US Army Experimenting With Second Life to Create Inception-Like Dream Therapy for PTSD Victims. Really.

The US Army is funding a project called "Power Dreaming", Wired reports, which will create simulated dreams in Second Life to treat military veterans and others suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Yes, really:

“Power Dreaming,” Naval Hospital Bremerton in Washington State will help traumatized troops battle their nightmares — with soothing, digitally-made dreams crafted in virtual worlds... The hope is that these “power dreams” can be watched from laptops and “home training and 3-D goggles work to gradually enhance the strength of these new neurological images"... The computer program for soldiers to build out imaginary worlds and avatars on will be based on the virtual world Second Life. It will allow dream sequences to be custom designed “to develop physio-emotional states to counteract the reactive stress response inherent in trauma memories.”

More here. From the description, this project may actually be made in OpenSimulator, the open source spinoff of SL, and the "dreams" will be machinima. (I'll try to get more details from the developers.) At any rate, this may be the coolest and potentially transformative real world application of Second Life I've come across after writing about Second Life for over 8 years. As you may remember, in the Chris Nolan movie Inception, the dream technology is first developed by the military for combat simulation. As it turns out, the military is making a real life version, but as therapy largely for those suffering from the after-effects of real combat.

This isn't even the first therapeutic application of SL for combat veterans, by the way:

For example, there's also an SL-based VR cave for veterans developed at USC, and Amputee Virtual Environment Support Space in SL, sponsored by the US Army's Telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Center. Veterans have informally used SL as a therapy space, a practice which a top officer involved in veteran's care has described as "Working when nothing else has." So notwithstanding the fantastic, DiCaprio-flavored connotations of "Power Dreaming", I actually think this could be an effective healing too.

The image above, by the way, isn't actually from the "Power Dreaming" project, but borrowed from yet another Army-funded Second Life project: The Second Life Checkpoint Exercise, developed by USC's Institute for Creative technologies, using AIs to simulate Iraqis civilians for training soldiers to handle peacekeeping duties.

Hat tip: Kristian Cee.

Comments

[rikomatic]

If they aren't using SL / Open sim for having real time interactions but only for creating machinima, I am curious about what the advantages of this tech are versus other means for creating these fake dreams.

Perhaps it has to do with OpenSim being a platform where all of the assets can be controlled by the military and not subject to an IP issues. Presumably machinima is also cheaper and faster to produce than other 3d digital movie creation tools.

[Tateru Nino]

Really not. The references to Inception - actually, the whole tone/angle/headline of the Wired article are incorrect when you do a bit of digging.

[fsl]

still several soldiers commit suicide every day because they can not find help. and the army plays SL. no words