Military burn victims are testing out a state-of-the-art virtual-reality game called SnowWorld, which is meant to reduce chronic pain through distraction:
[A]fter Hoffman became director of the Virtual Reality Analgesia Research Center at the University of Washington Human Interface Technology Laboratory, or HITLab, he had some remarkable success. Using $35,000 goggles—the sort of hardware ordinarily used for training fighter pilots—researchers obtained drops in pain ratings by 30 to 50 percent.
If distraction was the key, why not just use over-the-counter video games for a fraction of the cost? To answer that question, Hoffman had run a control experiment. In his first case study, he had a teenager with a severe flash burn play Nintendo Mario Kart while having five staples removed from a skin graft. The data showed that in terms of reducing pain, anxiety about pain, and time spent thinking about pain, playing Nintendo Mario Kart compared poorly to SpiderWorld. The reason VR was so much more effective than a regular video game came down to a quality called "presence"—that sense of being immersed inside an artificial world.
The Dish 