- Get engaged left and right.
Contact right, contact right.
Back of our vehicle just got hit.
20, 30 Marines up there that got hit.
It's pretty catastrophic.
(gentle music)
My name is Chris Merkle, I'm a veteran
of the United States Marine Corps
and I'm a full-time student,
trying to reinvent myself
and transition back into
normal civilian life.
I joined right out of high school
when I was 17.
My role in the Marine Corps
was just a grunt, infantryman.
So, nothing fancy, just the down and dirty
of what war comes down to.
You’d experience something that's horrific,
that your body doesn't
know how to comprehend,
and when you don't address
it, it just manifests
in this horrible thing, and you end up
locked in your room hating the world,
thinking everybody's coming after you.
And I didn't want to be that person.
Talk therapy after talk
therapy, it wasn't working,
and it was like, now what?
What am I gonna do?
Virtual reality was a godsend.
- [Albert] Okay.
You can begin
to narrate the experience
that you went through.
- All right, so it's a really
dark, it's early morning.
All right, there you go.
We start taking some small arms fire.
Some machine gun fire.
All right, can you do
a big explosion up ahead?
(gunfire explosions)
Yeah, just a really surreal scene
just to see event, after event,
after event, after event.
- I think it's hard for people to imagine
the enormity of the
challenges that people face
when they come back from war
and adjust to civilian life.
We can activate emotions
in a very deep way in VR,
helping a patient go back and confront,
and process very difficult
emotional memories.
Advanced processing power,
faster computers are
essential for delivering good VR.
With the technology getting better,
computers have gotten faster, and you know,
things like some of the
latest Intel processors,
they're mind blowing,
they're like rockets.
And so, that's why we can deliver VR
that can make a difference
in people's lives.
You know, we ask so much
of our service members,
and we can't forget them
when they come back.
They deserve our best efforts,
and the best technology
available to help them get
back on the right track
for the rest of their life.
- So I'm setting a new path for myself.
I wanna be a clinical psychologist.
I finished my undergrad
literally two weeks ago,
I jumped ahead to a masters
and a doctorate program yesterday.
I have five years ahead of
me, and a whole lifetime
ahead of that to hopefully
help as many people as I can.
And go to school and help others.
- VR is a transformative technology
that's going to change
everything about how we learn,
how we heal, how we experience places
that we could never go to.
The cool thing is that these
are really consumer products
everyone will have one in their home,
and the advanced level of
processing that we're getting
allows everyone to be
able to buy a computer
that'll run a state of the art VR headset
and you'll be able to consume media
in dramatically new ways.
There's so much value
beyond just entertainment,
to use the power of this
technology to help people,
that is really exciting for me.
