Virtual reality is often used to transport people into imaginary worlds, but never before has it been used to transport people into someone else’s head to experience symptoms through their eyes. Excedrin, the head pain medication, has become the first brand to explore this.

One in five people suffer from migraine, but most people still think they’re ‘just a strong headache’. How could you understand what one is like unless you’ve actually experienced one for yourself? Excedrin wanted to help sufferers show the world how debilitating migraine can be.

So we developed the world’s first migraine simulator using Oculus Rift virtual reality technology. Combining the technical skills of some of the UK’s leading VR programmers, with insights from actual migraine sufferers, we built a custom-made rig and created a filmed experiment that allowed users to see the world through the eyes of migraine sufferers. The project was turned around within a 3 week deadline and with a £12,000 budget.

Understanding that every migraine is personal, we teamed real-life sufferers with VR developers to create a virtual world that mirrored the sufferers’ own experiences. Friends, family members and co-workers of migraine sufferers were challenged to take on a migraine for just 30 minutes in a regular day.

One of the biggest technical challenges was to overcome the inherent problem of virtual reality – the ‘lag’ (or ‘visual delay’). As the Oculus Rift is not designed to display video in real time, we developed bespoke drivers and used a high-spec capture card to minimise lag on the two web cameras, running simultaneously on one PC carried within the backpack. This made the experiment as realistic as possible. We’ve seen many in the VR field try and tackle this problem, and failed, which makes this this achievement particularly innovative.

The migraine simulator was created so sufferers could show non-sufferers, who otherwise could never understand, what migraine really looks like. Seeing the world through the eyes of a sufferer increased the users’ level of understanding and empathy, changing the perception that migraine is ‘just a bad headache’.

Excedrin’s migraine simulator used the latest virtual reality platform (Oculus Rift DK1 at the time of development) and then adapted both hardware and software functionalities to create a fully immersive experience where users could interact with their environment but with the effect of migraine overlaid on top.

The prototype was built using custom-designed 3D printed mounts that secured two wide-angle cameras to the front of the VR headset. Two real-time video feeds were then streamed into TouchDesigner, which we then programmed to overlay personalised migraine symptoms onto the screens within the headset. This meant users could still see and interact with the world as they normally would.

To increase the mobility of our innovation, we adapted the Oculus Rift device for wireless use by combining a processor, battery, PC and cooling rack in a wearable backpack. The additional processor was required to record the user’s experience while streaming the display to a local screen for external monitoring.

Finally, we designed an interface to control the experiment, which was controlled using a custom iPad app. This allowed our technician to supervise each participant wearing the device. The technician slowly increased the severity of the symptoms to mimic each individual migraine, thus providing a life-like reconstruction of what migraine sufferers truly experience.

The biggest technical challenge was overcoming the ‘lag’ (or ‘visual delay’) in between the live camera feeds the user experience. This required a lot of processing power along with innovative coding and video processing techniques.

With strong interest from Google and Facebook wanting to potentially collaborate and form new platforms to create user-generated content, the ‘Migraine Through my Eyes’ technology has received unbelievable attention. The scalability and innovation of the project has also been mentioned to Palmer Luckey, the original founder of Oculus Rift, and has since generated an unexpected amount of internal funding.

With immediate plans to expand the project’s reach, it’s currently being streamlined to fit a multitude of purposes for the brand communication channels (see confidential section 4). We’ve already created a global model for local markets to buy and demonstrate the technology as a demonstration/sales kit at press launches and trade shows. The brand also plans to take the kit on the road, allowing the public to experience it for themselves at a series of experiential events.

We developed the ‘Excedrin Experiments’ as a long-term platform for the brand to keep on innovating and challenging the perception of migraine, using new and cutting-edge technology. The long-term goal for Excedrin is to ‘open more eyes to migraine’ - helping people realise the severity of migraine as a condition, increasing empathy for migraine sufferers and thus positioning Excedrin as ‘the empathetic expert’.