Download the FREE PHOBOS Tech Demo from Oculus Share: this demo can be used without a VR headset and is also compatible with the Oculus Rift DK1. DK2 demo coming soon. 

Phobos is the ancient Greek God of Fear. In Psychology, the word phobia derives from phobos (fear)

Everyone is afraid of something, even if just a little.

Now think about the thing you fear the most and make the imaginary effort to dial up the feeling a hundred times to the point where the mere presence of that thing or situation incapacitates your mind, body and soul.

Are you afraid of heights? Imagine if you couldn't even climb a 6ft (2m) tall ladder or walk down a staircase.

Afraid of confined spaces? Some people have panic attacks while staying inside windowless room.

What if you couldn't leave your house because you are afraid of open spaces?

This is how millions of people around the world feel. To many of them, something as simple as going out for groceries feels like walking through a minefield within a warzone. And the worst part; they can't go to therapy because the idea of being faced with their greatest fear prevents them from taking the step.

Our brain has been hardwired by evolutionary processes to detect and manage threats. The imminence of one triggers what´s called the “fight or flight response”.
People who suffer phobias live in a constant state of alertness, scanning (conscious and unconsciously) their surroundings for the presence of these “threats”.  The presence or even the “suggestion” that the phobic element may be nearby triggers exaggerated physiological, emotional and cognitive responses to prepare the individual for self preservation.

Sometimes the fear is so great that the person gets paralyzed and this is where the situation becomes problematic as the person cannot put distance between him/her and the stressor and falls down a downward spiral.

This is where we come in.

Studies have shown that virtual reality therapy can be as effective -or more- as in vivo exposure (being exposed to real heights, for instance).

Phobos is a 3D platform for Virtual Reality based treatments and research; initially, for conditions such as:

• Acrophobia (fear of heights): affects 10% of women/men
• Arachnophobia, Ornithophobia and other creature related phobias
  
• Aerophobia (fear of flying)
  
• Claustrophobia
• Agoraphobia and some forms of chronic and acute  anxiety symptoms during certain situations: crowded/open spaces, public transportation.

 The virtual environments are designed to support standard CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) treatment protocols.

In the future, it is our intention to add environments for fear of speaking in public (glossophobia), fear of driving and, among others, an experimental scenario for multiple applications called "The Sim" which we will tell you more about during the campaign.

Why is VR Relevant for Therapeutic Applications?

Recent research has identified the areas of the brain that regulate our sense of presence. These studies concluded that a Virtual Reality environment activates these brain areas in the same way that they activate in similar real life situations*.

Virtual reality therapy also takes advantage of basic interactions in emotional processing to re-associate the memory of a feared experience with feelings of safety rather than fear.

This is done through a recreation of the memory and the immersion of the patient in an interactive process during which his/her memory of the experience is decoupled from fear and linked with feelings of safety and control.

Virtual Reality treatments are effective for 4 reasons:

- The person doesn't have to be exposed to the real stressor (which is usually a barrier to enter treatment)

- Costs are an order of magnitude lower (think in vivo exposure for fear of flying)

- The person doesn't have to imagine the situation

- The environment and conditions can be structured and tailored to each person

Up to this day, VR Exposure Therapy has been approached by not too many professionals; mainly because of prohibitive costs and because the technology wasn't ready for prime time.

What's different now, is that with the Oculus Rift(tm) Virtual Reality Headset and other headsets coming to market, an unprecedented level of immersion can be achieved at a fraction of the cost of previous VR gear.

Why we think PHOBOS has the potential to become researchers' tool of choice

Technology costs are not the only barrier for Virtual Reality to become adopted widely in the academia or by research teams.

We've asked students and researchers  and the  second main reason why they think that VR is not used it's because any type of environment that they need to create for their experiments has to be created from scratch.

Labs and students alike suffer from 3 constraints:

• Limited access to people with the know-how to create the virtual environments

• Limited timeframes to design and complete experiments

• Limited flexibility to do research

Limited access to people with the know-how to create the VR environments

If you are researching phobias and anxiety disorders, most likely you are not versed in coding, 3D asset creation, sound, user interface,control method implementation and the list goes on.

Instead of asking a 3D artist to invest time into creating virtual environments for you, we intend to provide you with a solution so you can skip right to what matters.

Limited Timeframes

Even if you had an affordable VR headset in your hands, you would still be empty handed. Developing VR software is time consuming and derails you from your main goal, doing research.

If you were to target a heterogeneous population -say people with small animal phobias- to investigate a single variable -increase in physiological response to the phobic stimulus- you would have to create the different creatures for each specific phobia, animate them and script their behaviors.

Once PHOBOS is finished, it will give you a framework so you can focus on the experiment instead of spending time creating the conditions for it or asking the Computer Science Departments or IT for borrowed resources to help with your experiment.

Our goal is that by using PHOBOS you will decrease the overall length of the experiment design phase and allow you to allot a higher percentage of time to actual research.

Limited flexibility

Affordable VR hardware and PHOBOS put VR within the reach of college and graduate students to do some of their research without having to schedule "VR Lab time" or find the  people to assist them with the creation of environments. Small groups will be able to use almost any space to do research without being left with no other option than to work in one centralized space.

The design phase can become de-centralized so the environments' conditions and variables can be defined, tested and rehearsed before moving onto the Lab to work with the subjects where supervision should be needed.

Who we are

PsyTech LLC is a software and Virtual Reality startup that develops anxiety and phobia management tools for individuals, professionals and organizations.

We are collaborating with universities, research facilities,  mental health professionals and individuals around the world to develop the most versatile research and treatment tool to date.  

We think that we are onto something that could help thousands of people around the world. Your support will enable us to bring this vision to (real) reality. 

Please share this campaign with those who could be interested in or could benefit from Virtual Reality based treatments.

FAQ

What is Phobos?

Phobos is a platform to research, test and treat common phobias and some anxiety disorders.

What do I need to get started?

You'll need the Oculus Rift(tm) Virtual Reality Headset and a mid-range PC or Mac. We intend to make system requirements as low as possible considering  that independent professionals usually don't sport high-end gaming computers in their offices.

If you want to take full advantage of Phobos, we will be incorporating full body tracking technology via Sixense STEM.

Can I treat myself with PHOBOS?

Surgeons use scalpels to save lives. In the hands of a sociopath, scalpels could be a weapon. For a (more ore less) normal person like you or I, it could be a tool we use to eat or pop a bottle of beer, but you won't know how to use it to perform surgery.

Think of PHOBOS as the scalpel. 

The software does not differ from any other VR experience in the sense that it may elicit strong emotions and reactions. The difference from other VR experiences is that PHOBOS will be built with functionality to provide a graded exposure to stimuli and a user interface tailored to enable professionals and researchers to do their jobs.

The software will not perform any kind of virtual treatment  to attempt to "cure" you.

If you are not the "target population" but you are a VR explorer, as Boll7708 put it on reddit, your input before we finish the software is also valuable.

Why can't we (yet) promise that PHOBOS will perform treatment by itself?

The main reason behind this is legal. There is a patent  (US 6425764
B1) that describes a method of treating a psychological, psychiatric or medical
condition in interactive VR environments**.

This patent was granted in 1997 and it will expire in 2017.
Until then, we will be unable to explore “self-treatment” functionality in
PHOBOS. Still this patent does not prevent us from doing in house research.

I am a clinician, do I need to learn special treatment protocols to use Phobos?

No, Phobos is intended to be compatible with current Cognitive-Behavioral treatment protocols.

Phobos can also be used in conjunction with Biofeedback Techniques and technology such as Physiological Response tracking through a heart rate monitor or Galvanic Skin Response Sensors.

Why Indiegogo?

As you may know, software development isn't cheap and this project does not just require software licensing fees, 3D asset creation, animation, behavior/artificial intelligence scripting and sound production. Also proper and specific hardware is required to benchmark and test Phobos; such as Galvanic Skin Response sensors, Heartrate sensors, an IPD (inter-pupilary distance) measuring tool,  motion tracking devices -Sixense STEM(tm)-, etc.

That is why this campaign will allow us to create the platform we envision.

Through stretch goals, we plan to incorporate networking capabilities to enable, in the future, the possibility of remote treatments (once proper research is conducted and ethical considerations are weighed in).

It is our goal that once VR technology becomes commonplace (and the Oculus Rift may be the enabler and spearhead massification), PHOBOS could be in as many clinicians' offices, labs and organisations as possible.

Will I need a professional to help me set up the software or is it simple to install

Absolutely not. Out idea is for PHOBOS to be basically plug and play. It will work right off the bat with a keyboard, gamepad and even if you want to use an omnidirectional treadmill like the Virtuix Omni or Cyberith Virtualizer, they will also be supported without any special tweaking of your computer. Same goes for motion control hardware.

Will you charge for tech support if I have problems with the program?

Let's put it this way: if you have a problem, we have a problem. So no, no charging. Any issues you encounter are issues that we need to solve across the board so tech support for us is a part of the normal development process. Actually, we will encourage you to send us bug reports, difficulties using PHOBOS or any type of feedback that you deem pertinent. 

Will there be an annual licensing fee for end users or will it be perpetual?  

There will be no recurring No annual licensing for neither the development versions nor the final release and it's successive updates up until the day we decide to launch PHOBOS 2.0.

Will there be a limit to the number of computers I can install the program?

We are evaluating different types of licensing options depending on the number of installations and other factors (i.e: independent professional, 5 installs, unlimited installs, student, etc.). 

Are you legit?

Yes, we take what we do very seriously. We have been featured in the documentary "The Dawn of Virtual Reality", we were recently featured in an article of Scientific American Magazine and in the week of October 5th we won the Distinguished Paper Award for our work on "“Safe Navigation of Pedestrians in Social Groups in a Virtual Urban Environment” at the Cyberworlds 2014 conference in Spain.

We are also focused on staying on top of every new development in VR reason why we attended Oculus Connect, the first ever event organized by Oculus last September in Hollywood, CA.

Features

Combination of closed and open 3D environments. The environments elicit emotions (ie: fear, anxiety, comfort, discomfort) in order to increase Cognitive Presence.

AI Crowd simulation/interaction and motion planning based on Psychological findings. NPC (non playing characters for scenarios related to social phobias) behaviors are based on psychological findings in group and crowd dynamics. The researcher and creator of the proprietary code is PhD candidate Francis Rojas.

3D Positional Sound.

Support for Gamepad and keyboard+mouse as well as other motion control technologies (TBA)

Voice input via microphone to communicate with subject using HMD/Headphones.

Native Support for Oculus Rift(tm) Virtual Reality Headset

* (Clemente M, Rey B, Rodriguez-Pujadas A, Breton-Lopez J, Barros-Loscertales A, Baños RM, Botella C, Alcañiz M, Avila C). A Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Assessment of Small Animals’ Phobia Using Virtual Reality as a Stimulus
URL: http://games.jmir.org/2014/1/e6/

** Patent US 6425764 B1: https://www.google.com/patents/US6425764?dq=virtual+reality&hl=en&sa=X&ei=dQdCVMzdDsPRmAWcl4GwCg&sqi=2&pjf=1&ved=0CE4Q6AEwBw