Development and Evaluation on Night Forest Virtual Reality as Innovative Nyctophobia Treatment

Nyctophobia is an exaggerated fear that arises when a person is in the dark or at nightime. In psychology, cognitive behavioral therapy is commonly used to treat a person who is accustomed to face his/her fears by giving positive suggestions of the fears, then confront the fears until he/she no longer feels anxious. This paper presents the storyboard and prototype development of Virtual Reality (VR) Night Forest application which aims to provide an alternative tool for Nyctophobia treatment. The adventure game which is located in a forest at nightime is used as a new means to allow the user to become familiar with darkness. In the game, the user is made aware of the wonderful experience of hearing natural sounds such as footsteps, bird and door sounds. The user, as a boy scout, is then assigned to look for logs in the forest with different lighting levels. The storyboards are implemented on Mobile VR Apps. The experimental study shows that fear level of female users remains high compared with male users. Nevertheless, the repeated use of the game can positively motivate users to train themselves to get comfortable in darkness. In the experiment, the usability assessment concerning virtual reality user interfaces is presented using Sutcliffe approach.