Researcher develop virtual tube ride to help study and treat paranoia

“You won’t take the tube after five in the afternoon, will you ?”
“It’s not safe for a woman”

These are just two of the warnings the boys in the office issue before I travel to London. It could be because they genuinely think I’m a delicate flower or it could be because we’re foreigners coming from Dublin, where the plans for a tube line are still in the early stages and not scheduled to be finished for the guts of a decade (and that’s being optimistic).

Either way, many people get nervous on the tube and experts believe it’s time we did something about it.

Kings College in London has unveiled a virtual tube ride program, which they hope will help study and treat paranoia.

The program provides a more real recreation of a tube ride than could be one using real people. Let’s face it, even if you’d been known to wet yourself with terror on the tube you probably wouldn’t turn a hair at a bunch of actors sitting around in a stationary carriage.

They tested 200 people and surprisingly a third of them got a little bit iffy on the virtual reality tube. The program is designed in such a way that it allows the subject interact with the other passengers on the train. Basically, if you’re gawping at someone’s hair, you better believe that avatar is going to stare back at you.

Test subjects spent four minutes on the virtual tube and afterward many of them said that they were intimidated by some of the avatars in their carraige.

"There’s something dodgy about one guy. Like he was about to do something - assault someone, plant a bomb, say something not nice to me, be aggressive."

"There was a guy spooking me out - tried to get away from him."

"Felt trapped between two men in the doorway. As a woman I’m a lot more suspicious of men. Didn’t like the close proximity of the men. The guy opposite may have had sexual intent, manipulation or whatever."

Read the full story on the BBCOnline.