Pull that down over your eyes now.
We see this as a science.
- Wow.
- Using therapeutic virtual reality
to allow patients to escape a jail cell
of a hospital.
- A lot of people think of VR as just
simply gaming and entertainment, and we
start to help them understand that it's so
much more than that.
- Virtual reality helps us redefine kind
of what we do for actual patient care.
- You'll notice that you can look wherever
you want, and what we'll do
is we'll bring you to Iceland.
- Our patients suffer,
they suffer grievously,
they suffer physically,
emotionally, socially.
What we've been doing is
treating them with virtual reality.
- There are two reasons why VR really
works, one is it blocks
out all the threatening sights and sounds.
Just removing the environment alone,
blindfolding yourself to it and
replacing it with something pleasant.
- Is that comfortable?
- The second part is the more pain you're
in, the more you need to displace
that focus onto something else.
- And I realized how powerful the illusion
of virtual reality can be.
By overwhelming the mind with signals,
we can essentially distract it.
- You can actually reduce the pain that
you feel at the time.
They've even shown this in
fMRIs that your pain receptors
don't light up the same way.
- So we'll see
if it helps with the pain or not.
- Mm-hm.
- You'll tell us.
- Yes.
- Everyone talks right now about
the fact that we're in a pain crisis.
You talk about the opioid epidemic
that's going on.
Everyone is looking for a solution.
We know that VR has a role to play.
- And what we've seen is that it reduces
pain by about 24% after just about ten
minutes on average.
- I wasn't thinking about the pain.
- You weren't?
- No, I wasn't.
- Really? - I was just thinking
about being there.
- It is not necessarily a replacement for
opioids, but when somebody has acute pain,
it's at that vulnerable moment
where we can potentially insert something
like virtual reality, rather than sowing
the seeds of opioid dependency by starting
somebody at that moment on an opioid.
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- So we're focusing specifically on pain
and anxiety.
If you think about when someone is going
to a hospital or an outpatient,
there can be a lot of fear and anxiety.
And sometimes on the walls of
these places, they'll put a picture
of a beach scene up there.
Well think about it with VR,
we can actually, literally,
transport them to a beach.
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- They're in an immersive
360 degree environment.
It's not like watching a movie.
It's something different and
you can see it.
- And it's just incredible,
the transformation that you could observe
almost instantly.
- The breathing slows and you can see
the body language, the patient is sort of
comfortably falls back into their bed and
almost surrenders to this experience.
And that's when we realized that
the treatment is having an effect.
- Your mind is elsewhere, you're not,
I wasn't thinking about the hospital just
now, I was thinking about
what was going on in there.
- What we're doing is we want to build out
a platform that we can, think of it as
a VR pharmacy of sort of therapeutic and
escapism type content.
- The library of different visualizations.
- Okay.
- We think of this as a new field.
I need to be able to pick and
choose the right treatment for
the right patient at the right time,
just like with any other medication.
- Because once you see the success, once
you see the smile on a patient's face,
whose in pain or
experiencing anxiety, you get it.
- There's stars right there now?
- Yes, it feels like it.
- It's moments like that,
when you're impacting a patient.
- That shows the power
a technology could have.
- Like, a big cliff.
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- How does it make you feel?
- Whew, nervous cuz I'm afraid of heights.
- Uh-oh. - (Laugh) - You okay?
- But it's peaceful.
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- It's like a dream, you feel all
the energy that's going across the force
being directed towards the water.
And you feel your impact on the nature
around you.
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It feels magical, intuitive, and
it feels like you have superpowers.
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