In “Burning Man,” Jay Kirk tells the incredible story of Sam Brown, who was set on fire by an improvised explosive device while on tour in Afghanistan. He survived, only to find himself doomed to a post-traumatic life of unbearable pain. When hallucinogen-grade drugs offered little relief, he turned to virtual reality. And partaking in a video game called SnowWorld helped Sam Brown cope with pain more than anything else he tried:

Last July, Maani and Hoffman published the results of the study in which Sam Brown had participated. Echoing the civilian studies, soldiers reported significant drops in pain while immersed in SnowWorld. Time spent thinking about pain, which is an inextricable contributor to actual pain, dropped from 76 percent without SnowWorld to 22 percent with SnowWorld. Amazingly, some of the biggest drops were for the most severe levels of pain, which went against every previous expectation. Since then, SnowWorld has received a good deal of enthusiasm from several well-lit corners of the Pentagon. At least one four-star general, after seeing the results from the ISR study, has gone so far as to say that he foresees a day coming soon when VR pain distraction might become standard care. There is nearly equal excitement about Hoffman’s other applications, including one called IraqWorld, a virtual-reality exposure therapy he built to treat soldiers with PTSD.

Hoffman knows that more studies need to be done before VR becomes a regular part of a medic’s field kit. To that end, he and his colleagues at HITLab are now using $7.5 million in NIH grants to further investigate how VR affects the mind and how better to apply it in clinical situations. One part of the study is looking at using small doses of ketamine to enhance the sense of presence. But he is confident that eventually, as the technology becomes more sophisticated, VR will be exponentially more effective. Soon, he predicts, VR worlds will be customized, personally tailored, and as in social networks or Second Life, they’ll allow patients to bring along other people—a vet’s mother, girlfriend, buddies. Hoffman imagines programs that will tap into a patient’s happy memories—of a ski vacation or a honeymoon or a morning rowing on a river, sunlight dripping from the oars.

Hoffman can also see battlefield applications. Customized VR worlds will be pre-programmed right into the soldier’s eye gear. He’s already experimenting with piezoelectric crystals to that end. It doesn’t seem like much of a stretch to imagine a near future in which combat patients could simultaneously distract themselves from their own pain while inflicting it on a virtual and remote enemy. A soldier could put his mind inside a drone instead of watching as a medic changed his bandages. In such a future of techno-utopian warfare, at least for those combatants equipped to fight outside the pain matrix, victory will indeed belong to those who have rid themselves of the inconvenience of being men and who, for all we know, may as well bleed snow.

An incredible story.