Universitat de Barcelona

Virtual reality therapy is increasingly known and develops as each day passes. The most common application of this is the phobias treatment. Exposure therapy is ideal for applying virtual reality that offers an intermediate point between in imagination therapy and “in vivo” therapy. The objective of this study is to delve a little deeper into this line of research. The relationship that has the sense of presence and anxiety caused by being in a virtual environment with acrophobic stimuli is sought. Two groups are compared. The first has a haptic stimulus, a table that they must go through while they are in the virtual environment. The second passes the same environment, but without the haptic stimulus. The results show that there are no significant differences between a group. Even so, there are differences, within the same group, in the anxiety they feel during the experiment. These new data may be useful for future studies that continue to look for how the relationship between sense of presence and anxiety is established. In conclusion, we can say that it is a very new point and that it still needs more research.