Category Archives: Virtual Reality

July 5, 2017 Credit: University of Oxford

Researchers from the University of Oxford are using a unique blend of virtual reality and innovative genetic techniques to understand the causes of diseases such as diabetes and anaemia.

The team, working in collaboration with physicists from Universita' di Napoli and software developers and artists at Goldsmiths, University of London, are using the state-of-the-art technology to investigate the 3-D structure of DNA. The way in which DNA is arranged in 3-D space has huge consequences for human health and disease. Subtle changes in DNA folding impact on whether genes can be switched on or off at particular times dictating what a cell can do. It is this process that the team are trying to get to the bottom of in the hunt for the causes of disease, and potential new treatments.

The scientists are presenting their research at the Royal Society's annual Summer Science Exhibition.

Prof Jim Hughes, Associate Professor of Genome Biology, University of Oxford, said: "It's becoming increasingly apparent that the way that a cell fits two metres of DNA into a structure more than ten times smaller than a human hair, is more than just a random process. We are dissecting this intricate folding to understand which parts of our immense genome are interacting at any one time, helping us understand whether changes in this process can cause disease."

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CSynth the software on show at the Royal Society's Summer Science Exhibition is designed to provide an engaging way to explore and understand the complex structure of the genome in 3-D, by integrating data from genome sequencing, computer modelling and high powered microscopy. Scientists are now hoping to use virtual reality to visualise the huge amounts of data they can generate in the laboratory.

Speaking about the software, Stephen Taylor, Head of the Computational Biology Research Group at the MRC Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine, University of Oxford, said: "With advances in genetic techniques, we can now harness more information than ever before from biological data provided by patients and volunteers. With the CSynth software we can integrate data from different experiments into something more tangible to help researchers understand how DNA folds. In addition, using the Virtual Reality mode in CSynth is helping us visualise these complex 3-D structures in a more intuitive way."

Prof William Latham from the Department of Computing, Goldsmiths, University of London, said: "I'm fascinated by the way we can use art to better understand and envision scientific concepts. In CSynth we've created something that not only accelerates research progress, but also allows the public to share in unravelling some of the mesmerising and intricate structures inside our body."

Prof Frederic Fol Leymarie from Goldsmiths, said: "By combining maths and physics together with computer games technologies, we can program realistic molecular interactions, and immerse people in the dynamic world of DNA. CSynth takes you on a close encounter with the very fabric of life."

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Researchers use virtual reality to unpack causes of common diseases - Medical Xpress

Wednesday, July 5, 2017 at 6:25 a.m.

Denver Comic Con is over for 2017,but the opportunity to geek out with other nerds over virtual reality, gaming and cosplay is just beginning. Player 2, a Denver startup, has been putting on events at bars around the city since January, giving people places where they can gather over beers to play board and video games.

"We want to bring interpersonal experience back to this stuff," says Player 2 owner Shadoe Konicek, recalling the community gaming fostered when he was young. These days, he notes, much of the gaming culture has "lost connections."

To help reinvigorate the social aspect of gaming, Konicek started Player 2, which brings a library of board games, a VR station with a full HTC Vive setup, and plenty of video games to participating bars. There, in the classic arcade spirit, you can buy tokens to use toward games or VR.

By September, Konicek hopes that Player 2 will be able to open its own private space, which will be run as a sort of clubhouse; customers will bring their own refreshments to enjoy while they game and experience a full VR station. He's confident the concept will fill a niche, and thinks it could expand to other locations, too; to help get the first one off the ground, Player 2 will run a small crowdsourcing campaign in August, offering early memberships.

In the meantime,Player 2 will be holding a "Nerd's Night Out" on Monday, July 10, at Platt Park Brewing Company, where it has held previous events. Anyone who shows up in cosplay gets their first beer for free, and players can compete in various challenges to win more beer or gift cards: Defeat the fabled samurai in the VR game Death Dojo, for example, and you couldget a$25 gift certificate to Platt Park.

"We do this so people can feel comfortable," concludes Konicek. "The point is it's okay to be adult and still like these things."

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Player 2 Celebrates Video Games, Virtual Reality...and Beer - Westword

A year ago, while Bryony Cole was researching technological developments in entertainment, she stumbled across virtual reality sex, which essentially lets people interact through a screen as if they were in the same bedroom. The fact that people could have rich, varied sex lives without ever leaving their couches both fascinated and frightened her. How would that affect their real-life relationships? Was it considered cheating?

Those questions made her curious enough to start the Future of Sex podcast. In each episode, Cole investigates a new issue at the intersection of sexuality and technology, from the etiquette of dick pics to the ethics of sex robots. But to hear her tell it, the most significant changes she's seen in sex tech aren't about the mechanics of how we have sex, but how our attitudes are shfitingparticularly where gender is concerned.

Cole talked to Glamour about how technology is altering our relationships and ultimately our society, for better and for worse (but mostly, she believes, for the better).

Glamour: What are the most exciting sex tech inventions you've seen lately?

Bryony Cole: OMG Yes, a sex ed platform for women, which includes touchable videos that allow you to learn and practice 12 different techniques that lead women to orgasm. The touch screens are enabled with feedback technology that essentially tell you if you're doing it correctly or not. This sort of interactivity is far more engaging than any book or screen has been previously.

That interactivity extends to virtual reality. Theres a couple of interesting VR sex ed examples going on at the moment. One is from Emory University in partnership with Georgia Tech. The execution is still pretty basic at the moment, but what theyve attempted to do is walk women through a nightclub and practice saying "no," practice consent in that environment, where you meet someone and it may feel awkward but you're not sure how to say "no." If you keep going through this environment, hopefully, when it gets to the stage of real life, you have the skills and knowledge to be able to say "I don't feel comfortable in this situation."

The other interesting application in VR for sex education is a program called Virtual Sexology II, designed by BaDoinkVR. There's a program for men and one for women, designed by sex therapists to enable you to become better lovers: for men to work through premature ejaculation by getting in contact with your body, and for women, getting in touch with your body and exploring different types of touch. You're touching yourself, but you're in this virtual, immersed environment having this safe place where you can still learn.

Glamour: That sounds like an opportunity we don't really get now, since a lot of people wouldn't feel comfortable masturbating in front of a sex therapist.

BC: Not in the therapy world, but in the coaching world, theres people who do that. Kenneth Play, for example, travels the world and watches couples have sex and teaches them how to be better. [VR sex ed] is probably going be a lot cheaper than having someone stand in your room and a lot more comfortable than having someone watch you have sex. In real life, if theres someone in your room, you can't deny that. With this, you can just take off the headset.

Glamour: What technologies would you like to see more of?

BC: The problem thats going to make the most impact on our lives is helping people communicate. For a lot of tech, thats not the case. Were spending more time communicating via streams versus in person. I [would like to see] technology that can solve the problem of how we can communicate better to our children, our lovers, our friends, and other people. How do we increase our emotional and social intelligence? Theres definitely arguments against that, if we look at the proliferation of dating apps and the way we can swipe through 200 people on the toilet, and the idea that thats made us view people as more disposable. If we look at young people and how they learn to communicate via Instagram and Snapchat, that's a different kind of interaction. True emotional intelligence and being able to read people and body language? That's a super power. Any technology that can enhance education around communication is going to improve our lives.

PHOTO: Bryony Cole

Glamour: Are there any other technologies you're concerned about?

BC: Im more concerned about the way people will take it rather than the technology that's being invented. Dolls and robots are currently being used as companion dolls in the field of therapy, as sexual surrogates for healing people who have been through severe sexual trauma or have some disability so that they cant have sex with another person. Theres totally the potential for these dolls to be used in other ways. Theres concern around the dolls you can makechild sex dolls entered the market in the U.K. That idea of how our brains are changing, and were becoming attached to objects and seeing them as something that can potentially replace us, is definitely concerning. They have a lot of protests about this. Theres nobody regulating the sex tech industry in terms of whats being developed. The reason I started the podcast is to ask the ethical questions around "What are we designing?" and "How are we going to navigate love, sex, and dating in the future?"

Glamour: What are the biggest changes you've seen in sex tech since you started your podcast a year ago?

BC: The biggest marker for me was in the sex tech world. We saw sex tech companies like Unbound raising money, which has previously been a big problem because of reputational risk and morality causes. In 2017, JWTs global intelligence report hailed 2017 as the year of "vagina-nomics." Vaginas and economics are coming together like never before. Body image and female sexual pleasure, which have previously remained on the fringes of discourse, are rapidly being embraced in mainstream media. And in turn, we are in a year where there are more womens sex tech products on the market than ever before: period underwear, pee-proof underwear, tampon subscription services, vulvar skin cream.

The fact we can put an ad on a subway that simply says ["Underwear for women with periods,"](http://www.glamour.com/story/glamour-staffers-try-out-thinx-period-underwear-the-verdict-theyre-awesome) unapologetic about a womans bodily functionssignifies society's attitudes are changing. The sex toy industry in particular has had to make a major shift from being a male-dominated industry that primarily used cheap, dodgy materials to one where many of the best brands are either founded by women or have women on their design teams, and they are using the latest advancements in technology.

Some of my favorite examples include Dame Products, co-founded by Janet Lieberman, an MIT graduateoften the first female engineer in the company she worked forwho created a vibrator company out of frustration with the lack of quality, high-end design. The Eva became the highest-funded adult product in the history of crowdfunding. It raised seven times its goal and is now sold globally. Stephanie Alys, co-founder of MysteryVibe, designed a six-motor vibrator that bends to any shape you like. User-focused design and deep research with their target market is a hallmark of this sex tech aimed at women.

Sex tech is not only changing the experience of sex for women. It's shifting views and opening up public conversation. Its changing the language and giving us words to talk about these things that were previously in the dark.

This article is part of Summer of Sex, our 12-week long exploration of how women are having sex in 2017.

More Summer of Sex:

How Tumblr Porn Got Its Woman-Friendly Footing Everything You've Ever Wanted to Know About Sex in Space Meet 6 Sex-Positive Instagrammers Changing the Internet

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How Virtual Reality Sex Tech Just Might Change Women's Lives - Glamour

Diving into the deceptively real world of virtual reality (VR), for example exchanging ideas with Group colleagues at a logistics hall in the Czech Republic from Wolfsburg the latest VR technology makes that possible for the first time. Experts from the Volkswagen Group have developed virtual reality applications for production & logistics that enable several participants to meet in a VR room. Following a test phase, the Volkswagen Group is now the first car manufacturer to roll out VR technology with the HTC VIVE-VR system. The Volkswagen Digital Reality Hub developed for this purpose together with the Innoactive startup bundles all existing VR applications, users and tools in the Group on a single platform. This platform is making its public debut at the Digility conference and exhibition in Cologne.

Virtual reality creates the ideal conditions for cross-brand and cross-site collaboration, Jasmin Mller from Audi Brand Logistics explains. Together with colleagues from the Group, she develops VR solutions for production & logistics as part of the cross-brand Digital Realities Team. They have already designed virtual reality logistics trainings, created virtual environments for workshops, or exchanged best practice examples in VR.

Dennis Abmeier from Group IT is also a member of the Digital Realities Team. As he explains, exchanging knowledge is just as important as bundling knowledge. Thats why we came up with the Volkswagen Digital Reality Hub central platform in collaboration with Innoactive. All employees have access to all existing VR elements as well as existing knowledge via the platform. That way, we enable individual units to implement new use cases quickly and jointly move in VR applications so they can plan new workflows interactively.

Mathias Synowski, a VR user from Group Logistics, describes the added value of virtual reality solutions: Going forward, we can be virtual participants in workshops taking place at other sites or we can access virtual support from experts at another brand if we are working on an optimization. That will make our daily teamwork much easier and save a great deal of time. Rolling out VR technologies is therefore an important step towards the digital, networked and efficient production of the future.

The testing and rollout of virtual reality applications is an example of cross-brand cooperation in the Group: under the umbrella of Group Logistics and the Digital Factory, the Digital Realities Team is currently developing further virtual reality applications for production & logistics at the Audi, SEAT, KODA and Volkswagen brands. The applications will be accessible throughout the Group via the Volkswagen Digital Reality Hub common platform. As far as the technology is concerned, the VR end user device is the HTC VIVE Business Edition, a special VR headset developed specifically for businesses. The Volkswagen Group is therefore the first car manufacturer to roll out virtual reality (VR) technology throughout the Group with the HTC VIVE headset.

The Volkswagen Group, Innoactive and HTC VIVE are presenting the new VR applications for production & logistics as well as the Volkswagen Digital Reality Hub to the public for the first time at the Digility conference and exhibition in Cologne on July 5 and 6, 2017. There will be a live demonstration of the latest VR applications at the trade fair for AR and VR technologies.

See the article here:

Volkswagen Group is backing virtual reality solutions for interactive collaboration in production & logistics - Automotive World (press release)

Segment the human experience of light apart from the objective behavior of light unseen from our universe, and try to imagine seeing light in both its particle and wave form at the same time. In case you are struggling, here is a snapshot of the behavioral duality exhibited by light, captured as both a waveform and a stream of particles.

Over the past 200 years, cameras have evolved just as rapidly from analog to digital as they did from large to miniaturized. Now the worlds virtual reality and augmented reality enthusiasts are attempting to create more immersive experiences by altering and improving the way a physical environment is captured digitally. Capturing a physical environment digitally requires a 3D scanning system. The specific considerations needed for creating a digital version of an as-built model for virtual reality depend on the current technological limits of photorealistic reality capture.

A San Franciscobased company called Lytro has designed and constructed a light-field camera and developed an array system it calls Immerge to capture, compute and create an immersive virtual reality experience of a musical performance at St. Ignatius Church.

A light-field camera is designed to capture light from different angles to make images with depth and color, calculated from intersections of different angular directions of rays. Using an array of cameras set up in a predesigned capture matrix, each can be programmed to see different perspectivesexposure, shutter timing, focal length and position all carefully measured and quantized sequentially.

The creation of a multi-camera, array-based system requires the expenditure of considerable time and capital. But Lytro has developed an individual camera called Illum apart from Immerge. This array-based system of light-field technologies allows Lytro to capture a light field, calculate ray angles and then manifest a virtual representation for interactive immersion.

This incredible array of 475 cameras called Immerge captured and processed a huge amount of visual data using Googles cloud platform and custom rendering techniques designed by Lytro. (Image courtesy of Lytro.)

To learn more about this technology and the virtual reality capture at St. Ignatius Church, visit the Lytro blog.

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How Does Lytro Capture Light Fields for Virtual Reality? - ENGINEERING.com

With Oculuss place at the forefront of virtual reality technology becoming shakier with the departure of its CEO Palmer Luckey, the news that the company was shutting its filmmaking division, Story Studio, was a surprise. Some have accused Facebook the company which owns Oculus of being behind the move, as a way of prioritizing the social functionality of VR.

Whatever the motive, what was hailed at its inception as the Pixar of virtual reality is no longer a going concern. But will the former Oculus Story Studio staff who counted former Pixar employees amongst their number simply take their talents elsewhere? Or is this a flare sent up to the industry that VR film isnt worth making to begin with?

Firstly, it is worth noting that when people talk about virtual reality film, what they are really talking about are movies shot with a 360 camera. This has led those in the industry to take pains to note that 360 film isnt really true VR, as it lacks the interactive element virtual reality is, by definition, entirely computer-generated, after all. Last year, UploadVR convincingly argued the case for True VR being reclassified as responsive VR, in the hope that both 360 cinema and VR experiences could coexist peacefully in the eyes of the industry.

Speaking at the Cannes festival in 2016, Stephen Spielberg told journalists of his scepticism towards VR filmmaking. It gives the viewer a lot of latitude not to take direction from the storytellers but make their own choices of where to look. This may seem like futurephobia from the director of some of the most beloved films of all time, but its a view shared by those in the VR industry as well.

Virtual reality production company REWIND have noted that, as a film medium, VR can be technically dazzling, but lacking in story: there is no certainty that anyone watching a film in VR will even notice the plot points of the narrative going on around them. However, with most virtual reality films clocking in at under ten minutes apiece, the best virtual reality film content will arguably strive to strike the ideal balance between story and spectacle. This is where the pros come in.

As far back as 2015, commentators were claiming that VR film would favor creative experimenters, which may explain why so many Hollywood luminaries are eager to work in the medium. Aprils Tribeca Film Festival may have premiered The Handmaids Tale and the new documentary from Werner Herzog, but some of the festivals biggest-names were there to promote their VR work. Kathryn Bigelows eight-minute documentary The Protectors about the ivory poaching industry was widely praised, and Emily Mortimers appearance in Broken Night was hailed as a breakthrough in tailoring the medium of VR film to accommodate narrative filmmaking.

Last years festival saw the first screening of Invasion!, the debut VR film by Baobab Studios, a then-new VR production company helmed by the director of the Madagascar films. One year on, and the festival premiered the first episode of Rainbow Crow, Baobabs latest series, which also featured the voice talent of John Legend and Constance Wu. The Tribeca Film Festivals VR programmer told the BBC that he believes the richer the content is, and the more compelling, the more it warrants being paid for. Thats when we have an industry and a legitimate visual medium. Whether that new industry sees a sustained spirit of collaboration between Silicon Valley and Tinseltown that has so far eluded traditional filmmakers remains to be seen.

The first celluloid films were even shorter than their VR counterparts, limited in length to under a minute by the bulky cameras and nonexistent editing technology. By comparison, VR films are generally only 10 minutes long (though Miyubi, a 40-minute feature, has been garnering some of the mediums best reviews yet).

The forms brevity could be down to the health risks some have associated with spending too long in VR worlds, though the bitesize nature of virtual reality film has given some studios alternative ideas about how it could be used. RSA Ridley Scotts production company launched a dedicated virtual reality division a month prior to the Tribeca festival, with its inaugural VR experience being released to accompany Alien: Covenant. Its first projects independent of existing Ridley Scott films are two new VR series (one fiction, one documentary), though it seems telling that the head of its division neglects to mention narrative filmmaking in the companys launch statement.

I think VR is one of the most exciting areas in the industry today, said RSA VRs head of department, with potential to influence how we consume content for generations to come. Whereas Spielberg was worried about storytelling, RSA are simply content with creating content.

But this isnt necessarily the final direction down which VR film could travel; indeed, perhaps Baobab Studios will end up supplanting Oculus Story Studio as the mediums Pixar. Invasion! is set to be adapted into a feature-length 2D movie, with a follow-up VR short also in the works. At the very least, this surely shows that, regardless of how they choose to use it, VR film is fertile ground for some of the most imaginative minds in cinema.

Read next: Photobucket's 'ransom demand' is a masterclass in how not to treat your users

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What does the closure of Oculus Story Studio mean for VR filmmaking? - TNW

After being under the spotlight at Electronic Entertainment Expo(E3) 2016, VR was largely downplayed at E3 2017. Many of the major VR players settled for low-key presentations, unlike last year's overwhelming scale. The slower than anticipated VR headset sales have not helped their cause either. However, at E3, Sony (NYSE:SNE) made a big push on VR. On the other hand, one of Sony's main rivals, Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), at its Xbox One X launch, snubbed VR. The likes of Facebook-owned Oculus avoided the show while HTC, the maker of Vive headsets, settled for a low-key event.

The lack of a strong show by major VR players at E3 2017 could be a hint that the VR hype has not lived up to the early buzz it received and could be heading towards a dead end. But that's not the case if you go by recent reports from some research firms. In spite of a tepid response to VR till now, some research firms are extremely optimistic about the long-term prospects of VR. IDC predicts that VR headsets will grow at a very strong pace, with a CAGR of 48.7% through 2021. AR and VR headsets collectively are expected to increase from "under 10 million units in 2016 to just shy of 100 million units in 2021, with a 5-year CAGR of 57.7%." Another firm, CCS Insight expects "sales of dedicated VR headsets to grow to 22 million units by 2021 - an 800 percent increase over 2017. Market to be worth $7.7 billion by 2021." PWC's study finds that Chinas demand for VR headsets will reach 85.9 million by 2021, overtaking the United States' demand for 68 million units. All these reports raise the expectations from this industry, which is still in an early stage and yet to become mainstream.

Sony's VR push at E3 2017

At the E3 presentation, Sony announced diverse new VR game titles targeting all sorts of users. The horror thriller Inpatient, shooter game Bravo Team and lighter side game Starchild were among the few titles which were revealed. Popular game title Skyrim also is coming to the PSVR. This sort of focus on VR content suggests the company is more serious about VR than other platforms like Vita portable or Move motion controllers.

The focus could be justified in the sense that with only two full quarters of sales, it has managed to sell over a million VR headsets till date. In the first quarter of 2017, Sony sold more than three times the number of tethered VR headsets sold by its more powerful counterparts like Facebook's (NASDAQ:FB) Oculus and HTC's Vive. Sony, having shipped 429,000 PlayStation VR headsets in the first quarter, is second on IDC's list after Samsung, which shipped over 489,000 VR units. Samsung has sold the most number of VR headsets but those are screenless viewers. Sony is the market leader in tethered VR headset market. Further, Sony has stated it has been struggling to keep up with the demand. If this is the case then Q3 and Q4 numbers could be much stronger. IDC expects Sony to remain the market leader for some time at least in the VR gaming market.

IHS' head of games research, director Piers Harding-Rolls, has spoken highly of Sony's VR strategy and thinks that PS VR could also be a runaway success like the PS4. Commenting on the company's VR strategy, he states "Microsofts reticence to embark on a console based VR strategy until at least 2018 means that Sony has an opportunity to build a comprehensive VR lead during the rest of 2017. While the VR market is still embryonic, Sonys VR strategy offers it a key differentiator beyond the multi-platform timed exclusive games which represent the traditional battleground between Microsoft and Sony. Sony is bringing its first-party studios to bear here, with a number of titles coming to the platform in 2017." IHS projects the PS4 installed base would hit 69 million units worldwide by the end of 2017. This is a huge target user base for the company's VR strategy. Even a 5% conversion of its projected PS4 user base will mean sales of more than 3 million VR headsets. This would, on an average, bring in $1.2 billion revenue for the company.

The advantage Sony has here is that its VR opportunity doesn't end with just VR headset sales. It controls its complete VR ecosystem including headset, game console, and content. So, as VR becomes mainstream it has multiple avenues for generating revenue from the VR opportunity. With Microsoft not coming up with any specific console based VR offering till late 2018, Sony has the edge to create a strong VR ecosystem base and then work on it to take it forward. The company is in pole position to build a massive lead over its main rival Microsoft in the VR space as it has done in gaming console space with PS4. If analyst projections were to hold true and Sony maintains its market dominance in VR headsets, it could be one of the best ways to play the VR opportunity. The larger PS4 user base and expanding support of AAA games for VR make Sony a strong contender to succeed in the growing VR market.

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I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it (other than from Seeking Alpha). I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article.

Additional disclosure: This article was written by Sreekanth Anasa, an equity analyst at Amigobulls. Neither Amigobulls, nor any members of its staff hold positions in any of the stocks discussed in this post. The author may not be a certified/registered investment advisor, and the opinions expressed should not be treated as investment advice. Buying and selling of securities carries the risk of monetary losses. Readers/Viewers are advised to carry out their own due diligence and consult their investment advisors before making any investment decisions. Neither Amigobulls, nor the author have any business relationship with any of the companies covered in this post.

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Sony Could Be The Best Virtual Reality Growth Play - Seeking Alpha

Alex Woods blood and needle phobia went from being a source of anxiety to life-threatening after he contracted pre-diabetes in college.

With skyrocketing blood sugar and hypoglycemia levels, Wood was forced to confront his bloodcurdling phobia, sitting through what he describes as constant blood tests.

[Blood and needles] are definitely something that I find extremely uncomfortable. Its exacerbated by when I had really serious problems with my blood sugar and hypoglycemia levels as a university student. They used to say look around the corner, look whos here and Id turn around and theyd jab the needle in quickly. They tried every trick possible to try and get me through it, Wood says.

For those afraid of blood and needles, fainting, dizziness and avoiding doctor appointments are all too common. Wood says that while the blood tests saved his life, helping him beat his pre-diabetes, they also exacerbated his phobia.

As a London-based tech journalist, Wood was drawn to virtual reality as a quick and easy means to overcome his phobia. Like exposure therapy, virtual reality therapy means gradually exposing a patient to what they fear.

But instead of having to confront your fears face-to-face, you can do it with just a psychologist and a VR headset.

In Woods virtual reality therapy session he watched 360-degree videos of scenarios that would normally induce anxiety. The psychologist taught him relaxation techniques to deal with his phobia and measured his pulse and heart rate. Increasing with intensity with each session, the videos first showed Wood sitting in a doctors waiting room something that he finds extremely stressful. Later he was shown videos of himself getting injections and blood tests.

Before virtual reality therapy, Wood couldnt stand watching gory horror films and hospital dramas. But after just one session he describes the therapy as game-changing, making an astounding difference to his phobia.

Blood and needle phobias arent the only phobia capable of being treated by virtual reality. The possibilities are endless, with VR treatments ranging from fears of flying to medical and animal phobias and even treating fears of cotton balls and garden gnomes. Currently, in Australia, about one in 10 people have a phobia. In the United States, around 23 million people have a phobia roughly the size of Australias population.

A phobia differs from a regular fear as it encompasses a change in behavior, including avoiding the phobic situation, says Brenda Wiederhold, a psychologist at the Virtual Reality Medical Center in California. Virtual reality in recent years has become an increasingly popular alternative to hypnosis and traditional therapy. Wiederhold says that in her clinic VR therapy has a 92 percent success rate and on average patients take 10 sessions to cure their fears.

Wiederhold emphasizes that these phobias can be extremely debilitating for patients, intruding upon the normalcy of their everyday lives. This includes costing them jobs and sometimes even forcing them to move home.

Instead of having to confront your fears face-to-face, you can do it with just a psychologist and a VR headset.

Virtual reality therapy has slowly but surely made its way to Australian shores. Currently, Sydney Phobia Clinic is the only clinic in Australia offering virtual reality therapy. This city-based clinic is where Kevin McAuley conquered his needle phobia.

Like Wood, the 32-year-old entrepreneur had suffered an intense fear of needles from a young age, but with a vague idea of how his fear had come about. Through therapy sessions and using virtual reality, McAuley is now able to get injections and blood tests, something that he had once avoided at all costs.

Before therapy, even people talking about injections or blood tests, I would literally have to say stop. Anytime I would go to the doctor and get an injection Id faint. I would feel sick, dizzy and hot and then next thing Id be lying on the floor and people would be waking me up, McAuley says.

McAuleys phobia came to a head when he started a new job and one of his first clients was Red Cross Blood Donations a nightmarish situation for someone with a needle phobia.

As soon as they said it I just knew I couldnt handle it. My mind ran away with itself and just the thought of it, I ended up fainting on the first day of the job, McAuley says.

Needle and blood phobias have this element that other phobias dont have, where you faint, like a fight-or-flight response. All the blood is leaving your head so that you can run away but were not on African plains, theres not a lion and your body recalibrates, he says.

One benefit of VR is that it enables patients to practice the relaxation techniques theyve learned in therapy before facing a real-world phobic scenario. In real-life exposure therapy, McAuley and Wood may have canceled dozens of doctors appointments due to intense fear. But with virtual reality, they were able to gain confidence through practicing with a psychologist and a VR headset.

And with the advent of VR, psychologists are curing phobias that were previously impossible to treat with exposure therapy. This is because, as Wiederhold explains, some phobic situations are difficult for psychologists to recreate, such as a fear of heights, storms, or flying. But even so, a hefty price tag stands in the way of VR therapy becoming common use for medical professionals and consumers.

Currently, researchers around the country are working hard to reverse the high expenses of VR technology. One researcher at the University of New South Wales Jill Newby is developing technology to make VR more affordable, at the cost of just a $15 headset.

One of the things Im working on is using virtual reality but in a really cheap, accessible way. I have taken 360 degree photos, where I can go into a free app on my phone and view the photo using a virtual headset. This headset only costs $15, so its really cheap. Anyone could use this in their own homes to help them overcome their fears, Newby says.

And in the end, helping people with life-threatening phobias overcome their fears is what makes the job worthwhile for psychologists like Newby and Wiederhold.

I get postcards from people who are going on a flight, or going to a graduation they didnt think they could attend. One gentleman had a fear of driving around cliffs and he went on a holiday in Italy with his wife after he did the treatment. Its very rewarding to have peoples lives changed by these things, Wiederhold says.

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VR is good for something other than video games and porn - New York Post

Rve execs take product development into virtual reality Minneapolis / St. Paul Business Journal ... from left, Kristin Pardue, Thong Nguyen and Brad von Bank. Provided by Roomera. A startup launched by the consulting firm's leaders is betting that the stores, bank branches and hotel rooms of the future will first be seen through a virtual reality ... and more »

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Rve execs take product development into virtual reality - Minneapolis / St. Paul Business Journal

Organizations are increasingly clustering their skills and capabilities into security operations centers (SOCs). An SOC is a focused facility where security specialists monitor, assess and defend against computer security issues. Introducing virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) technology into this environment can enhance the teams performance.

An organization wishing to invest in an SOC typically has two options to accomplish this goal:

But with a global skills gap translating to an estimated 1.8 million unfilled cybersecurity positions by 2022, it is critical to find better ways to detect and identify threats and vulnerabilities. Reducing complexity, too, will allow an organizations security staff to be as effective as possible. SOCs help organizations, chief information security officers (CISOs) and their staffs to successfully analyze, defend and complete their cybersecurity missions. In their current model, however, these security facilities are costly, and difficult to set up and maintain.

SOCs need for a central geographic site presents a number of technical, logistical and operational challenges. The traditional SOC model also calls for substantial investments in hardware, physical footprint, visual isolation and technical configuration, among other things. For example, SOCs need numerous digital displays and sophisticated servers to facilitate the visualization of security monitoring and the gathering of data via security information and event management (SIEM) software.

VR and AR technologies can help solve some of the problems todays SOCs face, enabling organizations to rapidly mobilize and scale their centers without excessive monetary and resource investment.

Using VR as a platform for security staff allows them to take their SOC anywhere, untethering them from the fixed physical infrastructure and geographic location of a traditional center. Taking action from the virtual world by sending serverside requests from the VR user interface to limit services, run scans and develop systemwide alerts creates an end-to-end story for users where monitoring and control exist in the same virtual space.

In a VR environment, the frontline SOC level-one security analyst role can be performed with the appropriately scoped visual cues, without requiring a seasoned security professionals depth of knowledge. This allows organizations to adequately staff their SOCs in the face of significant employment competition and high global demand for cybersecurity roles. The addition of services, such as Watson for Cyber Security, further enhances this capability.

Undoubtedly, VR represents a paradigm shift in how monitoring solutions are designed, created and employed. VR has extraordinary benefits to an organizations SOC: It can help reduce costs associated with maintaining the SOC, enable the monitoring of more varied sources and facilitate the analysis of more endpoints. Additionally, the virtual environment can raise internal awareness among the day-to-day requirements of SOC operators, helping them to identify areas of investment for the ongoing maintenance of the defenders ecosystem.

With its visual impact, the VR experience offers a unique medium through which business-level stakeholders can be kept abreast of their organizations security ecosystem and posture, improving both their understanding and their ability to ask questions.

With the addition of augmented intelligence and interaction in the form of technologies like threat intelligence, the SOC operator can issue voice commands to interrogate specific network data without needing to exit their virtual environment. This immersive VR space enables security professionals to maximize their time spent observing network activity and mitigating potential threats, in turn providing greater context and consumable intelligence for the C-suite.

Visualization is central to understanding security ecosystem data and organizational key performance indicators, as well as to building internal awareness of an organizations security status in a top-down, consumable way.

An organization cannot react to a cyberthreat that is not manifested in the data nor one that is hidden in even more data or else is delayed. The Ponemon Institutes malware report suggested that the greatest barrier to remediating advanced threat attacks is a lack of visibility of threat activity across the enterprise.

Security analysts are drowning in data, and it is difficult for them to interpret this information when receiving so many security alerts many of them red on a daily basis. More dashboards and more displays are not the answer. But a VR solution can help effectively identify potential threats and vulnerabilities as they emerge for oversight by the blue (defensive) team.

Our cybersecurity team at IBM Ireland has recently developed a prototype VR solution integrating with the IBM QRadar SIEM product. We built this prototype with the Unity Technologies framework, a cross-platform game engine that can be used to create highly interactive three-dimensional spaces. In our implementation, the Unity framework was combined with the IBM QRadar SIEM application program interfaces (APIs) to transform the JavaScript Object Notation data feed from the application into the form of a 3-D galaxy inside a VR-capable device (Oculus Rift, for example).

This VR-integrated IBM QRadar app immerses the security professional (blue operator) in a virtual 3-D space featuring planets, stars, nebulae, comets and manmade structures. Each spatial visual element represents the various nodes of the operators IT ecosystem from the SIEM solution, including individual IPs, databases, public customer-facing endpoints, or any other facet of the network or service they may wish to monitor. Threats and warnings appear as solar flares, supernova and other visual cues, clearly alerting the observer to any potentially troublesome cybersecurity activity inside their infrastructure scope.

Through our experience in gamification for security education and cyber skill development, we observed the enormous value in using visual metaphors to explain complex issues. Based on this experience, we adopted a visual metaphor approach in our VR prototype.

The VR experience has the potential to further evolve into the AR space, where digital contexts and layers can be presented on top of the real-world SOC itself.

With AR, any operator at any level can superimpose views on the fly to augment the data presented, improving forecasting, analysis and decision-making. AR is also a prevalent emerging technology with significant advantages over the VR prototype we built. In the case of the SOC, AR could enable a personalized and customizable second virtual screen (or view) for each operator.

While the main drawback of a VR-powered SOC is that it pulls the security professional out of the familiar physical world and into a virtual environment, an AR solution allows the SOC operator to be in two worlds at once.

A well-thought-out, configured and deployed VR SIEM integration toolkit will become an asset for organizations creating or maintaining future SOCs. Although the prototype described above is a virtual solution, enterprise security products will, in time, integrate effectively with a complementary AR utility to facilitate greater engagement, interaction and success inside SOCs.

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The Emergence of Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality in the Security Operations Center - Security Intelligence (blog)