Virtual reality exposure therapy for social phobia

This thesis presents researches and experiments performed in collaboration with a psychiatrist in order to validate and improve the use of virtual reality in social phobia psychotherapy. Cognitive and behavioral therapies are strongly based on the exposure to anxiety provoking stimuli. Virtual reality seems to be appropriate for such exposures as it allows for on-demand reproduction of reality. The idea has been validated for the treatment of various phobias but is more delicate in the case of social phobia; whereas the sense of presence provoked by the immersion in a virtual environment supports the emergence of fears linked to a location, we had to verify that we can reproduce social phobia related anxiety-provoking stimuli by simulating virtual humans. Therefore, and in order to provide therapists with an efficient virtual reality system dedicated to the exposure to social situations, we have developed software solutions supporting different immersion setups and enabling realistic simulations of inhabited virtual environments. We have experimented with public speaking scenarios within a preliminary study, three clinical case studies and a validation study on 200 subjects. We have been able to confirm that our virtual reality platform fulfilled therapeutic exposure requirements for social phobia. Moreover, we have been able to show that virtual reality exposure has additional advantages such as the possibility to improve clinical assessment with embedded monitoring tools. Our experiments with physiological measurements and eye tracking technology during immersion leaded to the validation of systems for objective and reliable assessment of patients' safety behaviors. The observation of such phobic reactions has confirmed the simulation impact and may provide therapists with enhanced pathological progression monitoring. During our experiments, we have also been able to observe that subjects' reactions during immersion were so much influenced by their sensitivity to fearful stimuli that their cognitive reactions were 'overloaded' by the arousal of anxiety and emotions. This has allowed us to consider that the sense of presence was more importantly related to the subjective impact of the content than to the technological process

Remote Phobia Treatment as a Tactile Internet Application Case Study in Edge augmented with Mobile Ad Hoc Clouds Environment

Tactile Internet is a next generation Internet that allows the transmission of haptic sensations in addition to audio and video content. It is expected to enable new latency-sensitive and critical use cases, such as remote phobia treatment, tele-surgery and autonomous driving. However, the current networking infrastructure cannot ensure the strict requirements that come with Tactile Internet, namely ultra-responsiveness and ultra-reliability. \indent Edge computing can help in solving this issue. While Cloud Computing offers powerful computing resources at distant data centers, Edge computing provides resources closer to the end user. To this end, computations can be offloaded from the cloud to the edge to obtain lower latency. In addition, as the Edge itself may prove to be insufficiently close to the end users’ devices in some cases, it can be augmented with Mobile Ad-Hoc Clouds. The Mobile Ad-hoc Clouds refer to a group of mobile devices located at the immediate vicinity of the end users, offering their available resources for computation, leading therefore to a reduced latency. Nevertheless, the design and implementation of an architecture based on edges augmented with mobile ad-hoc clouds for Tactile Internet raises several challenges. Firstly, a tactile internet-based architecture for remote phobia treatment should allow the exchange of auditory, visual and haptic information to ensure the efficiency of the therapy. Secondly, the end to end latency should be in the order of a few milliseconds to avoid “cyber-sickness”. \indent This thesis provides a case study of edge augmented with mobile ad-hoc clouds architecture for remote phobia treatment. The contributions are threefold. First, a software architecture for remote phobia treatment is designed for an edge augmented with mobile ad hoc clouds environment. Second, a proof of concept prototype for the proposed architecture is implemented and evaluated using a set of haptic devices, which include the HTC Vive VR headset, the Leap Motion hand tracking device, as well as the Gloveone haptic glove. Third, a set of experiments consisting of placing the components in the different layers (i.e. Cloud, Edge and Mobile Ad-hoc Cloud) were conducted, which allowed an evaluation of the impact on performance. A set of high-level interfaces were introduced to allow communication with the heterogeneous devices. The design of the architecture as a set of software modules allows the reusability of the architecture

Acquisition and extinction across multiple virtual reality contexts: implications for specific phobias and current treatment methods

Victor Wong studied human acquisition learning over multiple contexts using virtual reality. He found that learning an association over multiple contexts can impact subsequent extinction training. This suggests that fears acquired over multiple contexts may be more difficult to treat using exposure-based therapies and will need to be augmented for effectiveness

Proceedings of the 5th international conference on disability, virtual reality and associated technologies (ICDVRAT 2004)

The proceedings of the conferenc

Proceedings of the 6th international conference on disability, virtual reality and associated technologies (ICDVRAT 2006)

The proceedings of the conferenc

VR Technologies in Cultural Heritage

This open access book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First International Conference on VR Technologies in Cultural Heritage, VRTCH 2018, held in Brasov, Romania in May 2018. The 13 revised full papers along with the 5 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 21 submissions. The papers of this volume are organized in topical sections on data acquisition and modelling, visualization methods / audio, sensors and actuators, data management, restoration and digitization, cultural tourism

VR Technologies in Cultural Heritage

This open access book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First International Conference on VR Technologies in Cultural Heritage, VRTCH 2018, held in Brasov, Romania in May 2018. The 13 revised full papers along with the 5 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 21 submissions. The papers of this volume are organized in topical sections on data acquisition and modelling, visualization methods / audio, sensors and actuators, data management, restoration and digitization, cultural tourism