When Eran Orr couldn’t pick up his 2-year-old daughter due to pain in his right hand, he knew something had to change.
Orr, a former executive officer in the Israeli Air Force, was suffering from cervical disc herniation. During his own rehab process, he saw major flaws with the physical therapy regimen, such as arduous PT sessions and difficulty quantifying results.
“At the same time I saw people playing with VR devices, so for me the combination was obvious,” says Orr, CEO and founder of VRHealth.
Orr saw potential to leverage virtual reality as a tool in the practice of physical therapy. He founded VRPhysio, now called VRHealth, in 2016.
VRHealth is a virtual reality software company that uses VR technology for physical therapy, pain management and reduction. During a painful or arduous procedure, VR can transport a patient to sunny beaches in Bali or to a calming rainforest in South America. Distraction is a key element in managing pain because it blocks pain signals before they reach the brain.
Pain is largely psychological, says Jorge Gomez-Mantellini, marketing manager at VRHealth. Sometimes a person experiencing pain just needs to be distracted from it. “If we can make people unaware of the pain, that’s when we are successful,” he says.
Other studies confirm that virtual reality as a tool for relaxation or distraction during medical procedures can help with managing pain.
A study published in the journal Pain Management found that “participants immersed in VR experience reduced levels of pain, general distress/unpleasantness and report a desire to use VR again during painful medical procedures.” Another study published in 2016 found that virtual reality provides a significant amount of relief for patients experiencing chronic pain.
“We’re not inventing a new exercise,” says Gomez-Mantellini. “We just apply the VR to it.”
Gomez-Mantellini notes that, of course, severe pain needs to be addressed. So VRHealth has software systems that help with pain management. The overall goal is to relax patients and provide them with tools, like breathing techniques, to help them handle their pain.
VRHealth sells its products to clinics, hospitals and offices for about $2,000 a year. Each headset costs about $900, and the software starts at $100 a month.
The technology also encourages patients to test their limits. Gomez-Mantellini says that patients are sometimes worried about reinjuring themselves and can be hesitant to push themselves to make optimal progress.
While VRHealth’s original focus was on improving the experience of physical therapy so that exercises didn’t feel repetitive, VR can also be used in other healthcare contexts, such as training medical students, calming patients and improving doctor accuracy.
The technology can also track patient progress. It starts by assessing a baseline range of motion, and each VR session tracks improvements over time.
Virtual reality is becoming a staple in the healthcare industry, with many applications that go beyond pain management. It’s projected to become a 6.9 billion dollar industry by 2026.
For example, IrisVision is helping patients with low vision regain sight. And Bravemind uses virtual reality as exposure therapy for patients with PTSD.
Virtual reality can also be an important tool for doctors.
ImmersiveTouch uses virtual reality to create patient-specific surgical plans. By using MRI and CT scans, ImmersiveTouch creates accurate 3D models of each patient. For example, a patient with a spinal cord injury will go through scans, and ImmersiveTouch uses those scans to create an individualized model of that patient’s spine. Doctors now have the ability to look at a 3-D model from any angle, which helps with planning the surgery and performing it more quickly.
VR can also strengthen the doctor-patient relationship. Instead of just talking to patients, doctors can now give a patient a VR headset and show them exactly what is going to happen during surgery.
“It’s helping real patients, and our mission is that this should be used, really, in every surgery,” says Jay Banerjee, the president and co-founder of ImmersiveTouch.
ImmersiveTouch, and other VR companies, like Medical Realities, are applying virtual reality to training. It can be difficult for medical students to get hands-on experience, so virtual reality creates a no-risk practice space. It also uses haptic technology, which uses vibrations to recreate the sense of touch.
Banerjee says surgeons rely on their sense of touch, dexterity and manual skills. “It’s not only just cognitive and mental, but it also has a lot of physical components.” The training improves accuracy, retention and speed, he says.
As the software, technology and capabilities expand, VR has the potential to find a home in most hospitals, clinics and operating rooms.
“It’s a tool in your arsenal,” Gomez-Mantellini says. “You can do so much in so many different landscapes of healthcare.”
Tag: virtual reality
How Augmented and Virtual Realities Can Take Students Beyond the Classroom
In the not-so-distant future, a field trip might mean donning an augmented reality device to allow a student to overlay digital elements on their real-world environment, to better understand other places in space and time. That device might also let a grade schooler look at a glass of water and see a screen overlay with a detailed description of H2O molecules, as well as pictures and descriptions of the microorganisms living in it. Or it could help a medical student understand the symptoms, feelings and medical background of a patient.
Augmented reality, or AR, creates a composite image of the real world by superimposing a computer-generated image over it. The promise of this tech is to “augment” real-world information, to help students better connect with and learn about the world. In the classroom, for example, this could involve a student wearing a headset that projects a secondary layer of information on a real or virtual space such as the above-mentioned glass of water.
Such ideas were part of the conversation at Samsung NEXT’s Jeffersonian-style salon in San Francisco, which focused on the possibilities and challenges of augmented reality in the future of education. A diverse group of technologists, entrepreneurs, journalists, educators, and investors gathered to discuss key issues that need to be addressed in order for augmented reality to have a positive and lasting impact in the classroom of the future.
The Key Question
While textbooks can help students understand other people’s experiences, augmented reality can give those experiences real-time context. “The big question is, how can augmented reality spark interest and engagement to give students a better experience than a textbook?” asks Jennifer Carolan, a former teacher and founder of Reach Capital.
And, of course, anything that might upend one’s perception of the world needs to be implemented with care. The group agreed that there are a lot of ethical considerations to consider, and that kids need to understand the difference between real and not real.
More Empathy and Engagement
As children become more glued to their screens for work, play and their social lives, research suggests that college students have become 40% less empathetic than they were ten years ago. At the same time, only 50% of students report that they are engaged in the classroom.
But if augmented reality education tools are built in conjunction with leading-edge thinkers in education who are planning the curricula of the future, students could start to feel more engagement and empathy by gaining further insights into subjects and develop stronger connections with diverse groups of people outside their own communities.
The Benefits of the AR Classroom
With the right applications, AR might offer many benefits. In some communities, particularly those that are lower-income, teachers often don’t have a lot of resources to take kids far outside the classroom, and likewise, families don’t have the financial resources to travel and experience other communities and lifestyles. “AR could bring students into communities around the world that they might not otherwise get to visit,” Carolan says. Real-time experiences, such as visiting a museum and seeing an exhibit about the Roman Colosseum, might be overlaid with a 3D gladiator duel. Such a dynamic, real-time experience could be overlaid with facts and statistics about the historical era, so that the student is absorbing the same information they would from a textbook, while at the same time feeling immersed in the time and place about which they are learning.
Jason Palmer, a general partner at New Market Venture Partners, suggests that AR could help students who learn in a different way. For example, one application of AR could be that a deaf student could wear a watch in a seminar that might vibrate to alert them when another student is speaking. Such applications could create more connection between students.
But for these experiences to happen in a thoughtful way, technologists and educators need to work hand-in-hand. “If you want AR to be a strong learning tool, you need the pedagogy and curriculum to drive that combined with the technology experts who help make the ideas happen,” says Sergio Rosas, a program lead at the Kapor Center. “A VR headset is not going to fix the problem if kids are left behind.”
Editor’s note: A previous version of this article incorrectly presented AR as an immersive digital experience. AR usually refers to the addition of virtual assets to a real-world experience, so that virtual and real seem to merge. VR is a more accurate description for the creation of virtual worlds.
—
Article produced in partnership with Samsung NEXT, Samsung’s innovation group that works with entrepreneurs to build, grow, and scale great ideas. NationSwell has partnered with Samsung NEXT to find and elevate some of the most promising innovators working to close the opportunity gap in America. Click here to meet the finalists.
Your Brain on Virtual Reality
It was famed critic Roger Ebert who first who first called film “the most powerful empathy machine in all the arts.” But over the past few years another medium has begun to claim that mantle: virtual reality.
As the kickoff to the winter film festival season approaches, a wave of new projects promises to immerse viewers in different worlds that help them better connect with subjects. But VR’s power to stoke empathy reaches further than just the movie industry. Even as far back as 1992 the federal government recognized the impact VR can have on military training exercises.
Journalists, activists and doctors are among those using the technology to bring about action around some of today’s social issues.
Solitary Confinement
In 2016, The Guardian was rolling through an online and print series on life in solitary confinement. The newspaper’s stories, videos and podcasts appeared around the same time that Albert Woodfox, a 69-year-old man who had spent over four decades in solitary confinement, was released from prison, renewing the debate on how the U.S. treats its prisoners.
As part of their series, The Guardian produced its first VR project, called “6×9,” which simulates the experience of being held in isolation for 23 hours a day, every day. “People hadn’t thought the cell would be so bad, or so small,” Francesca Panetta, The Guardian’s executive editor for virtual reality, told the Digital News Initiative last year. “They didn’t realize that people were in for nonviolent crimes, or for so long.”
Since then, other news organizations have used VR to explore the psychological toll that isolation can have, such as 2017’s After Solitary, produced in part by PBS’s Frontline.
Abortion
It’s one thing to hear about the throngs of angry protesters that confront women who visit abortion clinics. It’s another to experience that vitriol for yourself.
“Across the Line” was produced by Planned Parenthood and debuted at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival. Featuring real audio of protesters outside of clinics, the VR film gives viewers a first-hand experience of what it’s like to access an abortion while being harassed, cajoled and insulted.
In one screening, a Republican lawmaker was so visibly shaken by the film that he stormed out of the room, says Molly Eagan, vice president of Planned Parenthood Experience and the executive producer of “Across the Line.”
“Seventy percent of the people I showed [the film to] were in tears,” she tells NationSwell. “I am not a filmmaker; I’m a public health person. I did not have any idea about the emotional impact that a seven-minute VR piece would have on the viewers.”
Pain Management
As the number of Americans addicted to painkillers and other opioids remains a significant problem, VR is providing drug-free pain management to hospital patients. The Virtual Relief Organization, a project sponsored by the Center for Social Change, brings VR headsets to medical facilities at no cost, allowing patients to simulate the experience of traveling to destinations around the world as part of their recovery process.
The technology may even be helpful in revealing injuries that doctors have a nearly impossible time diagnosing, such as mild concussions caused by small impact during athletics or military training.
The company Sync-Think recently received clearance from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to start using headsets to track eye movements when an injury has been sustained. The technology, Eye-Sync, records, views and analyzes eye movements and can analyze brain health in 60 seconds, according to the company.
“The EYE-SYNC technology was initially developed to identify changes in brain function after injury,” founder and Stanford neurosurgeon Dr. Jamshid Ghajar says in a press release. “However its application has evolved significantly in recent years, and we intend to leverage our core technology to expand the many ways we can help people get the most out of their daily life activities.”
For the time being, the verdict is still out on whether the form can truly change how people think and act. You can, however, say it’s entertaining and seems to be helping in some way.
5 Virtual Reality Projects That Will Change How You View the World
In 1915, two decades after the first commercial film premiered, American audiences packed cinemas to see “The Birth of a Nation,” a three-hour, silent epic directed by D.W. Griffith. The story of racial tensions during Reconstruction demonized intermarriage and championed the Ku Klux Klan as guardians of white women’s chastity. The nation’s first blockbuster, the movie gained popularity for reflecting contemporary fears of racial inclusivity; it possibly even exacerbated prejudices.
If one of the first major experiments in the new medium of film ended up with such a retrograde product, what should we expect from this century’s emerging medium, virtual reality? By immersing viewers in another world, as opposed to the passive experience of watching a movie, virtual reality’s storytelling has the potential to change our moral point of view. If Griffith’s century-old film mythologized men in white sheets, could VR help us see beyond our skin color?
That, essentially, is the goal. But as with most mediums, especially one that removes us from our surroundings, there’s always the danger of escapism in to fantasy. NationSwell examined five recent works (sometimes called “sims” or “experiences”) to see if filmmakers have found a new way to generate empathy.
1. Embracing Our Differences
Nonny de la Peña is sometimes referred to as the “godmother of virtual reality.” At Emblematic Group, the VR company she founded a decade ago in Santa Monica, Calif., de la Peña brought the genre of “immersive journalism” (often pairing real sound with low-budget digital animations) to the mainstream with her short project “Hunger in Los Angeles,” which recreated the experience of waiting on line at a Skid Row food bank. Later films took viewers to a Syrian refugee camp and the Mexican border. This year, at the Sundance Film Festival, she debuted her most recent, “Out of Exile: Daniel’s Story,” about an LGBT youth coming out to his disapproving family. De la Peña, a former Newsweek correspondent, believes that VR can make viewers feel in a way no other artistic medium can. “If you feel like you’re there, then you feel like it could happen to you, too,” she recently told Los Angeles Magazine.
2. Adopting Another Perspective
For the last two years, Specular Theory’s “Perspective” series, which premiered at Sundance in 2015, has been showing how social cues can be misinterpreted very quickly. Playing two sides back-to-back, the narratives by Rose Troche and Morris May show varying perspectives on a crime. In the first chapter, “The Party,” about sexual assault, a man and woman meet at an alcohol-soaked college kegger. Gina, the girl, passes out, too intoxicated; Brian, the boy, has sex with her anyway. This year, “The Misdemeanor” doubled the number of perspectives around a fictional officer-involved shooting in Brooklyn to four: a teenager who’s shot, his brother and two cops. “Who will approach the piece and only watch one thing and think that they have the story?” Troche said to Wired. “That’s pretty much what we have in real life. The piece demonstrates the fact that just because you’re there, doesn’t mean you see everything. Through the four strings, you get to see the full picture.”
3. Contemplating the Bigger Picture
The Wevr-produced film “Hard World for Small Things,” which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2016, likewise tackles police brutality. In the five-minute story, director Janicza Bravo, a black woman, retells a deeply personal story from her own life. In 1999, while on vacation from her native Panama, a cousin had been killed in Brooklyn while holding a bag of coke. After looking up the event, all Bravo could find were short write-ups in local newspapers. Bravo’s film goes beyond that brevity to capture a whole life, leading up to its final moments. “What if their lives were more than a couple of paragraphs; what if it was their friends, where they were going, what they had read, what they had desired, etc. I wanted to make a short piece that was emotionally longer than a paragraph, and that you got a slice of his life before he died. So when he died, it’s not about the event and what he did to have died; it becomes about who he was, his humor, his laugh,” Bravo has said. For her new sim, she transposed the story to a mini-mart in South Los Angeles, where police mistake someone’s identity and fire at him with questionable cause.
4. Respecting Animals and Nature
Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab is bringing the rigors of academia to VR. At the university’s campus in Palo Alto, Calif., professor Jeremy Bailenson, the lab’s director, tests whether virtual reality can improve all life by making viewers more empathetic, more aware of the need for environmental conservation and more communicative. Essentially, he wonders, can visualizing the effects of our behavior change our actions? In one sim, a headset-equipped viewer grabs a chainsaw and cuts down a tree in a forest. In another film, after a person gets down on all fours and straps on the VR goggles, they become a cow grazing in a pasture before being driven to a slaughterhouse. It might just be enough for you to think twice about loading paper into a printer or ordering beef for dinner.
5. Putting Personal Responsibility in the Driver’s Seat
Even the lowly PSA is going virtual, too. Reel FX and AT&T’s recent commercial simulates the consequences of distracted driving. In “It Can Wait,” a person places her hand on a wheel before the simulation starts. She motors around a neighborhood while texting, barely avoiding bikers, swerving cars and schoolchildren in the crosswalk. As you can guess, the experience ends in tragedy. “Although people admit that such behavior is terrible and that they do it, they don’t necessarily see themselves as part of the problem. What people are doing is rationalizing that there is a safe way to do it,” Michelle Kuckelman, executive director of brand management at AT&T, told USA Today. By experiencing the film, participants get to see the danger from afar, while still catching a glimpse of disaster up close.
Continue reading “5 Virtual Reality Projects That Will Change How You View the World”
Erecting Skyscrapers With Climate Change in Mind, Coping With Pain Through Virtual Reality and More
Building to the Sky, With a Plan for Rising Waters, The New York Times
As climate change becomes impossible to ignore, real estate developers are adjusting their plans for rising storms and sea levels. A new waterfront property in New York City features generators with the ability to power tenants’ refrigerators and power outlets for a week, because “if you have your phone and your refrigerator, you can survive,” as one designer put it. After devastating hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, “resilient design” has become the buzzword in architecture.
Virtually Painless — How VR Is Making Surgery Simpler, Science Focus
Could VR headsets replace painkillers? That’s what a handful of surgeons are betting on in regions where sedatives are expensive and hard to come by. Once a high-tech luxury, virtual reality is becoming ever more mainstream and affordable, and has proven to reduce patient pain by up to 50 percent.
First Class Meal: Could the Declining U.S. Postal Service Deliver Food to the Needy? The Guardian
A creative proposal from students at Washington University in St. Louis aims to turn the stagnant U.S. Postal Service into a thriving food delivery service for underserved communities. A number of organizations are working to curb food waste in a nation where, despite its wealth, one in seven residents experiences food insecurity. But most lack a sustainable transport system to get surplus food to those in need. With vehicles, routes and workers already in place, the declining postal service could be an invaluable resource in the fight against hunger.
Continue reading “Erecting Skyscrapers With Climate Change in Mind, Coping With Pain Through Virtual Reality and More”
Forget Clickbait. This Is How Technology Improves News Reporting
Steve Grove, a onetime print reporter at the Boston Globe and a broadcast journalist for ABC News, joined YouTube and helped the homemade video site influence world events (becoming a platform for investigative video reportage like Sen. George Allen using the obscure racial insult “macaca” and a way to mobilize millions, such as President Obama and will.i.am’s “Yes We Can” music video). Today, as head of Google’s News Lab, he’s enthused about virtual reality and big data becoming an integral part of storytelling. NationSwell spoke to Grove from Google’s Silicon Valley headquarters about the future of newsrooms.
What’s the best advice you have ever been given on leadership?
[T]o make it something that you practice, not something that you are. I tell my team at Google all the time, “You’re all leaders.” What I mean by that (this comes from some books I’ve read, a few classes I’ve taken and also my own experience) is leadership is helping a group that is facing a challenge grapple with it in an honest and productive way. It’s really getting to the root of what a problem is, engaging in various interventions or techniques to really get to the core issue they’re trying to solve. Great leaders are able to exercise leadership, not just embody it.
What’s on your nightstand?
I just finished a book called “Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work,” which is about the modern economy and how technology has actually, in some ways, made us more distant from the actual work-product. The guy who wrote it was a motorcycle mechanic, and he talks about the power of working with your hands and how the trades are actually a really active way to use your mind and develop yourself. It’s not just an argument for, hey, you need to go start your own mechanic shop, but that you should understand how the things you own work.
What innovations in your field are you most excited about right now?
There are all kinds of new storytelling devices that are making journalism and frontiers really hopeful. While getting traffic to your site is a challenge and thinking about catchy titles or even clickbait is part of a conversation, deeper, more immersive storytelling is even more exciting and differentiates your site or broadcast. Virtual reality’s a part of that. You’re not just clicking and leaving: you dive into it. But another really interesting development (we’re not quite there yet) is journalism via drones. It’s really powerful for things like crisis response… and climate journalism — looking at ways different ecosystems have changed and are changing from above. It’s just a totally new perspective. There’s lots of challenges to figure out there ethically and technologically, but that’s exciting.
Data journalism itself is probably one of the biggest frontiers for journalism right now. It takes a massive amount of computing power that we now have, the extraordinary access to data sets we didn’t have before and a shift of how newsrooms think about telling stories. We, of course, work on Google data in that space, but ProPublica, FiveThirtyEight, The UpShot, Vox — they’re all really innovative data-driven journalism. That’s one of the things we’re betting big on: that data journalism has a huge potential for making readers around the world smarter about topics they’re discovering. Newsrooms are beginning to understand there’s never been a better time to be a storyteller, given the tools they have.
What do you wish someone had told you when you started this job?
I wish somebody had told me to lead with passion and manage with consistency. A lot of leaders are very good at one, but not the other. They can crisply manage a spreadsheet, a meeting schedule, a document and metrics tracker, but they don’t have the vision or the passion to lead an organization. Other leaders give the inspiration and purpose. That’s great, but the management piece falls off a little bit, because it’s harder for them to operationally develop things. Most leaders need to have both. I wish someone had defined that for me. I came into my work with the former — the passion and excitement — and I don’t think I was incapable of the latter, but I didn’t know when to toggle between the two.
What inspires you?
What’s most inspiring to me about my time at Google is amplifying stories or voices that wouldn’t have otherwise been heard. You look at YouTube as a platform for that, or the Internet in general as a chance to discover stories that wouldn’t have otherwise made it into our conversations — that’s a really powerful additive element of technology in media. Whether that’s citizen-captured videos from streets of the Arab Spring or whether that’s someone “coming out” to their community on a blog or whether that’s a kid in his bedroom in Philly or a mom in her house in Montana getting to ask the President a question in a Google+ Hangout, there’s all kinds of elements that plays itself out.
What’s your proudest accomplishment?
I feel very fortunate to have had some amazing experiences at Google. But if I had to pick something I was most proud of, I might go back to before I was a journalist, in my early twenties, when I spent about half a year in India. I just sort of went; I didn’t know anybody there. I bought a plane ticket and landed in Bombay [now Mumbai]. I wanted to do something that went beyond being a tourist, but I didn’t know what. I ended up finding the opportunity to work for an organization that did interventions in small rural Indian towns to try to get 30,000 people above the poverty line. They would help these people grow mango forests or cross-breed cows to create their own dairies. I [wrote] profiles of the people who this group was helping. I got to spend two months in rural villages, finding my own translators, talking to different people who were in these situations. It wasn’t the best journalism or work I’d ever done, but early in my career, it was a really transformative experience.
To learn more about the NationSwell Council, click here.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Home page photo courtesy of Steve Grove.
MORE: The Software That Could Enable Drones to Go Mainstream
Doctors Told This Man His Vision Would Never Improve; He Decided to See for Himself
Play a video game long enough and you might get pretty good at it: post a new high score, reach a new level — or reverse a supposedly incurable birth defect.
That’s the payoff promised by a new game developed by young entrepreneur James Blaha.
When he was 9 or 10 years old, doctors told Blaha that he’d never be able to correct his lazy eye and thus, never be able to see in true stereo vision, according to Daily Motion. Because of a condition he was born with, Blaha lived his life in a flat world, seeing only in two dimensions. He was told the condition was irreversible.
Then, inspired by a TED talk about teaching adults with eye problems to perceive in 3-D, Blaha decided try it for himself, by employing his skills as a programmer.
He developed a video game to strengthen his weaker eye with Oculus Rift virtual-reality goggles. The game takes advantage of the fact that the goggles show each eye a separate image. By dimming the image in the user’s strong eye, Blaha’s game can force the player’s brain to use the weaker eye — strengthening it and training both eyes to work together.
Blaha says his game worked: For the first time, the world around him started to “pop” into three dimensions. He’s started a company, Diplopia, to further develop his video game and to help other people overcome lifelong disabilities. Earlier this year, Blaha raised over $20,000 through a crowdsourced fundraising campaign, convincing hundreds of people to kick in some money.
Clearly, they saw his potential and supported his (now 3-D) vision.
MORE: This Man Was Born Blind, But That Doesn’t Stop Him From Teaching Children to Read
A Dying Grandmother Takes One Last Stroll With the Help of This Incredible Invention
Most people think of virtual reality as video games. But as the touching video below shows, virtual reality can also be a useful tool to help improve the quality of someone’s life.
As The Rift Arcade reports, video game artist Priscilla Firstenberg sent a note to Oculus VR, the Irvine, California-based developers behind the Oculus Rift, to help fulfill her terminally ill grandmother’s wish to go outside again. A virtual reality headset, the Oculus Rift is the company’s first product and is currently in development after a successful Kickstarter campaign.
For Priscilla’s cancer-stricken grandmother, Roberta, the 3D headset gave her the chance to stroll along a sunny Tuscan village right from her own home. Her reactions are nothing short of amazing—she describes touching butterflies, hearing the sounds of the beach and seagulls, and looking at all the beautiful colors.
“It’s just like dropping into a mirage, dropping straight down into a bubble of new life. It’s beautiful,” she says in the video.
MORE: Sorry Kids: The Rise of Virtual Learning Might Mean the End of Snow Days
But it was the simple action of walking up the stairs that Roberta found the most awe-inspiring. “Her favorite part was just being able to walk up and down the stairs again of the villa in the Tuscany demo,” Priscilla told The Rift Arcade. “I guess we take a lot of things for granted.”
Using the Oculus Rift’s version of Google Street View, Roberta was even able to take a virtual stroll and see an old snap of herself standing with her beloved pet dog.
Unfortunately, about four weeks after her first use of the Oculus, Roberta’s condition took a turn for the worse and she passed away. However, Roberta’s story is a reminder of the incredible possibilities of virtual reality, especially beyond entertainment purposes and video gaming.
As she says in the video, virtual reality can be a real form of therapy: “You can be in pain like I have pain but somehow when you see a blue butterfly reach out to kiss you…it makes you realize that we all are part of this world and this world is very precious to us.”
[ph]