Therapeutic Virtual Reality: Implementing the next frontier of technology into clinical practice

Rapid advances in virtual reality (VR) technologies have created the means to immerse people in safe, highly realistic, personally designed, therapeutic environments. In VR people can face their fears, overcome their anxieties, and re-train new response to their personal clinical triggers, all without ever leaving the clinicians office. Evidence for the efficacy of therapeutic VR in treatment of a range of mental illnesses is growing rapidly. A key challenge, however, will be the implementation of VR into clinical health care settings, as psychology and psychiatry have traditionally been slow to adopt new technologies into practice. This honours project will examine the barriers and potential facilitators of integration of VR into mental illness treatment services, with the ultimate aim of identifying effective pathways for implementation of therapeutic VR into psychological practice.