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When Benno and Marijke founded the Dolphin Swim Club, they wanted to create extraordinary VR goggles. Benno: ‘These are normal VR goggles. Try them on.’ The sight is breathtaking: floating in the clearest water there are dolphins all around you. ‘But you are sitting in a chair. If you would be in the water, the experience would be even more intense. That’s what we wanted to create. And that was not possible with normal VR goggles.’ The Dolphin Swim Club successfully applied for funds from SNN for UnderwaterVR goggles. Benno: ‘Thanks to SNN we could fund important research into the commercial viability of our plans, but also if we could use recycled plastics in the production process.’
Language: Dutch
In an interview with Computable, Johan Elbers of the Dutch healthcare institution ‘sHeerenloo, explains how he is always looking for new technologies to treat patients with a mental disability. As an innovation manager, he admits that some of the best applications have been developed with the patients’ personal wishes in mind. ‘The possibilities are endless, but do they really help these people? That’s why we always interview our patients first, to discover their needs. Swimming with dolphins is a good example. It’s impossible to take all our patients to Curaçao (a Dutch and that’s why, with the Dolphin Swim Club, we’re bringing the dolphins to our patients.’
A Dutch non-profit is strapping waterproof VR headsets on people in pools so they can “swim with dolphins.” The Dolphin Swim Club has been offering the experience, named Dolphin VR, as “dolphin-assisted therapy” since last month. While submerged, you can watch video reels of bottlenose dolphins swimming in their natural habitat. VR specialists Viemr had divers capable of holding their breath for up to 5-minutes record the footage during a 10-day shoot at the Red Sea in December 2015.
A double page feature in the Leeuwarder Courant! The Leeuwarder Courant is the oldest daily newspaper in the Netherlands. “This is the unlikely story of an artist and her husband. Together, this couple from Leeuwarden works on a project where virtual wild dolphins help patients deal with pain and anxiety. The Dolphin Swim Club is well on its way to positively touch the lives of many Europeans and Americans.”
Over 150 hospitals and healthcare institutions worldwide provide the Dolphin Swim Club’s Wild Dolphin VR therapy. This Dutch / Swedish initiative proves to be successful for adults and children suffering from mental disabilities or autism. Starting this week, 10 Dutch hospitals will use so-called dolphin therapy. But the Dutch initiative is popular in the United States as well. In the Stanford medical centre, children undergoing heart surgery swim with dolphins before the procedure. And the wild dolphin VR has proved popular with patients suffering from chronic pain at the Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles.
VR-Nerds mentioned the Dolphin Swim Club as the highlight of the VR Days 2017 in Amsterdam. We installed a converted container in the hall of the exhibition, which served as a swim tank. Naturally, we also brought all other necessary attributes: a changing room, wetsuits and our wild dolphin VR experience. ‘Well, we quickly changed into our Baywatch costumes and entered the cool water’.