Kate Summerscale

In 2018 a hundred acrophobes were recruited by Oxford University for a randomised experiment. After they had filled out a questionnaire to measure their fear of heights, half were assigned to receive immersive virtual-reality therapy and half to a control group. At six thirty-minute sessions, over about two weeks, the virtual-reality group wore headsets that enabled them to undertake different activities while they navigated ascending floors of a
simulated ten-storey office block. They might rescue a cat from a tree on one floor, play a xylophone near the edge of the next floor, throw balls out of the window on another. In this way, they acquired memories of being secure while high up.

When they answered a questionnaire at the end of the trial, the virtual-reality group reported a reduction in acrophobic symptoms of almost 70 per cent, while the control group’s fear had reduced by less than 4 per cent. When they filled out the questionnaire again two weeks later, more than two-thirds of the people in the virtual-reality group fell below the trial’s fear-of-heights entry criteria: they were no longer acrophobic. ‘The treatment effects produced,’ concluded the study’s authors, ‘were at least as good as – and most likely better – than the best psychological intervention delivered face-to-face with a therapist.’