The Virtual Reality Experience: The Secret Garden
Being able to deal with the three different psychological dilemmas at the same time is not easy.
However, positive technology can help us through the use of an innovative technology, virtual reality (VR).
VR can transform our experience through the high level of personal efficacy and self-reflectiveness generated by their sense of presence and emotional engagement.
Virtual Reality: The Perfect tool for Experiential Learning
VR is an advanced form of reality simulation that has many similarities with the functioning of the brain, making it the perfect tool for experiential learning.
For a long time, the main barrier to the broad use of VR technology was its cost. However, now the simplest and cheapest form of VR comprises nothing but a pair of magnifying lenses and a sheet of cardboard or a plastic box. These headsets sell for 15–30 USD and use a standard smartphone as a tracker and display to generate the three-dimensional (3D) environment. Mobile-based VR is particularly suited to a specific VR content that can be very useful to address the coronavirus stress: 360-degree videos.
What is a 360 video
These videos, also known as immersive videos or spherical videos, are special video recordings created using a camera with multiple camera lenses or a rig of multiple cameras. The use of different lenses allows the recording of every direction at the same time, effectively giving a full view of what is around the camera. One advantage of projecting a 360-degree video in a VR head-mounted display (HMD) is that when users turn their head, their view of the live-action video footage turns with them in real time, allowing the user to look around anywhere in the filmed footage.
The cognitive power of 360 videos
360-Degree videos have the power to virtually transport users, immersing them in the video recording, allowing them to actively explore its content and experience the video from any angle. As recently demonstrated by Li et al., these videos have the ability to induce specific emotions characterized by different levels of valence and arousal. More, as shown by Robertson and colleagues the neural representations of the part of the 360-degree video presented in VR (the scene within the current field of view) prime the associated representations of the full panoramic environment, facilitating subsequent perceptual judgments. In other words, 360-degree videos generate a dynamic interplay between memory and perception that can be used to improve the features of these cognitive processes and to update their content.
To help our readers to discover the well-being potential of VR, we will use a free VR tool: “The Secret Garden.”
It is a 10-minute 3D 360-degree video (4K resolution supported) that can be found below and here —http://tiny.cc/yurumz—that can be used within a one-week self-help protocol to improve our psychological wellbeing during the Coronavirus pandemic.