How effective is Virtual Reality as a research tool for simulating gambling environments in psychological studies?

The work presented in this thesis aims to design, develop and investigate the effectiveness of a Virtual Reality (VR) tool for conducting research in gambling behaviour. The majority of existing gambling studies are conducted in laboratories, rather than in vivo, raising questions over the generalisability of results [1]. VR is well established as an effective tool for exposure therapy, often motivated by an ability to create ecologically valid conditions whilst retaining experimental control, which is difficult to do in vivo. Whilst VR has also been used in some gambling studies, no work has considered how VR environments should be designed to best create ecological validity, and the differences in experience between laboratory and VR conditions. This thesis presents the process of designing and developing a VR tool, featuring a gambling task and VR environment to create an experience of gambling in a betting shop. A prototype artefact was tested within a pilot study to identify and fix bugs prior to starting user studies. Approached from the perspective of immersion, arousal and user experience; a within-subjects study (N = 48) was conducted. During this, participants were tasked with playing through the gambling task on a touch-screen tablet in a laboratory, before repeating the same task on a Virtual Gambling Machine (VGM) within the VR simulation of a betting shop. Subjective measures were applied to measure immersion, emotional involvement and workload. The results of user studies show that participants reported higher levels of arousal, in addition to higher levels of immersion in the gambling game when playing in VR. There was also a significant difference in self-reported physical task load in VR. These findings suggest that VR offers high levels of immersion which enable a user to better engage and focus on a research task, without a negative impact upon cognitive workload due to the VR equipment. Increased levels of arousal in the VR condition also mirror affects observed in existing work comparing in vivo conditions to laboratory-based methods [2], [3]. Based on these findings, we argue that VR should see wider use within gambling research, and propose that future work should compare VR with in vivo methods. This thesis also details the design and development steps required to create a tool which can effectively combine ecological validity and experimental control, demonstrating how key challenges were tackled and offering insight for future work. Additionally, the work presented in this thesis resulted in the creation of a VR environment which was designed and implemented to accommodate any gambling task. This VR tool offers psychology researchers the opportunity to create a game suited to their research needs and easily integrate it into a VR environment, offering ecological validity for experiments with little additional effort. This integration system can be ported into any VR environment created within the Unity engine to help suit the needs of specific research

Évaluation de l'efficacité et des facteurs prédicteurs de l'exposition in virtuo et in vivo dans le traitement de l'arachnophobie

Dans la thérapie cognitive et comportementale, l'exposition demeure une des stratégies d'intervention les plus efficaces pour traiter les troubles anxieux et particulièrement la phobie spécifique (PS). L'application de l'exposition à l'aide de la réalité virtuelle offre la possibilité de faciliter l'exposition de par la variété et la rareté des stimuli, le contrôle des stimuli et la possibilité d'administrer l'intervention dans le bureau du thérapeute. Cette modalité d'application alternative à l'exposition in vivo doit être validée empiriquement afin d'évaluer son efficacité réelle et de justifier son utilisation. À cet effet, le présent programme de recherche compare deux modalités d'expositions, in vivo et in virtuo, dans le traitement de l'arachnophobie. L'expérimentation comprenant 32 participants a été faite selon un protocole d'essai clinique contrôlé avec assignation aléatoire et groupe contrôle. Les données indiquent que les deux types d'exposition semblent comparables en termes d'efficacité. Elles ne présentent pas de différences significativement sur 4 des 5 mesures de la peur des araignées. Dans la perspective d'offrir le traitement optimal selon les besoins de l'individu, le programme de recherche a porté également sur l'étude des facteurs pouvant prédire l'efficacité du traitement. Les données obtenues permettent d'observer que les individus ayant une perception favorable de leur traitement présentent moins de symptômes phobiques à la suite du traitement tout comme ceux occupant un emploi lors du traitement. Une intervention ciblant spécifiquement la perception du traitement pourrait donc potentiellement augmenter son efficacité. Occuper un emploi lors du traitement semble un prédicteur d'une plus grande diminution de symptômes suite au traitement. Ce prédicteur nécessiterait une évaluation plus poussée afin d'en comprendre ses effets et son fonctionnement. Le présent programme de recherche permet de conclure que la réalité virtuelle est une modalité d'intervention qui pourrait s'avérer un outil de traitement aussi efficace que l'exposition in vivo. Le développement de la réalité virtuelle comme modalité d'exposition s'avère une avenue d'intervention prometteuse qu'il faudrait continuer d'investir. De plus, les avantages de cette modalité pourraient en faire un traitement de choix \ud ______________________________________________________________________________ \ud MOTS-CLÉS DE L’AUTEUR : Réalité virtuelle, phobie spécifique, exposition in vivo, exposition in virtuo, araignée

A domain specific language for dynamic interest management within virtual environments

Interest management is a widely used term within the area of virtual environments. It is so widely used that there even exist many synonyms for the concept. Thus both the terminology, and meaning of the concept are currently not well defined. The typical aim of interest management techniques within virtual environments has been to increase scalability. However, this thesis argues that the concept of interest management should not be so tightly coupled with the goal of scalable virtual environments, but be a concept in its own right, i.e. the management of interests. The main focus of this thesis is the representation of expressions of interest. The various techniques for expressing interest are surveyed and evaluated, providing the basis for the research into a suitable representation. This representation is achieved in two stages. The first part of this thesis introduces a novel dynamic interest management technique based upon set theory. It describes how it is expressive enough to implement most of the static interest management techniques currently available such as categorisation, locales, and interacting locales. By de-coupling the logic that implements these interests from the virtual environment, it can also describe how interests can be changed during the virtual environment's execution, thus making the technique dynamic. Enforcing and denying interests is also considered, allowing for the enforcement of interests integral to the requirements of the virtual environment. An example of this is denying the user the ability to be interested in artefacts that aren't visible. The new approach presented is implemented with SQL, and evaluated. The second part of this thesis focusses on the limitations of using SQL as an implementation language, focussing on issues of readability and succinctness and a lack of any abstraction mechanisms. Overcoming these limitations is treated as the primary design goal for a new domain specific language for representing interests. The thesis introduces this language, Wish, and evaluates it within the domain, demonstrating that it is as expressive as SQL yet is more readable, conceptually succinct and allows for arbitrary abstraction of complexity.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo