COVID Feel Good: A Free VR Self-Help Solution for Providing Stress Management and Social Support During the COVID-19 Pandemic

COVID Feel Good is a free protocol uses the power of virtual reality to provide a transformative experience that can help individuals in two ways: a) By providing a digital place in which subjects can relax and reflect; b) By facilitating a process of critical examination and eventually revision of core assumptions and beliefs. In particular we used the rules defined for an effective design of Transformative Experiences, to develop the "Secret Garden" VR experience and its weekly protocol you can find in the Covid Feel Good web site (www.covidfeelgood.com). For a long time, the main barrier to a broad use of VR technology was its cost. However, now the simplest and cheapest form of VR comprises nothing but a pair of magnifying lenses and a sheet of cardboard or a plastic box. These headsets sell for 15–30 USD . and use a standard smartphone as a tracker and display to generate the three-dimensional (3D) environment. Mobile-based VR is particularly suited to a specific VR content that can be very useful to address the coronavirus stress: 360-degree videos. 360-Degree videos have the power to virtually transport users, immersing them in the video recording, allowing them to actively explore its content and experience the video from any angle. As recently demonstrated by Li et al., these videos have the ability to induce specific emotions characterized by different levels of valence and arousal. More, as shown by Robertson and colleaguesthe neural representations of the part of the 360-degree video presented in VR (the scene within the current field of view) prime the associated representations of the full panoramic environment, facilitating subsequent perceptual judgments. In other words, 360-degree videos generate a dynamic interplay between memory and perception that can be used to improve the features of these cognitive processes and to update their contents.