Augmented reality has been used in many fields, but it has not been used to treat psychological disorders. Augmented reality presents several advantages respect to: the traditional treatment of psychological disorders and virtual reality treatments. In this paper we present the first augmented reality system for the treatment of phobia to cockroaches. Our system has been developed using ARToolkit software. It has been tested with one patient and the results have been very satisfactory. At first of the exposure session the patient was not able to approach to a real cockroach and after the exposure session using our augmented reality system, the patient was able to approach to a real cockroach, to interact with it and to kill it by herself. This first result is very encouraging and it demonstrates that augmented reality exposure is effective for the treatment of this kind of phobias.

Flying phobia (FP) might become a very incapacitating and disturbing problem in a person's social, working, and private areas. Psychological interventions based on exposure therapy have proved to be effective, but given the particular nature of this disorder they bear important limitations. Exposure therapy for FP might be excessively costly in terms of time, money, and efforts. Virtual reality (VR) overcomes these difficulties as different significant environments might be created, where the patient can interact with what he or she fears while in a totally safe and protected environment-the therapist's consulting room. This paper intends, on one hand, to show the different scenarios designed by our team for the VR treatment of FP, and on the other, to present the first results supporting the effectiveness of this new tool for the treatment of FP in a multiple baseline study.