exposure therapy using V.R. can supplement what a patients imagination alone can do, said Skip Rizzo, a clinical psychologist at the University of Southern California who has explored such technology over the past 20 years.

Barbara Rothbaum helped pioneer the practice at the Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, and her work spawned a company called Virtually Better, which has long offered virtual reality exposure therapy tools to some doctors and hospitals through an older breed of headset. According to one clinical trial she helped build, virtual reality was just as effective as trips to airports in treating the fear of flying, with 90 percent of patients eventually conquering their anxieties.

Such technology has also been effective in treating post-traumatic stress disorder among veterans. Unlike treatments built solely on imagination, Dr. Rothbaum said, virtual reality can force patients to face their past traumas.

PTSD is a disorder of avoidance. People dont want to think about it, she said. We need them to be engaged emotionally, and with virtual reality, its harder for them to avoid that.

Now, headsets like Googles Daydream, which works in tandem with common smartphones, and Facebooks Oculus, the self-contained $400 headset that sparked the recent resurgence in virtual reality technologies, could potentially bring this kind of therapy to a much wider audience.

Virtually Better built its technology for virtual reality hardware that sold for several thousands of dollars. Today, Limbix and other companies, including a Spanish start-up called Psious, can offer services that are far less expensive. This week, Limbix is beginning to offer its tools to psychologists and other therapists outside its initial test. The service is free for now, with the company planning to sell more advanced tools at some point.

After testing the Limbix offering, Dr. Jewell said it allowed patients to face their anxieties in more controlled ways than they otherwise could. At the same time, such a tool can truly give patients the feeling that they are being transported to a different locations at least in some cases.

Standing atop a virtual skyscraper, for instance, can cause anxiety even in those who are relatively comfortable with heights. Experts warn that a service like the one offered by Limbix requires the guiding hand of trained psychologists while still in development.

Limbix combines technical and medical expertise. One key employee, Scott Satkin, is a robotics and artificial intelligence researcher who worked on the Daydream project at Google. Limbix also works with its own psychologist, Sean Sullivan, who continues to run a therapy practice in San Francisco.

Dr. Sullivan is using the new service to treat patients, including a young man who recently developed a fear of flying, something that causes anxiety simply when he talks about it. Using the service alongside Dr. Sullivan, the young man, who asked that his name be withheld for privacy reasons spent several sessions visiting a virtual airport and, eventually, flying on a virtual plane.

In some ways, the young man said, the service is still less than perfect. Like the Street View scenes Dr. Jewell uses in treating her patients, some of this virtual reality is static, built from still images. But like the rest of the virtual reality market, these tools are still evolving toward more realistic scenes.

And even in its current form, the service can be convincing. The young man recently took a flight across the country here in the real world.

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A New Way for Therapists to Get Inside Heads: Virtual Reality - New York Times

After 15 minutes of much-needed rest, I was ready to try the beta version of Marvel Powers United VR, which is not set for release for many months.

By this time, I had figured out the Touch hand controllers a key technology improvement that helps players take better advantage of what's known as a "mixed reality" environment.

Such an environment allows players to not only use their hands in the game but also to see them, as well as having multiple points of view from within the game, said Jason Rubin, vice president of content of Oculus, during the presentation by him and Mitchell prior to the demo.

"Games have had just one camera," Rubin said.

"Now, we've put the camera in the game," he added, which was no small engineering feat. "Mixed reality took a lot of work."

It also produces a lot of fun.

Thanks to some more expert instruction, my virtual Incredible Hulk character learned to bring his huge fists together to generate energy. That energy glowed in front of me the Hulk as I stood in a gigantic room the size of a warehouse.

Enemy characters moved around me at the edge of the room, or ran along a catwalk above it.

By swinging my arms down violently, I was able to unleash that energy, which rippled across the floor of the room like an earthquake tearing up asphalt.

Soon I was able to target these energy blasts, known as "Thunderclaps," at my virtual foes with deadly accuracy.

At other times I hurled their bodies across the debris-filled room with a move known as a "Seismic Toss," according to my game guide.

Although I had largely missed out on the action in the first game, in Marvel Powers United I was able to protect my teammates, including a wise-guy raccoon called Rocket from Guardians of the Galaxy franchise.

He, in turn, saved my virtual, green, hulking self from laser gun fire on multiple occasions.

Originally posted here:

Virtual reality turned me into the Hulk, but I'm glad I took some Dramamine first - CNBC

Jennifer Jolly/ Special for USA Today Published 8:00 a.m. ET July 28, 2017 | Updated 11:54 a.m. ET July 28, 2017

Jennifer Jolly takes us inside the Children's Hospital, Los Angeles, where a groundbreaking new VR simulation is helping train doctors to better save the lives of children. It's part of Facebook's Oculus for Good program. Jennifer Jolly/Special for USA TODAY

Jennifer Jolly practices hospital life-saving techniques using Oculus Rift.(Photo: Roddy Blelloch/Special USA Today)

Earlier this year, inside a cramped, windowless corner office at the Childrens Hospital Los Angeles, I put on a virtual reality headset and tried to savea little girls life.

It wasnt real, of course, but it sure felt like it was. The blotchy, wheezing, seven-year-old struggling to survive while suffering from anaphylactic shock was nothing more than a bunch of digital polygons. Still, the experience triggered every real human reaction youd expect, flooding my brain with fear, stress, and anxiety.

Once I slipped the VR goggles off of my head, one other emotion struck me too: excitement. After a few tough years for the virtual reality industry, a wave of medical VR programs are breathing new life into this cutting-edge technology.

Patient in Oculus Rift simulator.(Photo: Oculus Rift)

Just this past week, VR made headlines for helping surgeons separate conjoined twins in Minnesota. The National Institutes of Health Vaccine Research Center uses it to find weak spots on viruses. Virtual realityalso made remarkable headway treating PTSD in soldiers, educating pediatric heart patients and their families, and speeding up rehab in stroke victims.

The medical uses are pretty amazing, says Unity Technologies Tony Parisi, one of the early pioneers of virtual reality. Were seeing the perfect confluence. Anything you can do to train people more quickly, effectively, and cheaply is a boon to the healthcare industry. VR is a rapidly evolving technology that solves a lot of problems here.

Virtual reality tested by NFL as tool to confront racism, sexism

VR has yet to find the right problem to solve for mainstream consumers, and has suffered for it. The technology that powers high-priced headsets like the HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, PlayStation VR and even portable VR gadgets like Googles DayDream and Samsungs Gear VR is undeniably impressive, buthasnt lived up to the hype.

In 2016, analysts at Super Data Researchpredicted as much as $5.1 billion dollars in sales of VR hardware, software and accessories for the year. The reality was actually around $1.8 billion. Even those companies that bet big on virtual reality have recently slashed prices, too, throwing in freebies, and doing just about anything to get VR gadgets off the shelf and into the hands of everyday people.

Using an Oculus simulator, a doctor checks the pupil of a virtual girl undergoing anaphylactic shock.(Photo: Oculus Rift)

Does that mean VR is a flop, akin to Google Glass? That augmented reality predecessor to VR was met with jeers and criticism by the general public, and Google shelved the product before announcing its reboot as a business device earlier this month.

Not a consumer flop, saysTirias Research principal analyst Kevin Krewell, but rather "over-inflated and over-hyped."

"When Facebook bought Oculus for two billion dollars everyone said, Mark Zuckerberg just bet two billion on it, Oh, this is going to be huge,'" Krewell notes.

"It will be, just not overnight.

VR gadgets such as the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and Sonys PSVR are well liked, and receive positive reviews from the tech community. Yet they've yet to strike a nerve with the masses, likely due to a combination of cost, content and comfort.

The deep-pocketed backers of virtual reality have faith it will happen. Until then, it's gaining momentum in business and science applications.

The heart is a complicated three-dimensional organ, and its really hard to describe whats going on inside of it especially when something is going wrong, says David M. Axelrod, MD. The clinical assistant professor of pediatrics at Stanford University School of Medicineis spearheading the development of a new virtual reality program called Stanford Virtual Heart.

Dr. Joshua Sherman, a pediatric emergency medicine specialist at Children's Hospital Los Angeles, has been using virtual reality simulations to prepare for real-life medical emergencies.(Photo: Roddy Blelloch/ Special for USA Today)

Through a VR headset, the program gives medical trainees the freedom to explore and manipulate a lifelike human heart as it hovers in front of them, spotting defects and becoming more familiar with the issues heart patients experience. Virtual reality eliminates a lot of that complexity by letting people go inside the heart and see whats happening themselves its worth way more than a thousand words.

The freedom that VR affords is priceless, but its also helping to reduce cost. At Childrens Hospital L.A., doctors are trading high-priced training mannequins for VR headsets, ditching the cost of purchasing and maintaining plastic models, which can top $430,000 every year, and adopting a virtual trauma center where lifelike virtual patients are fighting for their lives.

The VR patient changes color of skin, monitor changes, the sound of the monitor changes, those are all cues to us that okay, I have to do this now or else Im going to be in trouble, Dr. Joshua Sherman, a pediatric emergency medicine specialist at CHLA, says. And when you make that action, you watch it change and that gives you positive reinforcement that you did the correct thing, or the incorrect thing, if the situation gets worse. VR is amazing for that.

Jennifer Jolly is an Emmy Award-winning consumer tech contributor and host of USA TODAY's digital video show TECH NOW. E-mail her at jj@techish.com. Follow her on Twitter @JenniferJolly.

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Doctors are saving lives with VR - USA TODAY