Slip on your headset and enter a world that you create, one where you choose your body, your personality, your environment. Maybe you choose a muscular, medium-build with a passionate, yet easy-going affect who lives in the city and works downtown.
This is virtual reality beyond filmmaking and gaming. And it’s just around the corner.
Oculus, Samsung, Microsoft, Google and certainly many others are pouring millions into virtual reality viewing devices and the accompanying software.
For now it’s for movies and games, but not for long.
Soon, we’ll be able to use the software and hardware in other applications, like mental health. How can virtual reality help your emotional and mental state?
Just as with visualization that professional athletes use regularly to improve performance, we non-Olympians can train our brains. Our brains don’t know the difference between “real life” and the visualization. Virtual reality will work the same way. When you put on the headset and fully immerse yourself into your world, just as when you’re completely engrossed in a movie, you suspend your disbelief and become part of the film. In the case of virtual reality, you become part of your movie.
Until the technology is at the ready for us lay people to pop on a headset at home, try a little visualization on for size. Envision yourself reacting more patiently with your boss, your colleague, your kids. See yourself eating the foods that are healthy for you and exercising in the way that’s best for you. Really get into the emotion of feeling vitality behind closed eyes…write your story; write it in your mind; write it on paper. Then act it out.
photo source: pixtawan/freedigitalphotos.net
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