http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/04/darpa-virtual-therapy/
Please find this Wired.com article on our combined effort across ICT and with Cogito below. The project aims to push the limits on intelligent virtual agents, user sensing, telemed applications and much much more. Regardless of what the article might convey, SimCoach and SimSensei are not intended as virtual therapists. They are intended to provide information, first assessment and guide the service members who are in need of therapy to the approriate resources and therapists.
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/04/darpa-virtual-therapy/
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Happy New Year!
Today the Kessler Foundation posted a press release about a project that our MedVR group at ICT is working involved in. Skip Rizzo and I went to New Jersey to visit the Kessler Rehab Institute. While Skip was invited for the Estabrook Lecture Series, I installed a prototype of the Virtual Office which our group has been working on for the past months. The application is aiming to assess and train executive functions in a realistic virtual office environment. Here is the press release:http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-01/kf-kfa011012.phphttp://www.youtube.com/user/KesslerFoundation#p/u/0/wCPmeFdMafU It seems that Weebly made some changes to their custom html objects. Last time I've checked, Unity content didn't display when using Weebly's custom html objects. I made a short video explaining how this can be achieved now. It's easier than ever and you can freely embed your Unity content in your Weebly webpage. Embedded video and download for HD version are available. Let me know if you have any questions. -Sebas ![]()
I finally made it and finished the video tutorial of how I created the HIT Lab NZ model. It got much longer than expected. It's around 30ish minutes in three parts and I talk about some aspects of Modeling in Google SketchUp (parts 1&2) and how to turn it into a walkthrough in Unity (part 3).
For better resolution I added the original video files as download. It's finally done; or at least complete enough to post it online. I had to make some modifications to the original walkthrough of the HIT Lab NZ, because it was intended to run on the 3 screens of the VisionSpace theatre as a stereoscopic display. The current version of the walkthrough is running in a standard web browser and is approximately a 6MB download (+ the Unity plugin if you don't have that already).
I only released parts of the hallway and the VisionSpace room. It is nothing but a demo project, but this can show you what is possible with very little amount of work. I finished the project in a few days after accurately measuring out the lab and taking pictures for reference and textures. Some of the texturing is very primitive and only rudimentary lighting via a lightmap is implemented. Every 3D artist would most likely run away screaming, but it's not art but rather the kind of environment I could use to simulate a navigation training or cognitive training for problem solving. I could give this to our Health & Safety Department so they can have people simulate fire / earthquake / tsunami alarms etc. It's not pretty, but useful....and very accurate. If the floorplan is accurate, this model is to scale to the closest millimeter. You can walk with WASD or the arrow keys on your keyboard and head rotation works via moving your mouse. Right-click on the player window to select fullscreen if you like. A decent graphics card is recommended. If it doesn't run on your machine, I can send it to you as an executable or a video recording would be an option as well. I'd appreciate feedback. Video tutorials about the creation of this walkthrough will follow. Enjoy! You can find the demo here. While the IPhone world is busy figuring out whether or not the new IPhone OS 4.0 Terms of Service allows for Unity content to be sold on the App Store, I would rather focus on writing about development of 3D content for research studies.
So how does it work? I have posted a multitude of learning resources for Unity, but all of them describe the process of making games. How about non-gaming applications? What's different for the respective development processes? Non-gaming applications span across a plethora of disciplines. These include serious games (where acquiring meaningful skills/information is the primary concern), cognitive experiments, art installations, marketing presentations, simulations (e.g. medical, architectural), trainings, information displays and many more. The use of Unity content which I am interested in usually involves the collection of data for academic purposes. I conduct studies within virtual environments to test hypotheses about human behavior and cognitive functions. By saying that, I'd like to stress that my experiences don't necessarily apply to all of these areas or even to psychological research in general; it's just my point of view, for what it's worth. |
Sebas
Experimental Psychologist Archives
January 2013
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