Most of the applications of virtual reality haven’t been thought of yet — which is why E-VR, with local support and help from HTC, have opened a VR Tech Incubator in Ocean Terminal, Leith.

This is because there are businesses out there — your own included — which could be problem solving, marketing or branching out in a new direction, by using virtual reality.

First we’d be wise to separate VR from the headset itself. Think virtual reality, and you will picture someone wearing what is in fact a small pair of computer monitors on their head — the HTC Vive in our case — and within that headset you’ll probably imagine that person is playing a game, or is immersed in a new interactive world. However that person may be watching a 360 film.

Take the work of filmmaker Andrew MacDonald. In working with severely autistic children, Andrew discovered that a group of these children experienced extreme anxiety about making the bus trip to their day centre. What if the bus took the wrong route? What about all the people getting on and off the bus? What if they couldn’t get the seat they wanted? In speaking to these kids, carers uncovered a world of problems that may never occur to you and me.

When Andrew MacDonald heard about this, he offered to make a 360 film of the bus route, which he did. The kids in question then, wearing a headset, were thereafter able to watch the film as many times as they liked, to habituate themselves to the trip, and know what to expect and when to expect it.

This is a characteristic example of the straightforward therapeutic application of VR making all the difference, and achieving something that may have taken weeks of intense counselling or another therapy.

VR and 360 come into their own when dealing with phobias of all sorts. For several years now, Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy has been used in combination with physiological monitoring to treat such phobias as fear of flying, heights, thunderstorms, enclosed spaces, spiders, and social phobias, including public speaking.

Public Speaking in fact is a common function of VR, as it can be used for team building and obviously has corporate applications, with the most popular apps being Cereverum Inc’s Speech Centre VR, Samsung’s Be Fearless, Public Speaking VR from Virtual Speech, and Virtual Orator from Virtual Human Technologies.

E-VR recently had the opportunity to test pain management via VR with a patient who had undergone spinal surgery. The results were stupendous, as the immersive experience of lying in a coral reef, watching fish and other creatures flutter through the sunlight, allowed a significant reduction in pain to be achieved over just a few sessions.

At our base in Ocean Terminal in Edinburgh, myself and director Lynzi Leroy are specifically keen on these applications, and have done our best to find not only young developers who are working in these fields but those who are keen to branch out into it. So far this has included not just developers, but property companies, journalists, artists and communications experts.

So far, E-VR have begun work with several companies. One of these is Virtuous Reality, who have been examining how VR technology can be applied to a care setting. Their idea is to provide an immersive VR experience to those who, due to either age or disability, are unable to experience certain situations for themselves. Their plan is to make these experiences available in the comfort of their own home.

E-VR’s own in-house developer David Taylor is a game and app designer who has been working as a professional User Experience Designer for several years. Having researched cinematography and realism, he now seeks to build projects for VR such as a learning game which has the control mechanics of Job Simulator combined with the learning capacity of Papers Please to create serious fun games for young adults.

These are just two of the current health and educational aspects which are currently being looked at in E-VR’s tech incubator.

However, E-VR also invite all businesses to come and try out the headset if they haven’t already done so. “It doesn’t matter what field you’re in,” says Lynzi Leroy, E-VR director, “if you’re as impressed by how far the technology has advanced as we are, you might want to share some ideas with us, or with our help get a VR headset involved in your own business.”.