Fear of open spaces

Here's my contribution to the excellent Idea a Day site:

Develop a Virtual Reality environment for agoraphobics. As part of their therapy, patients can put on a VR helmet and explore open spaces. Whenever they feel uncomfortable, they can either 'retreat' to a safe, enclosed space with the push of a button, or 'resize' the area to a more acceptable space. Thus, the agoraphobic can gradually adjust to larger and larger spaces.

Once the patient is cured, an army of DoomTM cacodemons and spider-demons is released in the VR world, just to check for any other phobias, such as arachnophobia, the patient may have.

OK, so I didn't put in the last bit.

Posted by cronopio at 11:28 AM, December 03, 2003