| Story | Following the astounding success of the mobile game Sea Hero Quest, launched in 2016, today Deutsche Telekom and Saatchi & Saatchi London launches the world’s first consumer focused Virtual Reality (VR) game where anyone can help scientists fight dementia through gameplay.Sea Hero Quest VR aims to harness the power of VR gameplay to aid dementia research by helping to further advance our understanding of spatial navigation, and therefore understand one of the earliest symptoms of dementia.As Deutsche Telekom continues to connect people through technology this next iteration represents the second instalment in Deutsche Telekom’s #gameforgood initiative and its continued commitment to pushing technological boundaries to solve some of society’s biggest problems, transforming people’s lives for the better.Sea Hero Quest VR presents scientists with the opportunity for cross validation of the data collected by Sea Hero Quest mobile. They will build on the rich data set collected by the mobile game by using the latest in virtual reality technologies to gain greater insight into human spatial navigation behaviours.Providing data that is 15x more precise than that of the mobile game, Sea Hero Quest VR will bring scientists one-step closer towards helping doctors detect dementia earlier. An important development, this is likely to provide the format of a diagnostic tool yet to be developed.Just 2 minutes spent playing Sea Hero Quest VR collects the equivalent of 5 hours of lab based research.VR based experiments within a lab-based setting are already in existence, however this initiative marks the first time that such a study has been designed for a mass market consumer audience, able to provide much needed scientific data from the comfort of their own home.“Whilst Sea Hero Quest mobile gave us an unprecedented data set in terms of its scale, allowing us to gauge spatial navigation abilities at a population level, the VR game allows us to build on this by measuring subtle human behavioural reactions with much greater precision.” explains Dr. Hugo Spiers, of University College London. “With Sea Hero Quest VR we have also been able to replicate highly credible lab based experiments such as the ‘Morris Water Maze’ (winner of the 2016 ‘Brain Prize’) that would not translate well to video or mobile game format. The intuitive nature of VR means that the study can be opened up to those who might not be able to grasp the function of the mobile game – some people with advanced dementia for example.” |