NeuAR – A Review of the VR/AR Applications in the Neuroscience Domain

Abstract

Since the 1980’s, computational applications based on virtual reality (VR) aimed at treating mental disorders and rehabilitating individuals with cognitive or motor disabilities have been around. They started off by focusing on simple phobias like acrophobia (Emmelkamp et al., 2002) and agoraphobia (Botella et al., 2004), fear of flying (Rothbaum, Hodges, Smith, Lee & Price, 2000), and evolved to fear of driving (Saraiva et al., 2007) or posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) (Gamito et al., 2010), schizophrenia (Costa & Carvalho, 2004) or traumatic brain injuries (Gamito et al., 2011a), among many others (Gamito et al., 2011b).