Dick Tracey didn’t have to visit a tall building to get over his fear of heights. He put on a virtual reality headset.

Through VR, he rode an elevator to a high-rise atrium that looked so real he fell to his knees.

“I needed to search with my hand for something solid around me,” he said.

He told himself, “I must look stupid. Let’s just stand up. Nothing’s going to happen.”

Virtual reality therapy can help people like Tracey by exposing them gradually to their greatest terrors. The technology is just now reaching the mainstream after 20 years of research. Equipment is lighter and more affordable, with tech advances spilling over from the gaming industry to help people fight disabling fears of flying, heights, spiders or dogs.

And the surge in products is bringing VR to more therapists’ offices. Experts predict people with mild phobias will treat themselves successfully at home.

Research shows VR therapy can lead to real-world gains for people with phobias, and works as well as traditional exposure therapy, which slowly subjects patients to what causes anxiety for them.

For Denver librarian Nick Harrell, VR was a booster shot after traditional therapy for fear of flying. Panic drove him off a flight to Paris two years ago, forcing him to abandon a vacation with his girlfriend.

“I don’t like being locked in the metal tube,” Harrell explained. “I couldn’t breathe. My chest was pounding.”

With help from a therapist, Harrell first faced his fears through exposure therapy. Elevators, buses and trains were good practice for airplanes.

“Within a matter of months, I was flying again,” Harrell said.

With VR recently added to his therapy, Harrell keeps fears in check. His health insurance covers the cost with a small copay.

But few people with phobias seek treatment. Too embarrassed to get help, many plan their lives around avoiding their fears.

Tracey of Oxfordshire, England, avoided heights, from ladders to breathtaking vistas. Escalators gave the 62-year-old retiree heart palpitations. His wife walked between him and steep slopes.

Tracey’s VR therapy was part of a study . He was one of the first to try a VR world with an animated virtual coach. University of Oxford psychology professor Daniel Freeman developed the program for an Oxford spin-off with support from the National Health Service.

Freeman’s team is now at work on a VR world where people with schizophrenia can practice being in a cafe, elevator or store.

“Many of our patients are withdrawn from the world,” Freeman said. The fear-of-heights VR program shows you can automate treatment.

What is VR? Put on a headset and look around. You’ll see a simulation of an interactive, three-dimensional environment. Look up and you’ll see the sky; look down and your own hands and feet may come into view.

With exposure therapy, a therapist can accompany a person who’s afraid of heights to a tall building. With VR, a patient learns to feel safe on a virtual high-rise balcony, without leaving the therapist’s office.

Exposure works by gradually taking the oomph out of panic. Sweaty palms and pounding hearts ease. Fears shrink to manageable levels. By riding it out, a person learns the feelings are survivable.

The best studies on VR exposure therapy have been small with fewer than 100 patients. Increasingly VR therapy will be delivered at home via the internet, a still largely unstudied area, said Katharina Meyerbroker, a researcher at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, who has published reviews of research done in the field.

Harrell’s therapist is helping field-test VR content for a company called Limbix, an arrangement between the company and the National Mental Health Innovation Center at University of Colorado’s medical school.

Such ties are important for VR companies, which need scientific credibility to sell their products to therapists. Researchers gain too.

“We’ve all been piggybacking on this technology that was initially developed for video gaming,” said Hunter Hoffman, a research scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle who developed an early VR therapy called Spider World two decades ago. He didn’t license his arachnophobia project like other early researchers who’ve teamed up with companies to sell VR platforms and content.

Children may someday use VR to learn to cope with anxiety, said Stephen Whiteside, director of the Mayo Clinic Pediatric Anxiety Disorders Clinic, where a study targets kids with schoolwork anxieties.

In the VR scenario, a classroom teacher hands back a school paper with a bad grade.

“You hear the voices of other kids laughing and saying you didn’t do so well,” Whiteside said. “When I first watched it, I had a visceral response myself. It made you nervous.”

The Mayo researchers say children prefer the VR experience to traditional exposure therapy. Next they’ll test whether it works as well.

Whiteside said VR researchers everywhere must demonstrate benefits that outweigh treatment costs, which can reach $200 per session in some specialty clinics.

“The cheaper and more accessible it gets,” Whiteside said, “the easier that will be.”

VR therapy made life simpler for Tracey. After seven VR sessions, he now easily parks his car atop a multi-story garage. He stood on the flat roof of his house to clean his carport.

“I would never have dreamed of doing that before,” he said. “I now know how much the fear of heights restricted my everyday life.”

LOS ANGELES — HBO’s “Game of Thrones” recaptured the best drama series award and Amazon’s “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” became the first streaming series to win top Emmy comedy honors on Monday at a ceremony that largely slighted its most ethnically diverse field of nominees ever.

With the exception of “Saturday Night Live,” broadcast shows were shut out of the top awards as 21st-century platforms continued to overshadow traditional network fare like “This Is Us,” among the also-rans.

“The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” Amazon’s freshman sitcom about an unhappy 1950s homemaker liberated by stand-up comedy, earned best actress honors for star Rachel Brosnahan.

Her castmate Alex Borstein earned the supporting actress trophy and the series creator, Amy Sherman-Palladino, nabbed writing and directing awards.

Claire Foy of “The Crown” and Matthew Rhys of “The Americans” won top drama acting Emmys, their first trophies for the roles and last chance to claim them, with Foy’s role as Queen Elizabeth II going to another actress and Rhys’ show wrapped.

The field bested by Foy included last year’s winner Elisabeth Moss for “The Handmaid’s Tale” and Sandra Oh of “Killing Eve,” who would have been the first actor of Asian descent to get a top drama award.

“This wasn’t supposed to happen,” said a startled Foy. She played the young British queen who, as the series progresses, will advance in years.

“Game of Thrones,” which sat out last year’s Emmys because of scheduling, won its third best drama trophy despite competition from defending champ “The Handmaid’s Tale.”

“Thank you for letting us take care of your people,” ”Game of Thrones” producer D.B. Weiss said to George R.R. Martin, whose novels fuel the drama.

In a ceremony that started out congratulating TV academy voters for a historically diverse field of nominees ever, the early awards all went to whites.

An African-American sweep of guest series actor awards at the recent creative arts Emmys signaled major change in the awards, which only recently have given significant honors to performers and creators of color.

But there was disappointment for “Atlanta,” which had claimed acting and directing trophies last year for its star and creator Donald Glover and seemed poised for more with 16 nominations.

Rather than become the first black-led comedy in 33 years to be named the best (since “The Cosby Show” in 1985), “Atlanta” was shut out Monday (it won two awards, including guest actor for Katt Williams, last week).

The showing by “Mrs. Maisel” extended the long winning streak of shows that focus on white lives, including “Modern Family” and “Friends,” with ethnic minorities rarely given screen time.

“Let’s get it trending: #EmmysSoWhite,” presenter James Corden joked at the ceremony’s midway point.

Then Regina King broke the string, with a best actress trophy in a limited series or movie for “Seven Seconds,” which tracks the fallout from a white police officer’s traffic accident involving a black teenager.

She was followed by Darren Criss, who won the lead acting award for the miniseries “The Assassination of Gianni Versace” and who is of Filipino descent.

Thandie Newton won best supporting drama actress for “Westworld,” and Peter Dinklage added a third trophy to his collection for “Game of Thrones.”

Brosnahan used her acceptance speech to give a shout-out to her comedy’s celebration of women power.

“It’s about a woman who’s finding her voice anew, and it’s one of the things that’s happening all over the country now,” she said. She urged the audience to exercise that power by voting.

Bill Hader collected the best comedy actor award for “Barry,” a dark comedy about a hired killer who stumbles into a possible acting career.

Henry Winkler, aka “The Fonz,” won a supporting actor award — his first Emmy — for “Barry,” four decades after gaining fame for his role in “Happy Days.”

“If you stay at the table long enough, the chips come to you. Tonight, I got to clear the table,” an ebullient Winkler said, with an equally delighted auditorium audience rising to give him a standing ovation. To his grown children, he said: “You can go to bed now, daddy won!”

The biggest award won by a broadcast network was “Saturday Night Live” for best variety sketch series.

The Emmys had a real-life dramatic moment when winning director Glenn Weiss, noting his mother had died two weeks ago, proposed to his girlfriend, Jan Svendsen.

“You wonder why I don’t want to call you my girlfriend? It’s because I want to call you my wife,” Weiss said. She said yes, he put his mother’s ring on her finger and the crowd whooped and cheered.

John Oliver, in picking up the trophy for best variety talk show award for “Last Week Tonight,” thanked Weiss’ girlfriend for giving the right answer or, he joked, the whole ceremony could have gone south.

The Emmys kicked off with a song, “We Solved It,” a self-mocking celebration to the diversity of nominees sung by stars including Kate McKinnon and Kenan Thompson. The tune included a mention of Oh’s possible victory: “There were none, now there’s one, so we’re done,” the comedians sang.

Oh played along from her seat: “Thank you, but it’s an honor just to be Asian,” said the Korean-Canadian actress.

“Saturday Night Live” creator Lorne Michaels, producing his second Emmy telecast in 30 years, was tasked with turning viewership around after the 2017 show’s audience of 11.4 million narrowly avoided the embarrassment of setting a new low.

The ceremony clearly bore his stamp, with Michael Che and Colin Jost as hosts and familiar “SNL” faces, including Kate McKinnon and Alec Baldwin, as presenters and nominees. The long-running NBC sketch show, already the top Emmy winner ever with 71, won again for best variety sketch series.

The pressure was on Michaels because NBC and other broadcasters are increasingly reliant on awards and other live events to draw viewers distracted by streaming and more 21st- century options.

The networks, which air the Emmy telecast on a rotating basis, are so eager for the ad dollars it generates and its promotional value for fall shows that they endure online competitors sharing — and dominating — the stage.