A vr system for alleviating a fear of heights based on vital sensing and placebo effect

Abstract

Acrophobia is a phobia that persons fear for heights and tend to have negative images like falling down from their standing positions. Persons in acrophobia avoid going high places, so they have little experience in such places. Making them experience high places as much as possible is an effective treatment to improve the symptoms. Placebo effect is a well-known phenomenon that person’s psychological belief influences his/her physical and mental status. In this paper, we propose a VR simulation system to overcome acrophobia based on a placebo effect by making persons virtually experience high places. We show a method for effectively presenting the heights to viewers according to their fear strength and elaborate our implementation approach of the proposed system.