VR Therapy for Dementia - Hope It Gets a Social Add-On

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VR Therapy for Dementia - Hope It Gets a Social Add-On

Easily among the most powerful use of cases of VR I've seen:

The project began when Tribemix Managing Director, Alex Smale, wanted to help his elderly neighbours to get outside after becoming isolated due to disability, “Our nearby residents, Stan and Dulcie, are 99 and 94 years old respectively. Over the past two years, we watched them go from active people walking into town to do their shopping, to losing their confidence and never leaving the house. When we began developing in VR for our commercial clients early this year, I thought ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we could take Stan and Dulcie to the beach?’. So I created a virtual reality experience to do just that. This led to a conversation with a friend at Quantum Care. They were fortunately very forward thinking, and understood what we were trying to do. The results have been amazing and it’s the most rewarding thing I’ve ever been fortunate enough to do.”

Next step, seems to me, is to add a social VR component, ala Second Life/Sansar/High Fidelity/etc. To wit:

While many disabled people use Second Life, it also has a relatively large, general active userbase of 600,000 or so, making it possible for them to connect with others from many places and backgrounds, giving them a robust online community not defined by disability, but by shared interests beyond it. (This came out in my discussion with Barbi, who mentioned that Fran loves to attend live jazz performances in Second Life.) I can't think of an alternative platform which is superior in all these things at the same time. And here's the true irony: Because Second Life is pretty good as a social game and a content creation tool, it's great as a platform for the disabled. Perhaps greater by far than anything else on the market.

Via Robert Scoble.

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