Comparison of the Effect of Exposing Users for Height While Being Active Versus Passive in a Virtual Environment - A Pilot Study

Phobias have historically and evolutionary been vital for humans to escape quickly or fight in dangerous situations. The anxieties that phobias evoke have made people live longer. Evolutionarily, anxiety has been good, but fear and anxiety come in unjustified situations for the civilized population in the 21st century. Some people have an extra sensitive reaction system activated too often in irrelevant contexts. More than 10% of Sweden’s population has some phobia. However, only a few persons search for help to overcome their phobias, partly because they know they have to be exposed to their phobia to overcome it. An alternative exposure treatment is using virtual reality (VR). Recently, we have seen an intensified development of VR headsets such as HTC Vive and Oculus Quest. These headsets come with relatively high display resolution and great tracking of the hand controllers, which opens up opportunities to develop and evaluate more immersive interactive virtual environments that can be used, e.g., for exposure treatment. This paper presents two VR prototypes developed and evaluated using the new generation of VR technology. The two VR prototypes were then compared in a user study with 22 participants exposed to height while being active versus being passive. The main contribution of this paper is to elucidate knowledge about the experiment of comparing AE versus PE of heights.