Fighting Fears with 3D

We have all felt that creepy, icy feeling in our brain when confronted with our worst fear; our throat closes up, sweat runs down our back, and we feel paralyzed. Fear ranges from the ridiculous – including the fear of long words, vampires, or money – to the common, spiders, or heights, but they all have one common trait: the potential to affect, profoundly, a person’s ability to operate within society. A salesperson with a fear of flying will automatically have a glass ceiling placed on his or her career. Patients with anxiety disorders must face their fears to conquer them but it does not come without complications. For instance, the salesperson that fears flying cannot change their minds about a flight once the plane is airborne – unless their experience is a virtual one.

Although phobias and anxiety disorders can be treated effectively using traditional approaches, immersive virtual environments offer a more practical approach in a clinical setting. A typical doctor’s office is no place to keep spiders, alligators, snakes, high places, tight places, or other common fear-inducers. However, these creepy crawlies and uncomfortable architectures are easily available in a VR studio.

This is why our researchers in the Cyberpsychology Lab and at the Canada Research Chair in Clinical Cyberpsychology at the Université du Québec en Outaouais (UQO), Canada, are leveraging immersive virtual environments to help patients with anxiety disorders face and manage their fears in a safe, controlled environment.
 

Facing Fears
Immersive treatment conditions are created by projecting the virtual environments on the walls, floor, and ceiling of a virtual cave environment, or by using special 3D goggles referred to as HMDs. Everywhere patients look, the environment surrounds them, changing as they react to the scenarios – much as a video game changes based on the choices players make. The applications are in use to treat patients with conditions ranging from simple phobias to social anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

For example, treatment for someone with arachnophobia – fear of spiders – is the presentation of a small digital spider located inside of a virtual environment. Since size, distance, and the spider’s behavior are critical factors in the treatment of people with fears involving living animals, therapists can adjust these variables in conjunction with a patient’s progress in his or her therapy. Over time, the physician could add in other factors such as increasing the number of spiders, shrinking the size of the environment, or even altering the type of spider to help overcome their eight-legged fears. Testing of other applications, which do not target anxiety, also occur with the team, such as Alzheimer’s disease and addiction.
 

Ready to Help
The possibility of these environments is through Dassault Systèmes’ 3DVIA technology. Researchers at UQO found that 3DVIA was the best choice because it is quick and easy to learn, supports rapid development of immersive virtual environments, and allows them use in virtual cave environments and head-mounted display (HMD) platforms.

To create immersive virtual environments, the first step is to develop 3D objects in specialized DCC (digital content creation) or CAD software. Optimizing and importing the models into a 3DVIA content authoring platform creates a real-time 3D application. 3DVIA’s content authoring tools enabled the researchers to focus on developing applications quickly that connect easily within an immersive virtuality environment.

Another benefit is that 3DVIA was compatible with all of the researcher’s existing hardware right out of the box. This means users could link the existing technology infrastructure to it, adding immersive virtual treatment environments. The 3DVIA application runs on the UOQ’s master PC with a cluster of six computers that project images to the virtual cube environment, ensuring the image is seamless where different surfaces meet. Perspective matrixes can change the point of view or stretch the image to show it properly as images distribute on the surfaces of the room, saving months during design. 3DVIA automatically makes the necessary adjustments once the geometry of the room is in the system.

Top: A UQO researcher works on a virtual reality setting. Bottom: Treatment for arachnophobia – fear of spiders – is the presentation of a small digital spider located inside a virtual environment.

Finally, with 3DVIA technology, users can easily publish applications in different types of immersive virtuality environments. 3DVIA’s use of VRPN, an open source protocol, allows its environments to be projected or displayed using virtually any hardware on the market. It is a simple, intuitive process to help clinics cater to a wide variety of illnesses within its clientele without forcing them to purchase costly new equipment.

If they had done everything from scratch, it would have taken many years to create the type of rehabilitation center that 3DVIA immediately gave.
 

Speed, Dependability, Progress
Because researcher at UQO are funded by research grants, if they needed to spend three years just to develop the backbone and all of the codes for the virtual environment, they would be out of cash. Speed is paramount and showing progress on their research is important for securing the next round of funding. Because the researchers can test 3DVIA applications directly in the authoring environment, they can be confident that it will deploy effectively to the VR platform.

3DVIA provides the UOQ’s staff with the flexibility, lifelike imaging, and collaborative features necessary for a research environment.

Virtual reality and augmented reality technology is quickly invading consumers’ lives through technologies such as the Microsoft Xbox Kinect, opening the door for the use of virtual worlds to advance new and effective forms of virtual therapy.

3D virtual applications in a therapeutic setting provide patients with an enhanced level of control that traditional methods are not able to match. Patients progressively carry their newfound confidence and lessons learned in virtual reality to the real world. As a result, patients have shown considerable progress in overcoming fears when facing with them in real life.
 

The 3DVIA application runs on the UOQ’s master PC with a cluster of six computers that project images to the virtual cube environment, ensuring the image is seamless where different surfaces meet.

That said, there is still more progress ahead for this groundbreaking treatment. Researchers have experienced a success rate equivalent to traditional methodologies but the increasingly sophisticated tactics used at UOQ and other facilities across the globe will turn that tide shortly. With virtual tools providing us with unencumbered flexibility in our treatment methods, we look forward to pushing the boundaries of technology to benefit the overall welfare of our patients.

Université du Québec en Outaouais
Québec, Canada
uqo.ca