The virtual reality experience, created in an experiment by researchers at the University of Barcelona, could help people with death phobias. For the study, Professor Mel Slater and his colleagues recruited 32 volunteers to wear Oculus headsets and black suits. In addition, many movement trackers and vibrators were attached to their ankles and wrists. With their help, the correspondence of the position of the virtual bodies of the subjects to the movements of their real bodies was ensured. The vibrators were triggered every time a virtual ball hit the wrist or ankle. All of this helped trick the volunteers' brains into thinking that the virtual body was their own, like the rubber-arm illusion effect.
After the subject's brain was deceived, the inertia of visual perception changed, giving the participants the feeling that they were looking down at their bodies. At this time, the researchers dropped a virtual ball from above onto the virtual image of the volunteers, activating the corresponding vibrators on the bodies of only half of them.
In the questionnaires completed after the experiment, those who felt vibration indicated that they continued to feel connected to their bodies. However, those who did not vibrate felt their detachment from the body and said that after that their fear of death decreased. Scientists are going to conduct further experiments to determine if it really helps people with pathological fear of death.
The research results were published in PLoS One. In particular, it noted the following: “Our idea was that if we manage to put people in a situation illustrating the possibility of finding their consciousness outside their own body, then this can become an implicit evidence (not necessarily an unmistakable belief) that existence outside the body it is possible that in turn reduces the fear of death."