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Excellent Science INNOVATION
Virtual reality platform for researching time perception
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Market Maturity: Tech Ready
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Market Creation Potential
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Women-led innovation
A woman had a leadership role in developing this innovation in at least one of the Key Innovator organisations listed below.
Go to Market needs
Needs that, if addressed, can increase the chances this innovation gets to (or closer to) the market incude:
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UN Sustainable Development Goals(SDG)
This innovation contributes to the following SDG(s)
SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOAL 3
Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages

The UN explains: "Significant strides have been made in increasing life expectancy and reducing some of the common killers responsible for child and maternal mortality.

Major progress has also been made on increasing access to clean water and sanitation, reducing malaria, tuberculosis, polio and the spread of HIV/AIDS.

However, many more efforts are needed to control a wide range of diseases and address many different persistent and emerging health issues."

SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOAL 10
Reduce inequality within and among countries

The UN explains: "The international community has made significant strides towards lifting people out of poverty. The most vulnerable nations – the least developed countries, the landlocked developing countries and the small island developing states – continue to make inroads into poverty reduction. However, inequality still persists and large disparities remain in access to health and education services and other assets."

The EU-funded Research Project
This innovation was developed under the Horizon 2020 project VIRTUALTIMES with an end date of 31/12/2023
  • Read more about this project on CORDIS
Description of Project VIRTUALTIMES
The sense of time co-constitutes our subjective experience and embodied self-consciousness. It refers to the dimensions of passage of time (time passing by) and structure of time (serial order of events). Both can be disturbed under psychopathological conditions and give rise to a variety of psychopathological symptoms. VIRTUALTIMES will for the first time (1) provide a personalized and neuroadaptive virtual reality technol-ogy enabling the systematic variation of time experience (“MetaChron”), based on (2) the rigorous study of the sense of time in different psychopathological conditions including depression, schizophrenia and autism, under special consideration of sex, and (3) neuroscientific measures that describe neural mechanisms which underlie our sense of time and validate both diagnostic differences and technological interventions. For that purpose, virtual reality scenarios and games will be developed from the starting point of the everyday sce-nario “waiting room”. We will systematically enrich the scenery both physically (objects) and socially (inter-action partners). In the realm of time-based interventions this will allow to manipulate passage of time (vary-ing velocity of time flow) and structure of time (varying synchronicity of events). VIRTUALTIMES (1) will provide “MetaChron” as diagnostic tool and innovative mental health technology that works in a highly in-dividualized, easy-access, and easy-to-use application, (2) will foster new technological developments in the field of human-computer-interaction to improve personal wellbeing and intercultural communication in a global world, and (3) will initiate a radical shift both in empirical approaches to and our understanding of the sense of time as basic constituent of human subjectivity. The market value lies in the availability of a professional VR- and game-based tool for prevention and therapy of psychopathological conditions.

Innnovation Radar's analysis of this innovation is based on data collected on 09/03/2022.
The unique id of this innovation in the European Commission's IT systems is: 20025