“Read to me!” I commanded my mother as we sat by the river, tanning.
She frowned and replied, “Can’t you read yourself?”
“No,” I sadly said, handing her an issue of Psychology Today.
“I can only write – they didn’t learn me how to book.”
Unamused and with a heavy sigh, my poor mother reluctantly took the magazine.
Thusly, she began to relate an interesting virtual reality piece to my ears (since my eyes couldn’t be bothered reading it themselves) as I sat tanning on the sand. My wandering brain couldn’t help but think how I wished I could implant this real-reality in the sunshine into a virtual-reality I could take home with me – and everywhere. Especially at nighttime or in weird social situations that make me anxious. And while the piece didn’t talk about transplanting a pleasant image into a terrifying situation (like the dentist piece I wrote about), what it did talk about was getting through your fears by flooding – and using virtual reality to do that.
Classic flooding techniques will do something like take you to the edge of a cliff if you’ve got a fear of heights or put a giant spider on your hand if you’re arachnophobic – in real life. What this VR technique offers is all of the sensory stimuli that go with that to make it seem as real as possible – except with the emergency lever of powering down if you start to heart attack over it.
This made me think – maybe if you get the Gear VR I just heard Samsung’s rushing to market (with all its little imperfections built into it ‘cause duh, that way they can add ‘em in next year and charge you for the upgrade), you can just press a button to do that. The headpiece switches between VR view and real time. For normal folk, this is good for going between games and real life without removing the set. But if you’re virtually reassociating your nightmare fuel, it could also help save you from internally exploding or whatever a fear-gasm culminates in.
The yes-and innovative-technological-coupling I can foresee here could happen via the fact that the VR operates by pinging to your phone (Samsung only for this, so you and I will have to wait for the Apple version). If it’s pinging to our phones, we can now perform our virtual fear-flooding therapy through our mobile while being guided by an A.I. therapist talking us through dealing with our irrational fears that are coming through the screen.
This is normally where I’d chastise how far away we are removed from humanity. But my biggest gripe right now is that when I buy this for myself, it will only follow my eyes from side to side (not front to back) motions. And that means my fear of jogging into a giant spiderweb will never be cured. But, to be fair, I don’t think any kind of hacking – short of that done with a machete (or Dr. Lecter in the Ray Liota version of Silence of The Lambs) – could fix my brain when it comes to that. Ever.
Then again, I’m the type who can’t even multitask reading while tanning.
#wompwomp