A near-death experience (NDE) is a personal experience associated with death or impending death. NDE’s have been said to generally include the impression of moving through a tunnel, bright lights, meeting spiritual beings, euphoria, and out-of-body experiences. The research that I took a look at focused on the out-of-body aspect of NDE. An OBE can be described as the experience in which someone seems to be awake and is able to see their body and the world from a location outside of their body. It is has been found that those who experience OBE’S showed a reduced fear of dying. The idea was that if you were able to put people in a situation illustrating the possibility of their consciousness being outside of their body, then this would provide some evidence that survival beyond the body is possible and even reduce the fear of death.
VR was deemed suitable for this research for two major reasons: It can lead to the illusion of participants being in a different place other than where they are, and it can lead to their illusion of having a different body. VR involves people entering and participating in a surrounding computer generated simulation of a world, experiencing the illusion of presence. The critical element is that VR allows perception through natural sensorimotor contingencies where the whole body may be used for perception. When the VR is programmed appropriately to the reactions of the participants, then they tend to behave as if the experience was real.
Virtual reality was used in an act to achieve this with the method of virtual embodiment. Wearing a wide field- of- view head tracked stereo head-mounted display allows you to look in any direction within the virtual environment. This would allow them to look at their own body in this particular program. With real time motion capture the virtual body can be programmed to move synchronously with the person’s real body movements. This particular idea came from the rubber hand illusion which was first presented by Botvinick and Cohen. The rubber hand illusion is where the feeling that a rubber hand belongs to one’s body is brought about by stroking a visible rubber hand simultaneously to the participants own blocked hand. This eventually lead to a study that showed that a full body ownership illusion can be achieved through virtual reality. In this study participant’s saw from first person perspective a virtual body spatially coincident with and substituting their own.
The main strategy used was to first embody participants in a virtual body. In order to create a solid body ownership illusion the virtual body was seen in first person perspective and roughly spatially coincident with the real body and seen from the position of the eyes of the virtual body. Ehrsson was able to create the illusion of an out-of-body experience. This was accomplished by participants wearing a stereo HDM that allowed vide to be streamed from a pair of cameras behind them. While they saw themselves from behind, the experimenter tapped their chest while simultaneously striking under the camera with a stick. This was done to move their sense of perception in order to create an out-of-body experience. In this particular version of the experiment, the view-point of the participants moved up to the ceiling and behind the virtual body. If the participant moved their real body, the virtual body below remained stationary. The goal of this is for the participants to feel like they are out of their body.
Lenggenhager, Mouthon, carried out a study using out both paradigms, with the participant’s viewpoint always raised above the surrogate body, and confirmed that OBE resulted in disownership of the surrogate body whereas Drifting Body Experience (DBE) resulted in ownership. The study used a group of 16 participants. The groups were divided by DBE and OBE. One group experienced body ownership while ‘in’ the virtual body and then experienced the OBE condition, and the other group the same in-the-body phase followed by DBE. The second phase lasted for one minute and twenty-three seconds in both conditions. Both groups consisted of women students recruited from the Faculty of Psychology at the UB campus. Their ages were 21 and up. Both groups of volunteers had reported an average fear of about six out of seven prior to the experience. Those who had a virtual out-of-body experience reported their fear of death to be 2.7 out of seven, which is slightly less than the control groups three out of seven. Overall both groups saw a significant decrease in their fear of death.
The weakness in this particular study lies in the small sample size as well as in the lack of diversity. The article was also weak in the fact that there weren’t a lot of details. Some strengths of the study would be the strategy to have the participant embody the virtual body. I think that in the future they should expand the sample size in both size and gender. I also think that they should issue the survey to people with different ethnic and cultural backgrounds.
In another study, Participants are embodied in alternate bodies in a beautiful island along with two companions. In this particular experiment, the VR system was used to bring people who are physically remote together into the same consistent virtual world. They are each represented by a virtual humanoid body and they can see virtual representations of other people present in the virtual world. Data communication is shared across a network, and consistency of the shared world is maintained, so that all involved perceive the same environment from their unique viewpoints, and can interact with one another.
The participants explore the island and carry out tasks together. Over time each participant witnesses the death of their two companions as well as their own death. Fifteen female participants experienced six sessions in the island, each starting as a child and gradually maturing, and eventually aging and dying. Sixteen control subjects formed a waiting group. The results suggest that those who experienced the island report life attitude changes, becoming more concerned with others and global rather than material issues compared to those in the controlled group.
The main goal of this particular simulation was to provide a foundation in which mortality/immortality can be used as an independent variable in research. The secondary goal was to explore how the experience impacted the attitudes of the participants in relation to three outcomes. The first is concerned with their death anxiety – How would their simulated death as well as their partner’s death impact their death anxiety? Second, once they had encountered death, how far would previous prediction hold up? Most importantly, would the NDE report changed attitudes in life?
The Control group on required three sessions while the experimental group required seven. For both groups the first meeting was a screening session after which only the participants who matched with the appropriate profile for the experiment would be given the option to continue. The requirement for the profile were adult females with Catalan as their native language, who were not taking any psycho active medication, and were not suffering from epilepsy. During the screening session, applicants had to first complete questionnaires that checked that they were not affected by any recent death in their family or close friends, and to assure that they had a feeling of Catalan identity. It was required for all participants to score at least twenty out of forty on the National Identity questionnaire. The screening also included the LSB-50 questionnaire that assessed psychological symptoms. The participants were also asked to partake in a demographic questionnaire as well as a self-esteem scale.
All recruited Experimental group participants had a short Virtual Reality experience in order to ensure that they could experience body ownership over a life-sized female virtual body in which they were embodied from first person perspective. They answered questions on a Likert scale from 1 (not at all) to 7 (totally) regarding their illusion of body ownership, and the minimum required score for inclusion was 4.
The questions were:
1 Though the body I saw in the mirror did not look like me, I had the feeling it was my body.
2 Although the body I saw when I looked down did not look like me, I had the feeling it was my body.
3 Did I feel dizzy while in the virtual environment? (The maximum accepted level of dizziness was 3 out of the maximum of 7)
Among all applicants, in total, fourteen were screened out. This left the study with thirty-two participants that met the full requirements. One participant ended their participant due to discomfort with the simulator sickness during virtual reality sessions. This reduced the experimental group to fifteen. Each session included three participants. An experimenter was assigned to each participant.
Participants were physically located in separate adjoining rooms and great care was taken to ensure that they never met or even saw each other during the experiment. Participants were never told anything about the other virtual characters. The participants had to think things through for themselves rather than receiving instruction from the outside. When the first participant entered the simulation the other two characters were confederates. Eventually one of the confederates became old and died, to be replaced by another participant. A cycle continued as participants died and were replaced.
The participants were seated throughout. They were instructed that they could move only the upper part of their body but not their legs. They would see a life-sized virtual body spatially coincident with their own body from first person perspective, so that when they looked down towards themselves they would see the virtual body substituting their real one. The Kinect was used to track their body movements in real time, and the corresponding movements were mapped to the movements of their virtual head and upper body and limbs. At various times participants would see their body in a reflective surface, in addition to seeing it normally when they looked towards themselves. Hence embodiment was executed through first person perspective and visuomotor synchrony between their real movements and movements of the virtual body.
Participants would see that they were seated on top of cloud-like platforms, and that their two partners were also seated on such a platform. These platforms also acted as their vehicle for movement through the virtual world. Participants had learned that they could move through the world by leaning in the direction of the desired location. The leaning angle of the upper-body, as measured by the Kinect placed in front of the participant, thus moved them in the direction of the lean.
This system measured the leaning forward angle of the upper body to control the speed of forward movements and the backwards angle to move backwards. Left or right rotations, were based on the measured lateral leaning angles. To minimise the chance that participants would become sick when moving, a very slow linear and angular speed was used, as well as the linear and angular acceleration. This moving metaphor, based on an original idea by Fairchild, Lee, was sufficiently intuitive and effective to allow all participants to move inside the virtual environment even though they had quite short training.
From the moment, the participants entered the island, they were connected to each other by an illuminated rope. This encouraged them to be close to one another, since if they are separated more than a specific distance from the center of the triangle formed by the links between them, an alarm would sound, and they would not be able to move further from the center. This was to make sure the participants felt as though they belonged to the same group and enhance their cooperation in carrying out different tasks.
When all three participants entered the fenced area, a mirror portal was activated. The portal would allow you to see your reflection. This would help reinforce body ownership and ensure that they knew their own appearance. The portal would also allow you to cross through the mirror and teleport you to another part of the island. The location of the task would be indicated by a large column of purple smoke. The smoke would dissipate once the participants were close enough to the location of the task.
To keep the participants occupied and entertained, and to reinforce the social bond between them, collaborative tasks were designed that were available in every session. A new task was available for each session, each time at a different location. There were three main types of tasks, with two variations of each, which formed six different tasks.
Tasks
Classification Task: In this task, there were two baskets and some objects nearby. The participants had to put the objects in their corresponding basket. If an object was placed in the wrong basket, it was rejected and thrown out.
Maze task: participants had to exit from a labyrinth by opening some doors which blocked their way. To deactivate those doors, each participant had to remove her key (represented as a colored cube) from the door. Once all the locks were removed, the barrier disappeared and participants could continue to follow their path looking for the exit of the maze.
Piano task: for this task participants had to pass over the lit key of a huge piano keyboard that appeared on the ground. Only one key was lit at a time with a red, green or blue color, and when the corresponding participant (i.e., the red, green or blue one) passed over the key, the key was turned off and a small piece of music was played. Then another key of another color was enlightened, until the three participants had passed over their key, thus playing a short tune.
The sixth and last VR session for each participant began as the others with the exercises in front of the mirrors in the 'embodiment room'. By this time their virtual body was old and frail. Then they were transported to the Island as previously but after approximately 7 minutes the experimenter supervising the participant initiated the virtual death process. For the participant, the virtual death process started by her vision becoming blurred through three flashes, then she could hear the beats of her virtual heart and after some seconds there was a cry of pain. Further, her viewpoint was slowly moved above her now immobile virtual body lying on the cloud to generate an Out of Body Experience.
The disembodied participant is then teleported to a dark room where she would see a life review of her virtual life. This was through a rapid playback of a succession of images recorded during the different sessions of the participant's virtual experience, presenting a summary of her life in images based on the idea of the life-review flashbacks reported by some people who have experienced a NDE. Once the life-review was over, the participant would see a distant light at the end of a dark tunnel and she was automatically attracted towards it, giving her the sensation she was moving through the tunnel until reaching the light. At that moment, everything faded to intense white as also reported in NDEs
Afterwards, the experimenter removed the HMD from the head of the participant, and invited her to sit in front of a computer screen where she could see, now from the outside, events continuing in the virtual world. During this, in the virtual world, the remaining participants typically approached the dead body lying on its cloud. While the participant was seated in front of the screen, the experimenter discretely initiated a ceremonial task. The ceremony started with the disappearance of the dead body and the cloud that was supporting it to be replaced nearby by two bowls filled with seeds of the two colors of the remaining participants. One of the bowls was lit. The participant with the same color as this lit bowl had to grab it and move it over to another bowl containing a blue luminescent liquid that had appeared at the former location of the virtual body.
After the participant completed this ceremony, the bowl of her color disappeared and other bowl, that of the remaining participant, was lit. Once the second participant had grabbed her bowl and moved it over the bowl containing the blueish liquid the roots of a tree slowly started to grow out of the ground. However, rather than a regular tree, what eventually grew was a statue of the same color and appearance as the deceased character. The final size of the statue was approximately 1.5 times the size of the virtual body. The participant who had died in the virtual world observed this ceremony and monument to her former self on the computer screen. The experimenter could also force the wooden statue to appear if the participants were unable to accomplish the ceremony.
The participants found the others to be friendly, collaborative, and they tended to like the tasks. At the same time, there was very little evidence of any systematic discomfort, apart from a few outliers. Body ownership was high throughout the exposures, in line with previous findings that first person perspective over the virtual body and visio-motor synchrony provides powerful cues for this illusion. The participants experienced the movements of the virtual body as their own, so that the setup was successful in this regard. Overall participants experienced the illusions of being in the Island environment, with their virtual body as their own. They liked and collaborated well with the other participants, with very few incidents of discomfort.
The one of the main strengths of this article would definitely have to be the detail that is provided. I also think that another strong point of the study itself would be how meticulously and thorough they seem to have been with this particular study. The weakness of this study would be the small sample size and the lack of diversity. Again, in the future I think that they should include more diversity in gender, size, and ethic/cultural backgrounds as well.
I think that with the evidence and information provided throughout this paper that Reducing fear and anxiety of death with VR is very much possible. I think that after being put in a situation that illustrates the possibility of you entering a state of consciousness being outside of your body – post-death can help you reflect and come to terms with death. Due to the results talked about above we already know that full body ownership illusion can be achieved through virtual reality. In the first study, those who had a virtual out-of-body experience reported their fear of death to be 2.7 out of seven, which is slightly less than the control groups three out of seven. Overall both groups saw a significant decrease in their fear of death. In the second study the participants found themselves being more concerned about the well-being of others and the world around them then themselves.