URBAN SPRAWL
INVIROVR is the bridge that re-links Nature and Humanity using Virtual Reality and Eco-therapy. Urban Sprawl is the way in which the environment manifests itself for most people today. Invirovr stresses the importance our environment plays in our daily lives. How we relate to our jobs, families, people we encounter, and most importantly ourselves. There is a direct correlation between our physical/emotional well-being to our overall environment. Nature is the vital source beneficial to our physiological, emotional and spiritual well-being.
Hospital Patient using VR to augment healing.
INSTITUTIONAL LIFE
Institutional interiors commonly feel inhospitable, compounding existing stress disorders. Invirovr has experience with eco-design and offers consultation to health care venues. Virtual Reality environments will be instrumental in bringing the energetic of our natural world into our man-made surroundings. Due to numerous constraints, many of us are unable to frequent Nature as often as we would like, resulting in a broad-spectrum of emotionally deblitating feelings. Virtual Reality can improve Institutional care and patient experiences.
NATURES WAY
THE SOLUTION
Careful attention must be made as to what types of prescriptive environments will nurture as opposed to exacerbate a person’s overall well-being. Just as a doctor would prescribe antibiotics for one patient and pain medication for another, virtual realities must be carefully created and executed to impart the curative powers of Nature herself. VR content is now being therapeutically implemented to effectively treat Military Vetrans for PTSD, Hospice, Memory Care, Stress and anxiety, Burn Victims as well as a host of many other conditions that undermine health in general.
Hospital Patient with VR-Headset
The excerpt is taken from Dr. Oliver Sacks neurologist, author.
Having lived and worked in New York City for half a century — a city “sometimes made bearable… only by its gardens” — Sacks recounts witnessing nature’s tonic effects on his neurologically impaired patients: A man with Tourette’s syndrome, afflicted by severe verbal and gestural tics in the urban environment, grows completely symptom-free while hiking in the desert; an elderly woman with Parkinson’s disease, who often finds herself frozen elsewhere, can not only easily initiate movement in the garden but takes to climbing up and down the rocks unaided; several people with advanced dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, who can’t recall how to perform basic operations of civilization like tying their shoes, suddenly know exactly what to do when handed seedlings and placed before a flower bed. Sacks reflects:
I cannot say exactly how nature exerts its calming and organizing effects on our brains, but I have seen in my patients the restorative and healing powers of nature and gardens, even for those who are deeply disabled neurologically. In many cases, gardens and nature are more powerful than any medication.
More than half a century after the great marine biologist and environmental pioneer Rachel Carson asserted that “there is in us a deeply seated response to the natural universe, which is part of our humanity,” Sacks adds:
Clearly, nature calls to something very deep in us. Biophilia, the love of nature and living things, is an essential part of the human condition. Hortophilia, the desire to interact with, manage, and tend nature, is also deeply instilled in us. The role that nature plays in health and healing becomes even more critical for people working long days in windowless offices, for those living in city neighborhoods without access to green spaces, for children in city schools, or for those in institutional settings such as nursing homes. The effects of nature’s qualities on health are not only spiritual and emotional but physical and neurological. I have no doubt that they reflect deep changes in the brain’s physiology, and perhaps even its structure.
