Professional coaches are increasingly in demand and the field has been growing significantly over the past decade. Coaches offer personalized support, advice, and guidance, helping clients navigate a variety of life’s challenges from careers to dating to mental health and physical wellness.

A recent article in Behavioral Business News highlighted one example of where professional coaches can step in to supplement an overburdened healthcare system.

“Coaches are helping guide [people] in behavioral skills … to recover [from eating disorders],” Carolyn Costin — a Malibu, California-based psychotherapist and longtime eating disorder expert — told Behavioral Health Business. “Nobody up until now has really been filling that gap. You can have a lot of plans from your therapist and dieticians. But there’s only so much that they can do.”

With access to all types of care, support, and guidance moving from in-person to Zoom, the shortcomings of video sessions are becoming apparent. VR offers several benefits to both clients and coaches over video sessions and headsets are more affordable and powerful than ever.

5 Benefits of VR for Clients and Coaches

1. Anonymity Lowers Barriers and Increases Accessibility

VR allows clients to remain anonymous both in appearance and voice (through voice masking) while still interacting with coaches and/or other clients in realistic 3D social environments. This anonymity offers a safe onramp for clients to reveal more about themselves and their struggles without the fear of judgement or recognition. For coaches, anonymity offers an opportunity to expand access to those who may not be comfortable initially identifying themselves for any number of reasons.

2. Avatars Allow For Identity Exploration

Avatars in VR present an opportunity for clients to explore different representations of themselves with a coach and also in diverse social scenarios. Coaches can either participate as avatars themselves or observe and direct from afar as two or more clients take on different identities to practice everything from a first date to a networking event to a public speaking engagement. Guiding clients as they inhabit different identities can change perspectives, build confidence and raise self-awareness.

3. Simulations and Role Play Provide a Safe Space for Real World Scenarios

VR convincingly replicates the experience of sharing a realistic, three-dimensional space with others. This combined with the ability to take on different physical appearances is a powerful tool in changing behavior, growing empathy, and increasing confidence when confronted with the same situations in the real world. Scripted scenarios and other curriculum developed by coaches and translated into VR, offer coaches a powerful tool to provide services to remote clients in a safe, controlled, and shared setting.

4. Remote Sessions Offer A More Engaging and Focused Experience Than Zoom

VR headsets provide a distraction-free remote experience, blocking out external interruptions from other people and competing technologies like smart phones and monitors. For clients, this means being able to work intimately with a professional coach without needing to travel. This opens the door to providing services to new and underserved communities in ways that are more engaging, effective, and focused than Zoom.

5. Analytics and Playback Provide Behavioral Insights That Lead to Outcomes

Analytics like time speaking and directional gaze combined with the ability to record and replay sessions offer coaching tools that can help clients better understand their own behaviors. Repeated practice in a safe environment with feedback prepares clients for facing real challenges in their everyday lives.

Foretell Reality is a social VR platform which features and capabilities that support coaching and training of all kinds. For a demo, click here.

The stigma and challenges of online dating can often hinder people from trying it out. Between the focus on physical appearances, awkward text exchanges, and exaggerations about goals and dreams, online dating can be an uncomfortable and unfulfilling experience.

A recent Psychology Today article examined whether recent advances in Virtual Reality (VR) might be a better alternative to online or even in person dating.

One obvious advantage the author points out is that VR provides an amplified sensory experience. Life-like expressive avatars not only provide a true feeling of presence with a dating partner but also take away inhibitions and preconceptions tied to physical appearance. As technology advances, epidermal VR, the ability to mimic the sensation of touching another person, could add another enhanced sense of connection not possible through current online platforms.

The ability to personalize avatars to be something other than realistic can also lead to self-expression, exploration, and connection that might not otherwise occur. “Rather than being deceptive, avatars could be part of the fun of VR dating. With avatars, people could choose to be realistic about how they look, or they could experiment; for example, by traveling across time to go on dates as younger or older versions of themselves.” 

Another advantage to using this VR technology is that the locations that you can travel to are endless. “You could jump out of a plane, journey to outer space, or dive underwater for a scuba diving expedition, all in an evening.” The author points out that more exhilarating dating experiences in VR could actually lead to ‘excitation transfer,’ the phenomenon where people “misattribute the arousal they feel from doing something exhilarating to those around them.”

Lastly, the author points out that VR dating provides the opportunity to practice and improve interpersonal skills whether those are applied in the real world or they stay in VR. By practicing real life dating scenarios with a coach or even having an ‘invisible ghost’ coach available during an actual date, “those who struggle to navigate social situations on their own” could benefit from guidance generally not available from online platforms.

Foretell Reality is a social virtual reality platform that supports many different types of avatars with varying degrees of realism and expression for different use cases involving remote interpersonal communication.

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