Psychiatry and Virtual Reality
projects for Eng 477
This page is organized to describe some of the ideas for Psychiatrically
oriented projects for the Eng477 class
My name is Milton
Huang, and I am a psychiatrist at the University of Michgan Hospital.
I am interested in the applications of Virtual Reality to the treatment
of psychiatric illness as well as understanding more about the psychological
implications of VR use. I have been working with students in Eng
477 for the last three years on such projects and am looking to continue
this tradition this year. Below are some of my interests. If
any of these match with yours, talk to me and we can see if we can generate
ideas or specific projects.
Height Estimation Projects
Many of you are already familiar with the height estimation protocol
we created using the model from the Acrophobia project (below). There
are many variations I'd like to test out:
Separate the binocular and visual angle clues to height by changing the
size of the model and moving it closer or farther away. This could
give the eye the same information about judging height based on shape,
but the height estimate from the binocular clues would be different.
Rotate the model so instead of looking down, you are looking across.
See if there are differences in ability to estimate distance/height.
Eliminate textures and use a lighting model to see how effective it is
in cueing.
If a group wants to work on other perceptual experiments/illusions, I would
be glad to help out. |
|
Acrophobia Project
|
This project has involved Eng477 students for the last few years.
You can read the report
from last year which recreated part of the UM hospital in VRML2.
We have since put the
environment into the CAVE. The current goal of this project would
be to optimize the CAVE experience for realism by reconstructing some of
the buildings to be more accurate, adding appropriate lighting, taking
higher quality photos for texture maps, or even adding people walking around. |
Other Phobia Projects
. |
Many other groups have created environments for treating acrophobia,
as well as fear
of spiders, fear
of flying, fear of public situations, etc. I would be happy to
work with others in designing other types of exposure environments.
The key of course, is to make the experience engaging and real enough to
emotionally affect the viewer. (i.e. make them afraid) You
pick a fear you are interested in. |
|
Sense of Presence in Virtual Reality
The sense of "Presence"
or "being there" one has when experiencing VR is a current research interest
of mine. This project would aim at creating a virtual environment
involving objects and simple manipulation tasks that could compare how
"present" people feel when the VE is experienced via the CAVE versus via
the BOOM versus through a screen. Tasks would involve creating a
storyline for the participant, then having them move through the environment
and manipulate virtual objects with a particular goal in mind. |
|
Virtual Humans
|
Virtual Humans are models of people created for virtual environments.
From a psychiatric perspective, I am interested in studying the emotional
response people have towards virtual people compared to real people.
This can involve anything from creating models
of facial expressions to animating video on top of a model. The
goal in this kind of project is getting an emotional response or to create
a system that allows us to examine how people respond to different types
of facial expressions. |
|
Brain Mapping
|
I am interested in taking brain mapping data and creating a three dimensional
surface model that one could walk through (literally!). Extensions
could allow labeling of structures or even the ability to add new neural
pathways with information about receptors like serotonin and dopamine. |