Looking for a midnight snack, you open a Tupperware container. Inside you find not your dinner leftovers, but a nasty cockroach. You stick your hand in. Welcome to augmented reality psychology. The cockroach in the Tupperware is only in your mind--or your virtual reality goggles--and is part of an exposure therapy technique meant to treat those with extreme phobias. Though traditional exposure therapy might require a person afraid of elevators to ride one repeatedly, or demand that a person afraid of cockroaches meet one face to bug-eyed face, the mere prospect of such experiences is enough to drive some patients out of therapy. But perhaps, as described in a small study in Behavior Therapy, an augmented reality cockroach can provide all of the benefits without the ick. Technology Review blogger Christopher Mims describes the setup, in which virtual cockroaches are inserted into video images of the real world.
"Combined with ...
