Examining the Importance of Realism in Virtual Reality Therapy Environments for People With Specific Phobias

Specific phobias have been successfully treated in Virtual Reality since 1995. Now that the technology is affordable and available, psychologists can use it in everyday therapy and development can focus on the virtual environment itself. The question is how a perfect environment for the therapy of specific phobias can be build. Creating more complex and realistic environments involves higher effort and cost. This study focuses on acrophobia as a specific phobia and examines the importance of visual realism in virtual environments for the therapy of the fear of heights. To determine how the level of realism impacts the sensation of presence for people with acrophobia a cross-over study with 36 participants with and without acrophobia was conducted, using virtual environments with different levels of realism. While participants without acrophobia experienced a clear difference in presence depending on the visual realism, this difference diminished with rising levels of acrophobia. People with and without acrophobia thus experience presence based on visual realism differently. Therefore the creation of virtual environments for exposure therapy of acrophobia with a lower level of realism might be sufficient, making the creation of such environments easier, cheaper and potentially enabling the rapid creation of customized therapy environments.