User:Fatma Inan

File:Fatma Inan.jpg

Fatma Inan

Human-Computer Interaction

Project

Project: Social Phobia

Title: Virtual Reality and Social Phobia: Recreating a social situation in Virtual Reality

Abstract

Virtual Reality (VR) is a technology which allows a user to interact with a computer simulated environment and could offer a powerful tool in the future treatment of phobias. An application of VR is Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy (VRET) in which a phobia patient is exposed to a virtual environment containing the feared stimulus instead of being taken into a real environment or having to imagine the stimulus. This research aims to examine if the simulated social situation in the prototype virtual environment, especially developed for this purpose, is able to provoke the same behavioral response as the real life situation. If this is the case, it would be a step towards implementation of VRET in social phobia treatment. Two cases were examined in the prototype virtual environment to assess whether it was able to recreated social behavior of people. First, we examined if participant who enter a crowded room in the virtual environment prefer to take a seat in a chair that is close to them. Secondly, we investigated if participants in the virtual environment have the tendency to physically distance themselves from strangers when choosing a seat in a room full of strangers. We covered the prototype design of a social situation in a virtual world, the implementation of the prototype, the applied software and techniques and the results of a pilot experiment with the virtual world. We concluded, based on the two cases we examined during our experiments, that a social situation can be recreated in a virtual world.

Conclusion

We designed and implemented a prototype virtual environment for the treatment of social phobia. The applied software and techniques were presented and used for the implementation of the prototype. We implemented three main elements of social phobia into our virtual environment to induce social phobia symptoms such as anticipated anxiety. We performed the experiment, evaluated the result and have reached our research goals for this thesis. With the experiment we observed that people entering a room with strangers prefer to sit down on a chair close to them. We also observed that the participants preferred the chair with no avatars around them rather than the chairs with avatars surrounding it. The reaction of the participants to the implemented virtual situation was in accordance with the assumed behavioral response. Since social phobia patients show an extreme form of the responses that people without social phobia experience we can conclude that the real life social situation has been successfully recreated in the VR environment. We can unfortunately not confirm that the prototype can be used for VRET for social phobia, because we had a very limited number of social phobia participants to draw that conclusion. However, we have recreated a social situation in VR and made a first step towards a virtual environment that can serve as a prototype for virtual worlds that will be built in the future to treat social phobia with VRET.

Recommendations

The prototype used in the experiment covers several requirements for social phobia. There are already two parameters implemented in the prototype that could be manipulated by therapist during exposure therapy, but still a lot of improvements can be made. The design of the room can be more symmetric and the navigation could be changed, e.g. by making the participants walk through the room and between the chairs to provoke anxiety. For graded exposure, anxiety arousing sounds could be added into the virtual environment such as a whole group that starts laughing when the patient enters the room. The number of avatars can vary, manipulated and be placed on different chairs. More interaction between the avatars and the patient can be built in the virtual environment such as a conversation and eye contact. The objective measurements like heart rate and perspiration could be used to test if a situation has indeed provoked anxiety. All of these aspects can be incorporated in the future in our prototype to achieve a more improved VRET for social phobia.