How would an external observer view your reality?
Viewer, player and designer: interactivity level
VRs allow various types of users from an interactivity viewpoint: viewers, who are passive receptors of information or stimuli delivered by the environment; players – they interact with the information being presented and with the environment; designers create the environments. Some VRs can offer the user a role, and grant him/her the ultimate power to create the next event.14 Not only is he/she enabled to observe a reality, but also to enter and experience it as reality.
How interactive are you with your environment?
Are you a viewer, a player or a designer in your life?
Applications of VR technologies
Coaching Applications of VR
I would also like to reflect on what we could achieve as coaching outcomes from using VR technologies in coaching. Technological developments in virtual realities offer many potentials and implications as this set of technologies continues to develop, becomes more affordable and less expensive. Leaving the financial side apart, is imaginable that VR technologies could bring some advantages, as most of us live now in what we could call hybrid environments that combine technological advances with the natural reality. Technological improvements in this area have already been integrated by coaching professionals in form of virtual coaching, as well as in form of specific applications.
Application of VR in other fields
Applications of VR have been found in many areas, inclusively in therapy. For example, professionals are using virtual reality as tool with patients that are afraid of heights. A Virtual Vietnam program is being used with combat veterans to help them overcome post-traumatic stress syndrome. Virtual reality techniques are proving useful with panicky public speakers and nervous golfers. The company Virtually Better, Inc.16 creates virtual reality tools for the treatment of various anxiety disorders. Other explorations regard the usage of VR with emotionally disturbed children or treating test anxiety in college students.
Exposure to VR has been used to treat people with social phobias, people who fear that they will act in a way that is humiliating or embarrassing and that others will judge them negatively. Although they recognise that this fear is irrational, they experience extreme discomfort and anxiety when in the feared situation and will seek to avoid the social encounter whenever possible. Fear of public speaking is a very common form of social phobia, with great social significance. People who fear speaking in public may find their career choices limited and avenues for promotion closed to them, resulting in considerable personal distress. In the context of exposure therapy, patients exposed to a feared stimulus report that their anxiety attenuates with the passage of time, a process known as habituation. The use of virtual environments to provide exposure in a controlled and inexpensive manner is a potentially useful application of this technology.
One possible use of VR has been showed by Frank Sever, who has patented an interesting VR device in 1997. His invention uses a program designed for perfecting mental visualization within the mind of a subject in order to effect a desired neurological and/or physiological change within the body of the subject, even in the substantial absence of any physical movement by the subject. The program is interspersed with audible, visual or combined audible/visual subliminal stimuli, designed to aid a subject in achieving the goal. An either real or metaphoric scenario can also be communicated to the subject, after inducing a state of meditation or hypnosis:
A subject desires to improve his technique at the high jump. Mental training is effected, by mounting a virtual reality apparatus on the subject. The apparatus is interfaced with a medium having a computer program imprinted thereon. The program is interspersed with subliminal stimuli. These subliminal stimuli are audible and/or visual, and are designed and spaced within the program to maximally aid in effecting the goal of improving the high jump technique of the subject. A first optional portion of the program is designed in time and content for perfecting, a state of meditation and/or hypnosis in the mind of the athlete by any of a multitude of wellknown prior art techniques. The technique is delivered to the athlete by plural sensory representation through the apparatus. After the desired altered mental state of the athlete is achieved, a second portion of the program is run. This portion of the program provides the athlete with a multisensory depiction of a dynamic scenario designed to merely augment or completely supplant the athlete’s ability to practice the high jump through mental visualization. The scenario depicts a substantially real particle world depiction of a/the athlete performing a high jump. The athlete interacts with the apparatus and program to perfect his jump. (…) Optionally, interaction can also be effected by a coach. Thus, the subliminal stimuli may also be effected by the coach. The forgoing process is repeated according to the prescribed regimen, until the athlete is able to achieve mental visualization sufficient for effective mental practice. In this manner the desired neurological and/or physiological changes normally incidental to physical practice can be achieved in the substantial absence of such physical practice.
Connection with the DARE Coaching Model
The Coaching Model DARE implies four steps: discover, analyze, review and ecologize. Just like natural environments, virtual ones allow exploration, analysis, review of the choice(s) taken and ecology. VRs facilitate active perception and exploration of the environment portrayed. The advantage of performing these processes in a VR is that it is a safe environment and living the desired state in the VR does not lead to the consequences that would exist in real life. Concerning off-line training and rehearsal, it has been suggested that that virtual environments may serve as a tool for rehearsing critical actions in a safe environment, in preparation for target performance in a less forgiving one.
VR technologies would allow generating a virtual reality which can be realistically or metaphorically representing the desired state. The virtual environment would encourage navigation through the entire virtual world, evaluation and calibration. The client would be able to analyze, validate, check the environment, the actors, the change that he desires in his life. The client will be able to live and experience virtually a situation and environment that he wants and projects into the future. VRs can allow us to experience consequences, than choose from knowledge.
Conclusions
This paper gives an indication of the potentials of virtual realities for coaching. On the one side, we can reflect about the way our brain reacts to VR and differentiates between virtual and actual realities. On the other side, we can learn from our interaction with this emerging set of technologies, and create VR environments and applications useful for coaching.
Through virtual realities technologies, we can feel and experience various worlds. Usually when we think of virtual reality, we think of immersive systems involving computer interface devices such as a head-mounted display (HMD), fiberoptic wired gloves, position tracking devices, and audio systems providing 3-D (bin-aural) sound.20 Immersive VR experiences are subjective. Although mainly based on the visual senses, many VRs have included various other senses to the experience: sensing wind etc.
Simulated perceptual experience can match a real perceptual experience. Although at the level of perception and analysis of the sensory information the brain manages to discern between actual and virtual realities, the response offered for both types of reality can be similar. This can open many possibilities for coaching.
Virtual Reality is starting to be used around the world in various fields, for example in psychological therapy. In the same way that usage of LEGO-pieces and constellations has been fruitful in the coaching process, VR environments can represent a useful tool. As the technology improves and becomes less expensive, VRs can offer many potentials and implications for coaching.
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