daysand special, desk
how her life is. And it's really nice. And it's like after seven minutes, I was like,
whoa, this is going to change everything. I went home and I was like, oh, how do we,
how do we do this? And so I found my partner, Peter, we started this company called Cora.
And as our first speaker today, it said that 2016 is the year to experience and that experiment.
And that's what we did. So we have a shop and we have a shared office space in the meat
packing district. And we're doing productions for FCK and a lot of B2B. We released the gear VR
game for $3 and Oculus Rift game this year. And we're doing, we just came out with a video with
Dung and we're doing art with famous people in New York and exhibiting in, in, in Beijing. And a lot
of crazy things are happening and it's really fun. But today I'm going to talk about psychiatry.
So in our experimentation with virtual reality, what we see is a couple of different things.
But one thing is that this slide is really important. So when you look at this medium,
it can do something different. It can actually make a memory in people's brain. So when they
experience something in virtual reality, they remember it as a memory, not as a, as a medium,
as a, as reading or some, so, so in virtual reality experience is up there with simulating
the activity 90%. And this, these percentages are a little off or a little weird. So don't
remember those. Just remember that this is a medium that can actually create memories.
I'm going to steal this TED talk.
It starts around the fire with a good story. Our clan leader is telling us about how he hunted
the wooly mammoth on the tundra that day. We hear his words and translate them into our own
internal truths. Same thing happens when we look at the cave paintings version of the story,
the book about the mammoth hunt, the play, the radio broadcast, the television show, or the movie.
All of these meetings require what we call suspension of disbelief because there's a
translation gap between the reality of the story and our consciousness interpreting the story into
our reality. I'm using the word consciousness as a feeling of reality that we get from our senses
experiencing the world around us. Virtual reality bridges that gap. Now you are on the tundra
hunting with the clan leader or you are the clan leader or maybe you're even the wooly mammoth.
So these are some of the things that we found the virtual reality. This new medium can really do.
And the way it links to psychiatry is that this is a controlled experience that you can design
that has a strong impact on the mind. And that's what I'm going to talk about. I'm going to go
through some of our projects that we have and some of the challenges that we see right now
in the field of psychiatry. I have to say I'm not an expert in psychiatry. I'm a virtual reality
explorer. So most of the things that are the foundation for these projects are, and I'm just
going to repeat smarter people who know more about psychiatry and psychology in these projects.
Some of the things that are happening right now is that this is a new area that's evolving
quite quickly since a lot of people, more people are getting a diagnosis. Also the fact that many
mental illnesses can be cured is something that I wasn't really aware of before, but that also
gives you an incentive to cure them because it also costs a lot of money for the state.
Since people with a mental illness, often if they're not cured or helped, then they will drop out
of the market, which means that it costs the Danish government quite a lot of money.
Another thing, this was the headline yesterday, it's about how pressured people who work with
psychology are in Denmark. It means that they basically have to diagnose children
without actually meeting the children. That's kind of the foundation right now.
This is one of our projects. Basically you have kids, we did this with the Rishosbetejdel,
the main city hospital in Denmark. So basically you have kids who are long-term sick for various
reasons. Sometimes they're in isolation and they're basically stuck to this bed and they don't do
anything. So we did field trips for them to the zoo and I'm not going to talk so much about this
project because this girl does it much better.
So he's probably just about ready to eat it.
I was actually a bit sceptical, but when I tried it, it was really fun. Much more fun than I had expected.
You get the papers on, but you're at a completely different place and you have to sit down and do something else.
And then the pain comes down in the back of my head.
I wouldn't have experienced this in the same way if I had just taken a historical case.
And then I get some experiences in my summer vacation.
So we're doing more hospital adventures, which leads me to the second case, the second project that we're working on.
So a smarter person than me told me that there's a huge issue with MR scanning for children.
Children between four to eight years, 50% of them when they need to go into an MR scanner, get fully sedated.
Sometimes they don't want to be sedated.
So the doctor kind of holds them down and puts the mask over their face.
It's not that nice.
And that's a problem because MR scanner is really not painful at all.
It's just a machine that says a lot of noises, but it's quite hard to lie still when you're a kid.
And you need to lie pretty still.
So what we're doing is we took an MR scanner and made it in 3D.
And then you're able to experience and practice your lying still skills before you go into the machine.
And we're considering making it into more of a game way or at least an experience.
So if we're able to make kids not needing to be sedated because it gives you a headache,
and if you do it a lot, it might impact your learning abilities, then that would be fantastic.
So let me just go to...
So then there's the area for dementia and elderly.
We have a pilot project with the Rødå Kommune, and also now we're spreading it out to other municipalities.
But basically what we're doing is to see if we can give experiences to people with dementia
and elderly who are immobile who can't go out.
So what we did is this woman called Binde.
This is one of the personal stories.
There's also a couple where you can just go to a beach.
So there's specialized content and then there's generic content.
But Binde, she don't remember that much.
The one thing that she does remember is her granddaughter Silke.
And they used to live really nearby from each other, and they used to go around this lake.
So what we did is we made a 360 video.
We went to Silke's house and we filmed her.
And she said, hey, grandmother, let's go around the lake.
And then we took them down to a bench at the playground where they used to go.
And then we moved them further down to feed the ducks.
And then at the end, they walked back home and Silke gives her a kiss on the cheek and says, thank you for a nice day.
And it's a 20-minute experience.
And we really hope that Binde is going to enjoy it when she tries it next week.
But this is the type of experience that you can do that can really help people with dementia and help people who are immobile.
So we also hope that it's not just entertainment for elderly, but it's also getting them to remember things,
which is what you really work with when you work with dementia.
Yeah.
So the last case that I'm just going to talk about is this area of anxiety, phobias and eating disorders that we're working on.
So just every 15 will be diagnosed with a mental illness during their lifetime.
The problem is quite big.
250,000 suffer from anxiety.
250,000 suffer from depression.
There's also quite a few who suffer from some kind of eating disorder.
So it's not a small problem in the Danish society.
The way you treat many of these things are through exposure therapy.
And it's not I'm not an expert on this thing, but this is a good example.
You start out if you're afraid of spiders, you start out thinking about a spider and you do breathing exercise and you relax with a psychologist.
And then you move up the ranks over the weeks.
And then at the end, you're able to let a spider crawl on your arm.
And it takes a long time.
And it's together with a shrink or a psychologist.
I think there's a lot of things like social anxiety that's quite hard to visualize.
So if you're afraid of going to the supermarket like this, then then showing this picture might scare you a little bit.
But it doesn't scare you as much as actually going to the supermarket.
And if you're afraid of flying, you know, I wouldn't show this picture.
But but then you can, you know, the extreme would be to take plane rides with your psychologist, which was would be quite expensive.
The alternative would be thinking about it or showing pictures from inside a plane.
So these things that virtual reality can do is it can transport you to a simulation of that situation that you're afraid of and expose you to the things that that that are there.
I'm just going to summarize a little bit some of the things that I think the virtual reality can bring to this this world.
So one is to bring adventures into lives that that don't in for some reason don't have a lot of adventures.
Another thing is to help patients understand and and and do the right things in terms of the procedures that they're they're in for some reason, like lying still in the MRI scanning.
I think dementia patients is a whole area.
There's a lot of things you can do, but I think increasing life quality and triggering memory is some of the main things.
The whole area of exposure therapy has a bunch of different applications.
But one thing is is taking you to the situations that you're afraid of.
That's hard to visualize in in the room with the shrink.
Another thing is treating things that are not being treated right now.
So if you're afraid of spiders, the state won't fund, you know, a psychologist to help you go through this treatment because you're able to live life pretty well, even though you're afraid of spiders.
But there's a lot of these kind of semi acute things that you would be able to treat if you could do treatment in VR.
And then there's after you're cured or you're helped with your mental disease, you're able to go through an avoid fallback VR program that could really maybe help optimize the whole setup.
And then the whole thing is if you can do parts of it as self training, there's a huge cost saving on on this area.
So this is some of the things that you can take.
But but I just want to say that the big thing that we're looking at, this is all pretty cool.
But the big thing is, is this.
So in the developing world, most countries don't have a policy around mental diseases.
You have a W.A. Yeah, World Health Organization saying that this is one of the main causes for ill health and disability globally.
You have a lot of people not getting any sort of treatment.
And I think this is actually where I think if we're able to in this little spoiled Danish welfare society to develop some really cool things,
then if we could take those cool things and give it to a lot of people that are not getting any treatment, I think that would be really impactful.
So that's all I had today. Thank you very much.
Perfect. Thank you.
Just a quick question.
In your opinion, you are, like you said, a VR explorer.
In your opinion, in this kind of field, what is what can this new VR technology?
Where is the most breakthrough?
Like we saw 3D audio, eye tracking, stuff like that.
Where can we use this the most?
Where's the breakthrough?
I think the eye tracking thing, making things without wires, I think it's all about getting the cell phones be able to do everything.
I think I'm very excited about the Google Daydream where, you know, top of the line Android phones will be able to drive a good VR experience.
And I think if you're able to add that with with some of the optimizations from eye tracking, I think that's super cool.
I'm not going to be down on sound.
I think that's super cool.
But I think if you're able to optimize the cell phones, suddenly you're going to see that in a couple of years, everybody has a pretty good VR experience in their pocket.
And then you have mass market and our games will sell really well.
All right. Thank you.
Thank you to Simon.
