Lab E and VR Expert announce partnership. VR Expert will support Carola Epple’s company with hardware sales and customer support.
Lab E GmbH was founded by Carola Epple in March 2020 and supports psychotherapists in the treatment of anxiety patients with virtual reality. With specially designed VR videos, therapists can create environments for their patients at the push of a button to guide them through anxiety more easily. The VR media library “VirtuallyThere” is available as a streaming service via subscription and offers the largest selection of this kind in German-speaking countries with around 300 VR videos. Available are the VR videos for all common VR headsets, via an app for Android and iOS and a desktop application.
Virtual reality saves time
In behavioral therapy exposure, patients confront the fear-triggering stimuli specific to them in company and with guidance of a therapist. This usually requires very concrete scenarios. Creating these situations is often time-consuming and sometimes not even possible (as in the case of fear of flying, for example).
Virtual reality enables the therapist to create the desired situations in a controlled manner, thus saving time and preparation effort. It has been scientifically proven that virtual environments arouse real feelings and real fear with astonishing ease. Accordingly, the current S3 guideline for the treatment of anxiety disorders explicitly recommends virtual exposures.
VirtuallyThere contains lots of scenarios
By using VR headsets, certain environments can be evoked without any problems, depending on which scenario is currently required for the patient. Carola Epple and her team work closely with psychotherapists in developing the 360° content to make the VR videos as effective as possible for therapeutic use. The VirtuallyThere media library includes experiences such as highway driving, a ride on a Ferris wheel, crowds, or a doctor’s visit to draw blood. The media library can be streamed anywhere, anytime, and with a subscription, therapists have access to all VirtuallyThere content.
Therapists experienced in VR find it a great advantage that anxiety patients find it much easier to engage in an exposure in virtual reality than in reality. Virtual exposures can be precisely controlled and take place in the safety and discretion of the therapist’s office or clinic.
VR Expert supports Lab E in hardware distribution
VR Expert’s partnership with Lab E will include shipping the VR hardware and providing customer support. This will allow Lab E to focus on its core business of 360° content and further develop the VirtuallyThere platform. In this partnership, both companies play to their strengths, with VR Expert providing the hardware and Lab E providing the content.
“I am very happy about our partnership. It’s great for us that we can supply our customers with high-quality and recommendable VR headsets through VR Expert. And our customers can even test them for free to really experience virtual reality for themselves,” says Carola Epple, Managing Director of Lab E.
“We are very proud to announce Lab E as our partner. The application of VR for therapeutic purposes is a very exciting topic and we are happy that we, as the hardware expert, can do our part to help this become more established in the future,” says Alexander Obermüller, Managing Director of VR Expert D-A-CH.
Get more information about Lab E: www.carola-epple.de
Learn more about VR Expert here: www.vr-expert.com