Shaping

A new question raised by the T.R. trials is whether the VV Sport display can be used as a rehabilitation tool, rather than simply as a prosthesis. In other words, is it possible to train akinetic patients to become less dependent on visual cues, through a process of slowly reducing the realism of the visual cues provided? This process would be an instance of what is known as ``shaping'' in the psychological literature [44].

It is not clear whether the experience of using the VV Sport display played an essential role in helping T.R. to learn new ambulatory skills, or whether he could have jumped directly to using the laser pointer. At the time, he thought that the VV Sport display might have been useful as an intermediate step which forced him to think more about the visual cues.

Viewed as a rehabilitation tool, therefore, the limited vertical field-of-view may be an advantage, in that it forces the subject to depend less on the external representation of the visual cues, and more on their imagined extrapolation beyond the display field.