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Published originally in Seattle Magazine, November 2004.
Fighting pain with — imagination
By Sally James
Where research scientist Hunter Hoffman works, reality is a very cool imaginary place. Giant penguins turn upside down from a snowball hit. There are 3-D canyons and rivers of ice. Hoffman and colleague Dave Patterson created this cool place to literally take heat off burn patients in the too-real and too-painful world of Seattle's Harborview Hospital.
Virtual reality, or VR to the insiders, is increasingly proving its value at reducing the pain patients feel. A few months ago, the University of Washington research team of Hoffman and radiologist Todd Richards, Ph.D., published their results of brain scans that showed physical evidence for the impact of the distraction on patients. This crucial objective evidence catapulted the research into an international spotlight. Hoffman's article on their project was published in the August 2004 issue of Scientific American. The magazine is available on-line in sixteen languages. He's hearing from people all over the world who want his consulting advice.
"Presence" is the technical word for the VR participant's sense that he or she is "in" the virtual world. The higher the presence, the higher the pain relief. Patients who have severe burns wear a VR helmet and see (and hear) and go into the fictional "Snow World" while a nurse may be cleaning a wound on their body. As patients use a keyboard to lob snowballs, their sense of presence increases. Every detail is calibrated to take their minds off heat and pain. Explosions here are green and blue. There is no red.
Hoffman has academic answers for the ban on red. His doctorate is in cognitive psychology. He thrives in the special laboratory at the UW where people don't feel limited by their titles.
No one wears a white lab coat here at what he calls the HITLab, short for Human Interface Technology Laboratory. He greets an interviewer in a striped t-shirt and jeans. He jokes that the HITLab began with two cultures — a military flat-top haircut type and a psychedelic game-playing type. They've melded.
Prior to getting funded by Paul Allen, the soft-spoken 44-year-old spent three years on this project without pay and used his savings to continue. Now he travels the world to talk about VR (Japan and Hawaii so far this year).
The spin-offs of his research could hit your local dentist's office, or reduce pain while you ride a stationary bike at the physical therapy office. Your child could someday use VR in the emergency room while someone takes a nasty splinter out of her hand.