|
 Patterson, an engineering student at the University of Pittsburgh,
studied a software used on the prototype of the head-mounted display
that creates virtual settings, such as a Middle Eastern-themed city
or desert road, that soldiers would otherwise avoid, as a way to
help them recover from their PTSD.
She hopes doctors and therapists around the country will better
understand how the technology can be helpful to their own patients.
Patterson is one of a handful of researchers who have used the
display for experimental treatments and studies that range from
treating glaucoma patients to easing pain in burn victims.
While there are no estimates of the potential size of the market for
virtual reality applications in the health care field, analysts say
that success in this area would likely spur even broader adoption in
a range of industries, such as education, fashion, media and
telecommunications.
The potential size of those markets is quite large, possibly
surpassing $5 billion over the next three years, according to some
estimates, especially as the gadget's uses extend far beyond gaming.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said he views virtual reality as
the next major computing platform, and he is working hard to ensure
that it is. While Oculus headsets will not be available to consumers
until 2016, the company has made prototypes of the system available
to developers since 2013, with the expectation that an array of
applications will be available to those buying headsets after the
formal launch.
The company plans to hold a news event Thursday in San Francisco but
has not specified what it will announce. It declined to comment for
this story.
Virtual reality is not new to medicine or therapy, but its
affordability is. Doctors and researchers often shell out $30,000 to
more than $300,000 for medical headsets and simulators while the
Oculus is available to developers for $350 to $400.
The more expensive medical virtual reality sets will still be needed
for certain studies, doctors and researchers said, because of their
accuracy in detecting sensitive movements and because patients with
severe facial burns cannot use a head-mounted Oculus device.
But they still expect the Oculus Rift and other cheaper virtual
reality headsets to quickly replace the expensive ones.
"As more and more companies get involved in this, we will keep
seeing inexpensive and very accurate systems," said Felipe Medeiros,
a professor at the University of California San Diego who used the
Oculus device to evaluate patients with glaucoma, a disease of the
eye's optic nerve.
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FLOOD VIRTUAL MARKET
Other companies, including Sony Corp, Samsung Electronics Co Ltd,
Microsoft Corp, Google Inc and HTC Corp have either already released
virtual reality headsets or plan to do so in the next year.
Oculus, however, has already distributed more than 100,000 units of
its developer version. This is more than has been available in the
history of virtual reality, giving it early brand recognition among
medical researchers, analysts said.
"Oculus has basically jumped out in front," said Hunter Hoffman, a
virtual reality researcher at the University of Washington Seattle
who used the Oculus Rift to ease severe pain in an 11-year-old burn
victim.
Some headsets, such as Sony's Morpheus, are built exclusively for
video games. Oculus, however, allows researchers and developers to
create their own software, whether for specialized applications like
health care or for video games.
In Medeiros's study, for example, he evaluated patients with
glaucoma. He created a simulated environment that made patients feel
as though they were moving through a tunnel and then studied their
bodies' responses.
That helped researchers predict the likelihood of a fall for
glaucoma patients, allowing doctors to teach them how to avoid it.
Medeiros and other researchers said future studies will compare the
inexpensive headsets against one another. But because of Oculus's
early availability, it has already become the most popular headset.
"Oculus has done a great job of keeping themselves front and center
and making themselves the product that everyone has to be compared
against," said Brian Blau, Gartner research director.
(Reporting By Yasmeen Abutaleb; Editing by Ken Wills)
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