A new use case for the older VR user: Dealing with death - Fortune

But older users, immoderate implicit 60, are present uncovering their ain niche successful virtual reality, according to MIT Technology Review, done Death Q&A, an hour-long sharing league astir mortality that’s tally by Tom Nickel, a 73-year-old erstwhile hospice volunteer.

Death Q&A and an evening league called Saying Goodbye are conscionable 2 of immoderate 40 antithetic events offered each week by EvolVR, a institution founded by Nickel’s son, Jeremy, a erstwhile curate who besides hosts Saying Goodbye sessions.

Jeremy Nickel started EvolVR successful 2017 and sold the institution for an undisclosed magnitude successful February 2022 to TRIPP, a Los Angeles-based institution that specializes successful metaverse mediation and wellness. Jeremy Nickel present works arsenic the vice president of assemblage and unrecorded events for the company.

Despite the sale, some Death Q&A and Saying Goodbye person continued going beardown since launching successful 2020. The groups started astatine the highest of the pandemic erstwhile galore people, and particularly older adults, experienced the most loneliness and isolation. They person already made an important interaction for immoderate of their regular attendees, particularly those who are terminally sick oregon disabled.

“The lightbulb went disconnected successful my head—people consciousness similar they’re truly unneurotic successful VR,” Jeremy told the outlet.

Although virtual meetings to sermon akin issues person existed for years, the VR facet of Death Q&A’s play sessions let attendees to vent astir a spouse oregon a child’s death, their ain expiry, oregon different issues successful a much interactive space.

“These relationships that we marque successful VR tin go precise intimate and heavy and vulnerable,” Tom told MIT Technology Review.

About 20% of radical articulation successful 2D done their computers, but astir radical articulation from their VR headsets. Through the headsets, participants are transported to a Buddhist temple, implicit with images of a real-life graveyard that changes each week.

One participant, Claire Matte, 62, started joining the virtual conversations soon aft her husband, Ted, was fixed six months to unrecorded aft battling cancer.

Through the play sessions, Matte told the outlet that she was capable to amended reckon with Tom’s fate, and marque immoderate friends during a acheronian period. 

“I don’t cognize what my travel would person been similar without it,” she told MIT Technology Review. “But I person to envision it arsenic overmuch worse.”