The SIRIPP project team has made significant progress in our VR therapy project and successfully delivered our first VR prototype! It’s really amazing to see how things have come together. Developing a 3D VR game with professionally generated content and intuitive user interactivities is already a great achievement. We managed to achieve this while integrating nearly the entire clinical procedure of a well-established mental health treatment. With the help of our partners Cardinal Clinic and St Andrew’s Healthcare, the game designer Andy Debus, game developer Murtada Dohan and I spent a lot of time reading and understanding the clinical procedure and experimenting with different game mechanics and visual objects in order to keep the whole VR experience playful and clinically effective at the same time. I believe this is a leap ahead from the “conventional” VR-based exposure therapy.

The “game” is set in a bespoke English cottage garden. Patients start their journey by finding themselves sitting on a bench in the back garden. It is a safe place where they can simply relax and be introduced to the therapy. This is also where clinical preparations are completed through some simple gameplay. The main procedures of the treatment are carried out in the cottage. Each room of the cottage will be configured differently to accommodate different preferences or stages of the treatment (We will show the treatment rooms in the future). It might not look like so, but many virtual objects in the scene are interactive and genuinely carry the functions of patient interactions/feedback critical for assessment and treatment.

While patients perform game tasks, the VR headset tracks a variety of data including eye gaze, gestures, body movements, facial expressions, etc. Our in-game features can respond to the live data feed and help improve the effectiveness of the treatment and potentially protect patients from overwhelming emotions while they process life events. The data will also provide psychologists with some insights into the patient’s responses to the treatment which wouldn’t be available using conventional methods.

More updates to come soon. Feel free to contact me if you’d like to volunteer for our upcoming clinical trials.