Acrophobia sufferers can experience a panic. The games also provide highly realistic graphics and can be easily adapted to an individual patient’s particular fears. Acrophobia (from Greek, meaning summit) or Altophobia is an extreme or irrational fear of heights.
#Pathological fear of heights software#
The whole cost of the software and hardware comes to a few hundred dollars rather than many thousands, they say. The researchers suggest that computer games might, therefore, be a cheap and easy-to-use form of VR treatment. Natural environment type (phobias of heights, water, storms, etc.). Tests with phobic patients showed that the games stimulated a response that could be used to perform controlled treatment. Acrophobia is an extreme or irrational fear or phobia of heights, especially when one is not particularly high up. cific phobia are that the fear is elicited by a specific and limited set of stimuli.
Exposing patients to the source of their pathological fear within this controlled and safe environment can be an effective therapy.īut Patrice Renaud and colleagues at the University of Quebec in Canada took the simpler approach of customising existing games to create VR worlds for a range of phobias.
Specially made virtual reality (VR) equipment is already used to treat certain types of phobia.
Popular computer games like Half-Life and Unreal Tournament could provide a cheap and effective treatment for people with debilitating phobias, say Canadian computer scientists.
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