Immersion in virtual reality relieves pain
Immersion in virtual reality relieves pain After encouraging first results on burn victims, virtual and augmented realities are currently being tested on other pains. The more we think we are hurting, the more we suffer. This is precisely the interest of augmented reality, and perhaps even more, of virtual reality. Both techniques are significantly different. The first superimposes virtual elements to the real world, hence an augmented reality. Both have already proven effective. A few years ago, American scientists reduced the pain experienced by burn victims with virtual reality by 35 to 50%. As for augmented reality, Swedish and Slovenian rehabilitation specialists have recently shown that it can halve the pain associated with ghost members of amputees. At the University of Washington, Hunter Hoffman has long been interested in the benefits of virtual reality in the treatment of pain. At the end of the 1990s, his laboratory developed the virtual reality program SnowWorld, t