It is called Peter, a virtual spider designed for the treatment and diagnosis of phobias. This novel instrument, which was created by the University of Pisa, is available for free download to assist clinicians and psychologists in the evaluation of phobic avoidance, a behavior that is most frequently linked to a variety of anxiety-related disorders. The tool is open source and requires only a virtual reality headset. Bioengineers from the Department of Information Engineering and psychologists from the Department of Surgical, Medical, and Molecular Pathology, as well as the Critical Care Area at the University of Pisa, wrote the article documenting the work, which was published in Communications Psychology, a Nature journal. "We created a scenario that exposes people to their fears by replicating in virtual reality a test used since the 1960s, in which people find themselves in a corridor with a large spider at the end", says Sergio Frumento, a researcher at the University of Pisa. Participants in the experiment were instructed to go as near to the spider as possible. This allowed us to properly quantify how long it took them to finish the task and their walking speed". Additionally, Alberto Greco, a professor at the University of Pisa, notes that "we have for the first time introduced a differentiation of avoidance behavior into different subtypes, which is very relevant for choosing the most appropriate treatment for each patient". The study included 75 people with varied degrees of arachnophobia. The study discovered distinct types of avoidance based on the trajectories used to approach the spider, each with its own psychological interpretation and, as a result, treatment. Greco concludes, "The subsequent phase will involve the integration of the system with the detection of physiological signals, such as heart rate, to conduct a more comprehensive evaluation of the subject's anxiety".