The decisions we make in life are highly manipulated by the way we are expected to see reality under the influence of the values and priorities of family, society, media and history. Most of us are clueless about where to start discovering who we really are and what our purpose in this universe is. From the day we realize we are assigned a role by the society we belong to, we fall into language. Every interaction we encounter, every decision we make from that point on is highly motivated by our goal to fulfill this role. Such a motivation highly conflicts with our humanly desire to question and understand reality as a whole, making only a small fragment of it visible to us and leaving many questions unanswered. Therefore, we frequently feel dissatisfied, unmotivated and restless. Lack of motivation diminishes brain performance, productivity and quality of life. Most of us experience psychological and emotional constraints such as anxiety, insomnia, paranoia, ADHD and OCD to a certain extent, which constantly pull us back as we try to move forward in life. What we almost never realize is that our reality, which is entitled to this dilemmatic motivation of ours, is entirely perceptual. In most cases, overcoming frustration or preventing an emotional breakdown is possible through change of perception. What if maximizing brain performance and providing a constant positive mood by neutralizing these limiting psychological factors was as easy as altering a person’s perception through an artificial reality?

At the beginning of the 21st century, many technologists and psychotherapists started working exclusively on prototypes that used change of perception in an artificial reality for the treatment of psychological disorders. The first psychotherapy sessions in virtual reality mainly focused on imitating a problematic real-life situation for the patient to learn how to cope with. “Typically, in VR the patient learns to manipulate problematic situations related to his/her problem. For this reason, the most common application of VR in this area is the treatment of anxiety disorders.”\cite{2013} VR expose therapy was proposed as a safe and cheap method for reproducing real-world situations. Many virtual reality development companies worked on simulating specific real-life experiences that caused anxiety/fear in a significant percentage of the society. One of these specific real-life experiences was fear of heights. Since local flights were becoming more and more popular around the same time, fear of flying was an emerging problem that was starting to affect many people’s lives. In opposition to other psychotherapy techniques where the patient is encouraged to re-imagine a real-life situation, i.e. imaginal exposure, VR expose therapy reduces anxiety through the processes of habituation and extinction.

Another advantage VR expose therapy has over imaginal exposure is the fact that it can be administered in any custom setting to increase efficiency. The VR environment is much more controlled and cost-efficient than the traditional method of imaginal exposure. The fact that the VR environment is much more controlled enables experts to focus on certain aspects of the real-world experience in order to maximize efficiency. If the fear of darkness is affected by the size of the room the person is placed in, for instance, experts are able to test a real-world scenario in many different virtual rooms with different sizes without having to build each room physically and spend a fortune.

In a similar fashion, VR technology can be used in treating symptoms of anxiety that is triggered by specific objects that remind the patient of a traumatic moment from the past. “Viaud-Delmon showed that subjects with high trait anxiety, such as subjects with symptoms of panic and agoraphobia, have a strong dependence on a particular reference frame in which the sensory information is interpreted and in which the subject would remain anchored.”\cite{virtuality2013} The efficiency of these tests are often increased by modifying the sensory reference frame and customizing the habitat of the experience. Changing certain variables of the environment in the process of testing a certain type of phobia has been scientifically proven to be extremely effective in speeding up the treatment process.

Since the mid-2000s, VR has been used in many different forms for neuropsychological testing and rehabilitation. The core phenomenon of these applications is that they all function with an attempt to alter the patient’s perception, one way or another. The advantage that virtual reality has over traditional methods of rehabilitation lies under the three key features it offers: “the capacity to deliver interactive 3D stimuli within an immersive environment in a variety of forms and sensory modalities; the possibility of designing safe testing and training environments; and the provision of ‘cueing’ stimuli or visualization strategies designed to help guide successful performance to support an error-free learning approach”. \cite{virtuality2013}

NeuroVR was the first software that enabled non-expert users to create and modify a virtual scene to suit the needs of a clinical setting. "Using the NeuroVR Editor, the psychological stimuli/stressors appropriate for any given scenario can be chosen from a rich database of 2D and 3D objects and easily placed into the pre-designed virtual scenario by using an icon-based interface (no programming skills are required)." \cite{cai2008} In addition to creating a setting from virtual objects, NeuroVR enabled users to incorporate video into the scene. This function created an amazing pathway between the early methods of visual therapy (i.e. film, video and animation) and the late methods of perceptual psychotherapy, such as VR expose therapy.

With the emerging power of the internet, the habits and the general philosophy of most software developers also changed. As legal regulations were made related to patenting, copyrighting and trademarks, it became more and more common to make software available for the public use and for collaboration. Today, the majority of the most commonly used high-tech applications are open-source. In the recent years, more complex methods for virtual reality research in the fields of experimental psychology and neuroscience have been developed with the help of the new, open-source VR technologies. VREX, a free open-source Unity toolbox, was released earlier this year in the light of Unity’s attempts to incorporate real-life usage into the purposes of the tools they create. “VREX provides a procedural generation of (interconnected) rooms that can be automatically furnished with a click of a button. VREX includes a menu system for creating and storing experiments with different stages. Researchers can combine different rooms and environments to perform end-to-end experiments including different testing situations and data collection.” \cite{Vasser_2017}

Since the early 1900s, it has been a challenge for the humankind to figure out a solution to "conducting both ecologically valid and at the same time highly controlled psychological and neuroscientific experiments." \cite{Vasser2017} The reason that this phenomenon has been impossible to implement until the recent years is the fact that controlling and/or manipulating certain variables in real life is often impossible, and in cases that it is possible, it is extremely costly. Technologies such as VREX continue to overcome this challenge that they took over from the early adopters of the VR technology in the early 2000s. Another phenomenal aspect of the VR experiences created in the past few years is the fact that the developers are finally able to give the user a significant amount of control over the virtual objects and environment, providing haptic feedback in response to the user’s interaction with these virtual objects. "As the virtual environment inside a HMD is projected spherically all around the person when turning one’s head, this approach also gives more freedom of movement to the study participant, who is no longer confined to look only in a single narrow direction towards the computer monitor." \cite{Vasser2017}

Since these technologies are all quite new, fully adopting them is still very costly. For that reason, virtual toolboxes such as VREX are doing a tremendous job in making these technologies available for practical use. This way, psychology researchers from all around the world can start benefiting from these new technologies, conduct tests and create experiments for virtual reality setups. Having access to such open-source software, researchers are able to collaborate with developers from any level and create meaningful experiences to help them collect significant data for their research and development purposes.

Evidently, the key characteristics of virtual environments created in the recent years for clinical research is the fact that they all provide high level of control and interaction, which enables more enriched and sophisticated experiences to be provided for the patient. The difference between any other method of psychotherapy used until today and these virtual reality exposure applications is that users are "no longer simply external observers of images on a computer screen but are active participants within a computer-generated three-dimensional virtual world." \cite{Cai2008} "Using visual, aural or haptic devices, the human operator can experience the environment as if it were a part of the world." \cite{2015}

All of this background information on the recent development of VR psychotherapy technologies influenced the birth and development of SelfDiscoVR. SelfDiscoVR is a brain-powered VR experience that stabilizes the user’s mood and maximizes brain performance by analyzing and responding to the brain’s reactions to certain thoughts and memories in real time. As the user follows the commands in the application by thinking about certain memories, objects, people, places and/or past events while observing the virtual objects around them, the software constantly monitors the fluctuations in the user’s alpha and beta brainwaves. Depending on how the brain reacts to certain thoughts, the virtual objects start changing color and shape, revealing the emotions that are triggered in the process. This data is later on used to help the user realize and overcome what in their subconscious is actually causing them to suffer from a negative psychological state.

At the beginning of the experience, the spectator is asked to put on the WAVR headset and sit on a stool with a vibration engine attached underneath. WAVR is a neuro-controlled VR/EEG technology that monitors and uses the fluctuations in a person’s brainwaves to control a VR application. The EEG microcontroller monitors the fluctuation in the spectator’s brainwave frequency and sends commands to the VR application in real time throughout the experience. There are two pedestal fans facing the spectator, about 3 feet apart from one another. The rest of the audience is able to watch the experience from the spectator’s point of view in real time on the projector screen.

The story begins as the spectator opens his/her eyes to an alternative reality. This new reality consists of visual and auditory elements that are reminiscent of our universe’s reality, except it is much more abstract and chaotic. Being in this alternative reality feels similar to being inside a tornado in space. The vibrating chair and the pedestal fans make the experience fully immersive as the spectator feels the strong vibrations in his/her entire body and the powerful wind in his/her face, while watching the space tornado swirl around him/her. In addition to the abstract 3D models of many random elements from Earth and other planets, we see halos, glare and beams of light shining in various colors, fluid 3D shapes flowing across the scene and reflective objects that alter the spectator’s visual perception. In addition to the visual elements, the spectator hears audio that sounds a lot like many random tracks of music, people’s conversations and sounds from everyday life were overlapped and fast-forwarded. Throughout the experience, the user is expected to keep relaxing in order to slow down the space tornado and choose virtual objects to focus on. As he/she tries to relax, the EEG headset keeps recording his/her brain activity. If he/she manages to go into a relaxed meditative state by bringing his/her brainwave frequency down to a level below 12Hz, the EEG device sends a command to the VR application that slows down the tornado, making the visual elements and the words spoken in the audio more distinguishable. The spectator then starts looking around and picks a virtual object to focus on. Using the eye-tracking technology, the VR application is able to detect which object the spectator is looking at. If the spectator manages to go into a deep meditative state by bringing his/her brainwave frequency down to a level below 8Hz while staring at one object, all other objects eventually start to disappear. The entire scene slowly gets reconstructed around the chosen object. At the end of the experience, the spectator is shown a graph of their brainwave patterns throughout the experience. He/she finds out at what moments during the experience his/her brainwave frequency fluctuated, and how his/her level of concentration compares to the average person. In addition to the brainwave graph, the spectator also receives a detailed analysis of what each virtual object he/she picked during the experience tells about his/her subconscious mind. Overall, the method and goal of the SelfDiscoVR experience is mainly to analyze, understand and treat a psychological fluctuation by having the user change and customize certain variables of the virtual environment themselves, simply by relaxing and focusing on virtual objects.

Although it is indisputable that VR has come of age for clinical and research applications, there are three major obstacles in the way of making SelfDiscoVR a VR psychotherapy experience that is used worldwide as an effective method of psychological treatment. The first and the most important one of these obstacles is standardization. The environment that the VR experience is observed needs to be standardized for every spectator in order to maximize efficiency. Developers need to carefully adapt the new VR technology to the specific requirements of the clinical setting. As more and more research and development is done, it is certain that there will be much more progress made in standardization in the following years.

The third and perhaps the most underrated factor that disables VR technology from being a practical method for psychology research is the fact that the majority of the VR applications that are currently available to researchers and users are not very user-friendly. Since it is a whole new technology, VR is something that requires time and practice for the average user to adapt to its user experience. The experiences created for clinical purposes that are currently on the market lack the sense of a good user experience design. Companies are so focused on making these applications functional that they fail to pay enough attention to the way the application is experienced by the end user. Therefore, the essence of most experiences get lost in translation and fail to be helpful to the user in most cases. Even the best virtual reality applications that are currently available, including VR games, require a significant amount of time for the first time user to get used to the user interaction. It is extremely important to interview psychotherapists, psychiatrists, psychology researchers and psychotherapy patients to understand their needs in order to provide the most seamless user experience possible to both the expert and the patient. Since collecting brainwave data for psychology research is a delicate process, it is vital to provide the ideal environment for the patient, as well as a user experience that makes sure the user does not get lost trying to figure out how the application works at any given point during the experience. A bad user experience design would immediately affect the data being collected, since most users tend to get nervous around technology that they are initially unable to figure out how to use.

As of now, SelfDiscoVR is capable of offering a standardized, intuitive VR/EEG user experience with maximum efficiency in a set, testing environment. Further testing and data collecting is key in determining the set and changing variables for maximizing efficiency for audiences with different educational backgrounds, different cultures and age groups. More advanced variations of the same experiment can be designed for people who are trained in meditation and mindfulness. While more data is being collected, the user experience needs to be customized for different age groups to fit the needs of the customer segment and bypass the learning curve. Above all, the technology needs to be affordable so that it can reach out to masses. It is vital to always keep in mind the factors that have been disabling the practical usage of virtual reality in clinical research in the further steps of the development and production of SelfDiscoVR.