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Popular computer games like Half-Life and Unreal Tournament could provide a cheap and effective treatment for people with debilitating phobias, say Canadian computer scientists.
Specially made virtual reality (VR) equipment is already used to treat certain types of phobia. Exposing patients to the source of their pathological fear within this controlled and safe environment can be an effective therapy.
But Patrice Renaud and colleagues at the University of Quebec in Canada took the simpler approach of customising existing games to create VR worlds for a range of phobias. Tests with phobic patients showed that the games stimulated a response that could be used to perform controlled treatment.
The researchers suggest that computer games might, therefore, be a cheap and easy-to-use form of VR treatment. The whole cost of the software and hardware comes to a few hundred dollars rather than many thousands, they say. The games also provide highly realistic graphics and can be easily adapted to an individual patient's particular fears.
Exposure therapy
"The effectiveness of the inexpensive hardware and software used in this study shows that VR technology is sufficiently advanced for VR exposure therapy to move into the clinical mainstream," they write in a paper published in the journal CyberPsychology & Behaviour.
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Pac-Manhattan is a live-action game that uses the New York City grid to recreate the 1980's video game Pac-Man. Developed in NYU's Interactive Telecommunications graduate program, its objective is to investigate what happens when games are removed from tabletops, televisions and computers and placed in the "real world".
A player dressed as Pac-man has to collect the virtual "dots" on the streets. Four competitors dressed as the ghosts attempt to catch Pac-man before he collects all the dots.
Through mobile phone contact, Wi-Fi connections, and software designed by the Pac-Manhattan team, Pac-man and the ghosts are tracked from a central location and their progress broadcast over the internet for viewers from around the world.
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Demor is a location based 3D audio shooter. The game was developed by a multi-disciplinary group of seven EMMA-students for the Bartimeus Institute for the Blind (The Netherlands). Demor can be played by both blind as sighted players.
Ingredients: players are equipped with a a laptop in a backpack, headphones, a GPS module, a head tracker and a modified joystick. The playfield can be any large, empty outdoor space.
Receipt: Player starts at point zero
Pressing the joystick button, the player is wrapped in a 3D audio shooting environment. He can then move through the sound surroundings and hear noises from his left, right and the direction in which he is heading, they can arrive from close-by or from a distance. Such sounds are produced by - among other - the enemies, the surroundings and ammunition.
The soundscape adjusts itself in real time to the position of the player and the direction in which he moves his head.
To get the highest score, the player must shoot as many "bad guys" as possible by turning his head towards them and then pulling 'the trigger'.
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A novel interactive way to relate children's stories has been developed by researchers in Singapore. The Magic Story Cube uses augmented reality technology, in which computer graphics are superimposed on the real world, to overlay an animated version of a story on top of a child's traditional "magic cube".
A standard magic cube is made up of a handful of smaller wooden or plastic cubes connected at various edges. These can be unfolded in a variety of ways to reveal a sequence of puzzles or different pictures. But now Adrian Cheok and Zhou ZhiYing at the Mixed Reality Lab at the National University of Singapore (NUS) have updated the children's toy.
Their first attempt is to tell the Old Testament story of Noah's ark. To watch the story unfold, the user wears a virtual reality headset with a small camera attached to the front. Both the camera and headset are plugged into a computer running software that recognises numbers printed on different cubes.
When the user unfolds the cube to reveal a particular numbered square, the computer uses this as its cue to run a segment of audio and animated three-dimensional video, which tells part of the Noah's ark story.
Arrows printed on the cubes tell the user how to unfold the cube to move to the next scene. Each numbered square that appears then pulls up the relevant video.
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A new type of Blu-Ray digital video disk made largely from paper has been developed by Sony and Toppan Printing in Japan. The two companies say such paper-based disks will be cheaper to make and less environmentally harmful.
Blu-Ray disks, considered a successor to conventional DVDs, store data using a blue laser rather than a regular red one. Because the wavelength of the blue laser is smaller, more information can be read from this type of disk.
Data is stored on Blu-Ray disks in the form of tiny ridges on the surface of an opaque 1.1-millimetre-thi ck substrate. This lies beneath a transparent 0.1mm protective layer.
The substrate is normally made from a polycarbonate plastic, which is ultimately derived from crude oil. But Sony and Toppan Printing have replaced this with a mixture of paper and another polymer.
The resulting prototype consists of 51 per cent paper but is still capable of storing up to 25 gigabytes of data. Regular DVDs have less than half this capacity.
"Oil is a limited resource but paper can be recycled," said Sony spokesman Taro Takamine. "One of the initial advantages of the paper disk will be a decrease in the amount of raw material needed to produce a disk."
Another benefit of the paper-based disks is ease of disposal, according to Hideaki Kawai, head of Toppan's R&D division.
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