A New Way for Therapists to Get Inside Heads: Virtual Reality<br />Dr. Jewell is among a handful of psychologists testing a new service from a Silicon Valley start-up called Limbix<br />that offers exposure therapy through Daydream View, the Google headset that works in tandem with a smartphone.<br />“We feel pretty confident that exposure therapy using V. R.<br />can supplement what a patient’s imagination alone can do,” said Skip Rizzo, a clinical psychologist<br />at the University of Southern California who has explored such technology over the past 20 years.<br />Barbara Rothbaum helped pioneer the practice at the Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta,<br />and her work spawned a company called Virtually Better, which has long offered virtual reality exposure therapy tools to some doctors and hospitals through an older breed of headset.<br />So Dr. Jewell, a psychologist in Colorado, treated the patient through a technique called exposure<br />therapy, providing emotional guidance as they revisited the intersection together.
