ArtOn Lab has been hired to develop a great VR project for Sony. Under supervision of clinical psychologists from Liverpool Hospital in Sydney we are building a Virtual Reality pain relief solution. You are probably thinking that the idea is to try distracting patients from pain by showing them some fancy VR? No, the project is actually much deeper than this. What we are building is an interactive VR visualization of an actual treatment that our clinical psychologist consultant performs in her daily life. The treatment does work and has been proved effective for cancer patients experiencing chronic pain. The pain would not completely go away as the result of the treatment, but the treatment helps reducing the level of chronic pain and helps patients to manage it better.
What so far has only existed in an imaginary world jointly created by the clinical psychologist and a patient is being transformed into an interactive Virtual Reality game, where the main character is… you guessed it, the main character is the pain. We are not quite finished yet and can only show a very rough draft. The above video was recorded on a very slow computer with the aim of reporting on our progress to Sony, so please excuse us that it is not looking super smooth. We promise that the next video will be much better looking, so watch this space.
After doctors conduct their initial patient trials, our game should hopefully soon become available in a hospital near you. The trials are expected to finish in 2020.