Huang hopes the computer engineering students who developed the CAVE can animate the environment and also place a version on the Web. Among the many clinical approaches to anxiety, perhaps the most high-tech is the research in the application of virtual reality in the treatment of phobias.
People learn to tolerate and then to overcome the fear, if treatment is successful.
We have to generate the fear for them to master it. Getting patients to their specific phobic environment and controlling their exposure to the source of fear can be time-consuming and expensive. U-M is one of the few institutions in the world with the kind of virtual reality chamber needed for phobic therapy. College of Engineering students in the Principles of Virtual Reality class taught by Peter Beier , associate director of the Laboratory for Scientific Computation in the College of Engineering, created the CAVE environment and continue to refine it. We measure patients' fear of height physiologically and behaviorally, recording their respiration and heart rates and observing certain behavior.