Of course, the big news today (unless you are living under a rock or in a cave somewhere) is that No Man’s Sky, a fantasy science-fiction game set in an infinite, procedurally-generated universe, has issued a major update that, for the first time, supports players in VR headsets (Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and Valve Index). It’s all gamers are talking about today on places like the No Man’s Sky subReddit.
Now, I must confess that I’m really not that much of a gamer, although I did manage to get to level 20 in Lord of the Rings Online (mainly because I was a such a Tolkien fan). But the lure of exploring an infinite, seamless universe in VR was just too much. So I bit the bullet and bought the game (it is on sale on Steam for 50% off until August 21st).
Wish me luck! I am off to milk some aliens and explore new worlds…
Today, the largest study to date at Cedars Sinai Hospital of the impact of virtual reality on pain relief was published in the open access scientific research journal PLOS ONE. This study provides the clearest evidence yet that in-hospital therapeutic VR could be an effective treatment for patients in pain.
Here’s a video narrated by Dr. Brennan Spiegel, the director of health research at Cedars Sinai and the lead author of today’s research paper, explaining how VR was used with patients:
Therapeutic virtual reality (VR) has emerged as an effective, drug-free tool for pain management, but there is a lack of randomized, controlled data evaluating its effectiveness in hospitalized patients. We sought to measure the impact of on-demand VR versus “health and wellness” television programming for pain in hospitalized patients.
Patients were split into two random groups. One group was treated with VR and the other (control) group viewed flat-screen relaxation television programming. The researchers concluded that the VR group reported significantly reduced pain when compared to those just watching TV. Not only that, the study found that virtual reality was the most effective for severe pain (i.e. pain that ranked 7 or higher on a scale of 1 to 10).
“There’s been decades of research testing VR in highly controlled environments — university laboratories, the psychology department and so on,” Dr. Brennan Spiegel, director of health services research at Cedars-Sinai and the study’s lead author, told MobiHealthNews. “This study is really letting VR free and seeing what happens. What I mean by that is it’s a pragmatic study where we didn’t want to control every single element of the study, but literally just see [what would happen] if we were to give it to a broad range of people in the hospital with pain; how would it do compared to a control condition already available in the hospital?”
This strength — alongside the substantial size of the patient population, variety of pain types included and direct comparison to an existing multimedia intervention — helps make the clearest case yet for VR’s clinical potential within the hospital, Spiegel continued, and paves the way for live deployments of the technology as part of inpatient care.
“We don’t need more science at this point to justify deploying VR in the hospital or creating virtualist consult services in the hospital. We’ve got enough evidence now, in my opinion, to begin using this in the inpatient environment,” he said.
Citation: Spiegel B, Fuller G, Lopez M, Dupuy T, Noah B, Howard A, et al. (2019) Virtual reality for management of pain in hospitalized patients: A randomized comparative effectiveness trial. PLoS ONE 14(8): e0219115. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0219115
Another day, another remote workteams VR application! This one is called, simply, Dream:
There’s precious little information about this one on their website, which I always find irritating when I am hunting for information about a software product. According to their Steam page, Dream features:
– Meet with up to 6 people in a Dream Team and collaborate with them in real time. Dream’s custom built engine and stack allow for extremely low latency collaboration while sending data 90 frames per second (as fast as we can from the hardware, with no interpolation needed). The quality and fidelity really makes Dream feel like being in a space with someone else.
– Utilize Dream’s Browser which is based on Chromium and deeply integrated with our platform and UI. We’ve made sure that every bit of Dream can be used entirely in VR, including a first in class VR keyboard that is capable of 30-40 WPM after a bit of getting used to.
– Federate external accounts like Google Drive and Dropbox to pull content from them directly into Dream. Bring in a PDF or Image, or bring up a video from your YouTube subscriptions or Plex account. The goal is to make bringing in the content you want to share easy and seamless.
Compared to what I’ve seen for other remote workteams VR platforms, there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot to recommend it, or set it apart from the competition. The avatars look uncanny/creepy, and what’s with the three-fingered hands?!??
