Except for video games and movies, there’s no doubt that virtual reality will be on the verge of improving the lives of people with a variety of medical issues, which is very meaningful and perfect matches my goal as a designer.
My summer internship is at a technology company focusing on healthcare industry. They have some potential projects to cooperate with a professor from Harvard University who is a psychologist and a specialist in using VR for mental health. I luckily got a chance to participate in their projects in the future.
The focus is creating a novel solution for bipolar disorder by combining VR, motion capture, and digital health, improving diagnosis techniques and thus create more effective treatments using these technology.
I wanted to try out a Mocap + VR project in this class for this idea. I envisioned there would have two different environments: peaceful versus noisy.
1.Peaceful nature with fewer people: ocean, forest, lake, mountain, etc.
2.Noisy city with crowded people: subway station (Grand central), park (luna park at Cony Island), Time Square, etc.
People who was diagnosed with bipolar disorder could be one of the avatars in the virtual world. They will see themselves in VR and interact with people and environment. The patients all live in the public space, so it’s hard to make a observation everyday and in different situations. So by creating a simulated environment, psychologists can work out what the mental pressure points are: exactly when patients start worrying, what kind of scenarios they’re most afraid of, and so on. One simulation will involve getting patients in a crowded scene and monitoring how they react to the people and events they encounter along the journey; the other simulation will take place on the pure nature scene to make a total contrastive surrounding.
Because doing motion capture in VR can create the same kind of mental and physical reactions as real life, doctors can use it to watch patients’ responses first-hand and have more insight into a condition. They are then in a better position to offer advice and guidance for coping with situations back in the real world, or pre-emptively to stop mental health problems before they get serious.
Mocap lab documentation
1.Calibration. To start, click on calibration > start wanding. Then walking in a zigzag way and waving the stick towards all the cameras. And showing some love to those cameras whose number changed very slow. The light of that selected camera will turn to yellow when we click on it on the software. The goal is to get the samples reach 10000.
2. Calculating.
3. Determining ground plane.
4. Creating rigid bodies.
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