Resumen
It is not surprising that phobia treatment would be one of the first successful mental health uses for virtual reality (VR). The sense of being immersed in another setting is particularly valuable in exposure therapy, a treatment technique for phobias. Exposure therapy involves subjecting the patient to anxiety-producing stimuli while allowing the anxiety to attenuate. These stimuli have traditionally been generated by presenting the patient with actual physical situations or by having the patient imagine the stimulus. VR allows a third option of exposure in a virtual setting that is safer, less embarrassing, and less costly then reproducing the real-world situations and more realistic than imagining the danger. An additional advantage of computer-controlled stimuli is that the patient can more easily regulate the level of the induced anxiety by modifying the parameters of the world to reduce or increase fear to match individual tolerance. All phobia treatment studies to date have used a headset to reproduce the feeling of presence in an anxiety-producing situation