Hello. I love to chat about new technology.
One of our favourite topics is VR or virtual reality, and the ways it's shaping life in the future.
VR allows you to put on a headset and escape into a completely different world. In this programme, we'll be hearing about some of the ways VR is tackling serious problems like domestic violence, and helping people overcome phobias - the strong and irrational fear of something.
People who use VR often describe the experience as intense. Putting on the headset makes you feel you're really there, in whatever new world you've chosen. And in this intensity that inventors, scientists and therapists are using to help people overcome their problems.
One of the phobias VR can help with is the fear of heights - but what is the proper name for this psychological disorder?
the fear of heights called Acrophobia.
Now, if like me, you're not very good with heights, you'll be happy to know that a company called Oxford VR has designed a system to help with precisely that problem.
In the safety of your own home, you put on a headset and are guided through a series of tasks moving you higher and higher off the ground.
You start by taking an elevator to the top floor of tall building and move on harder challenges, like climbing a rope.
Daniel Freeman is a professor of clinical psychology at Oxford University. Listen as he explains how the VR experience works on People Fixing the World.
Daniel Freeman
Even though you're consciously aware it's a simulation, it doesn't stop all your habitual reactions to heights happening, and that's really important, and that's why it's got such a potential to be therapeutic.
The art of successful therapy, and what you can do really, really well in VR, is enable someone to drop those defences, and in VR a person is more able to drop them because they know there's no real height there.
Although the VR experience seems real, the person using it knows it's only a simulation - a pretend copy of the real thing. This gives them confidence to go higher, knowing they can't really get hurt.
But although it's simulated, the experience is real enough to trick your mind into acting in its habitual way - the way it usually, typically works.
Although your brain knows you have both feet on the ground, VR is so realistic that to complete the tasks you have to drop your defences, a phrase meaning to relax and trust people by lowering the psychological barriers you have built to protect yourself.
Oxford VR's 'Fear of Heights' experience uses VR to put people into another world, but the next project we'll hear about takes things even further - putting people into someone else's body.
In Barcelona, a VR simulation is being used in prisons to make men convicted of domestic violence aware of what it feels like to be in the position of their victims.
The project, called 'virtual embodiment', is led by neuroscientist, Mavi Sanchez-Vives, of Barcelona's Institute for Biomedical Research.
Mavi Sanchez-Vives
In a virtual world we can be someone different and have a first-person embodied perspective from the point-of-view, for example, of a different person, different gender, different age.
One can go through different situations and have the experience from this totally novel perspective.
Many of the prisoners lack empathy for their victims. 'Virtual embodiment' works by giving these persons the experience of same behaviour in the first-person - from the perspective of someone who actually experiences an event in person.
In VR, the person face same behaviour they give to others. It's a novel - a new and original - experience for them, and not a pleasant one either.
But the VR therapy seems to be working, and Dr Sanchez-Vives reports more and more of the prisoners successfully reintegrating into their communities after their release from prison.
The experience VR creates of seeing things from someone else's point-of-view can be therapeutic, even for serious problems..
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