Unleashing a Swarm of Augmented-Reality Cockroaches to Fight Phobias
Augmented Reality Cockroaches An augmented reality system could be used to treat various phobias. NeoAcademic blog It's a well-known tenet of psychology that to overcome your fears, you have to face them. But in some cases, that's difficult or even impossible to do -- how do you face your fear of falling, for instance? According to a new Spanish study, augmented reality could provide an answer. An augmented reality system did a bang-up job of freaking out people with cockroach phobia, the study says. No word yet on whether it helped the patients overcome those fears -- so far, the goal was simply to find out whether an AR system could sufficiently induce anxiety. Participants sat at a desk with a computer, wearing a virtual reality headset. The headset had a camera, so the person wearing it would see a video of the desk she was looking at -- but covered in virtual...