Virtual Reality in Chemistry

Thank you for your excellent review. Especially it was a pleasant suprise to see that the article not only mentioned VRML (which about every article within the area does) but also clearly states that VRML is not Virtual Reality. I stronly support this statement. VRML is a language which describes (in version 2.0 animated) 3D scenes. With its hyperlink capabilities (similar to HTML) it is a great tool for building Web interfaces to 3D databases. However, it is not suitable for manipulating molecules in virtual reality. E.g.: it is not possible to grab a bond of a molecule and to turn it, in order to change a torsions angle. Such things are simply beyond the scope of VRML. Maybe someday Java3D applications filling this gap will appear.Some more infos and-I fear-errata: We, my co-authors and me, are cited in the chapter Immersive VR Molecular Modeling, 12th paragraph, [53]. Im glad to announce that this article is now available online at:http://tebio3.biologie.uni-stuttgart.de:8080/himm/public/himm_gcb96.htmlHowever, we are not the Biology Department of the University of Stuttgart, but the Institute of Technical Biochemistry of the chemistry department (of the University of Stuttgart). Our institutes home page and the homepage of the project cited within the article can be found at:http://tebio3.biologie.uni-stuttgart.de:8080/http://tebio3.biologie.uni-stuttgart.de:8080/himm/index.html     

Virtual Reality in Chemistry

With the advent of ever more powerful computer graphics hardware and visualization packages, new graphical methods of scientific visualization and data exploration are beginning to be explored. This includes fully immersive environments where the chemist is surrounded by data objects in 3D space. New models of animation and interactive manipulation of graphical entities are developed to help the chemist in gaining insight from or navigating in large amounts of data. This review discusses some representative approaches and systems which demonstrate where chemistry-related visualization and data management is headed.     

Virtual Reality: Viewership and Ethnographic Film

This article deals with the numerous difficulties in locating accuracy in representation. It expands C.S. Peirce's notion of the phaneron as applied to production and reception to the question of viewing of ethnographic flims. It revisits Wilton Martinez's seminal work on interpretation and ethnographic spectatorship critically. Keyan Tomaselli's model of the Phaneroscopic Table, derived from C.S. Peirce, is applied to the viewing situation itself. This article uses the metaphor of “virtual reality” to discuss the nature of iconic representation in relation to the viewer context. It examines some approaches of a variety of film theorists and reception scholars who have conducted empirical studies on reception.     

Image-guided surgery: From X-rays to Virtual Reality

Since the discovery of X-rays, medical imaging has played a major role in the guidance of surgical procedures. While medical imaging began with simple X-ray plates to indicate the presence of foreign objects within the human body, the advent of the computer has been a major factor in the recent development of this field. Imaging techniques have grown greatly in their sophistication and can now provide the surgeon with high quality three-dimensional images depicting not only the normal anatomy and pathology, but also vascularity and function. One key factor in the advances in Image-Guided Surgery (IGS) is the ability not only to register images derived from the various imaging modalities amongst themselves, but also to register them to the patient. The other crucial aspect of IGS is the ability to track instruments in real time during the procedure, and to portray them as part of a realistic model of the operative volume. Stereoscopic and virtual-reality techniques can usefully enhance the visualization process. IGS nevertheless relies heavily on the assumption that the images acquired prior to surgery, and upon which the surgical guidance is based, accurately represent the morphology of the tissue during the surgical procedure. In many instances this assumption is invalid, and intra-operative real-time imaging, using interventional MRI, Ultrasound, and electrophysiological recordings are often employed to overcome this limitation. Although now in extensive clinical use, IGS is often currently perceived as an intrusion into the operating room. It must evolve towards becoming a routine surgical tool, but this will only happen if natural and intuitive human interfaces are developed for these systems.     

Virtual Superheroes: Using Superpowers in Virtual Reality to Encourage Prosocial Behavior

Background

Recent studies have shown that playing prosocial video games leads to greater subsequent prosocial behavior in the real world. However, immersive virtual reality allows people to occupy avatars that are different from them in a perceptually realistic manner. We examine how occupying an avatar with the superhero ability to fly increases helping behavior.

Principal Findings

Using a two-by-two design, participants were either given the power of flight (their arm movements were tracked to control their flight akin to Superman’s flying ability) or rode as a passenger in a helicopter, and were assigned one of two tasks, either to help find a missing diabetic child in need of insulin or to tour a virtual city. Participants in the “super-flight” conditions helped the experimenter pick up spilled pens after their virtual experience significantly more than those who were virtual passengers in a helicopter.

Conclusion

The results indicate that having the “superpower” of flight leads to greater helping behavior in the real world, regardless of how participants used that power. A possible mechanism for this result is that having the power of flight primed concepts and prototypes associated with superheroes (e.g., Superman). This research illustrates the potential of using experiences in virtual reality technology to increase prosocial behavior in the physical world.     

Beyond Contagion: Reality Mining Reveals Complex Patterns of Social Influence

Contagion, a concept from epidemiology, has long been used to characterize social influence on people’s behavior and affective (emotional) states. While it has revealed many useful insights, it is not clear whether the contagion metaphor is sufficient to fully characterize the complex dynamics of psychological states in a social context. Using wearable sensors that capture daily face-to-face interaction, combined with three daily experience sampling surveys, we collected the most comprehensive data set of personality and emotion dynamics of an entire community of work. From this high-resolution data about actual (rather than self-reported) face-to-face interaction, a complex picture emerges where contagion (that can be seen as adaptation of behavioral responses to the behavior of other people) cannot fully capture the dynamics of transitory states. We found that social influence has two opposing effects on states: adaptation effects that go beyond mere contagion, and complementarity effects whereby individuals’ behaviors tend to complement the behaviors of others. Surprisingly, these effects can exhibit completely different directions depending on the stable personality or emotional dispositions (stable traits) of target individuals. Our findings provide a foundation for richer models of social dynamics, and have implications on organizational engineering and workplace well-being.     

First-Person Perspective Virtual Body Posture Influences Stress: A Virtual Reality Body Ownership Study

In immersive virtual reality (IVR) it is possible to replace a person’s real body by a life-sized virtual body that is seen from first person perspective to visually substitute their own. Multisensory feedback from the virtual to the real body (such as the correspondence of touch and also movement) can also be present. Under these conditions participants typically experience a subjective body ownership illusion (BOI) over the virtual body, even though they know that it is not their real one. In most studies and applications the posture of the real and virtual bodies are as similar as possible. Here we were interested in whether the BOI is diminished when there are gross discrepancies between the real and virtual body postures. We also explored whether a comfortable or uncomfortable virtual body posture would induce feelings and physiological responses commensurate with the posture. We carried out an experiment with 31 participants in IVR realized with a wide field-of-view head-mounted display. All participants were comfortably seated. Sixteen of them were embodied in a virtual body designed to be in a comfortable posture, and the remainder in an uncomfortable posture. The results suggest that the uncomfortable body posture led to lesser subjective BOI than the comfortable one, but that participants in the uncomfortable posture experienced greater awareness of their autonomic physiological responses. Moreover their heart rate, heart rate variability, and the number of mistakes in a cognitive task were associated with the strength of their BOI in the uncomfortable posture: greater heart rate, lower heart rate variability and more mistakes were associated with higher levels of the BOI. These findings point in a consistent direction—that the BOI over a body that is in an uncomfortable posture can lead to subjective, physiological and cognitive effects consistent with discomfort that do not occur with the BOI over a body in a comfortable posture.     

虚拟现实技术应用于运动障碍康复的研究

概述了近年来虚拟现实技术在运动障碍康复中的应用。介绍了该技术在运动障碍康复领域的四个重点研究方向：康复机器人、虚拟人、基于触觉反馈和力反馈的虚拟现实康复平台以及游戏机Wii的应用和新进展。最后总结了虚拟现实应用于运动障碍康复的优势及面临的主要挑战。     

Virtual Reality as an upper Limb Rehabilitation Approach

Cerebrovascular diseases seriously reduce the quality of life of patients. One of the priority tasks of restoring individual independency, daily living and social activity of patients is to restore basic motor skills such as the reaching, manipulating, and bimanual tasks an coordination. For successful recovery of movement necessary to conduct training in real environment, active participation of the patient, and interactive biofeedback that allows the patient to control the correct performance of motor tasks and adjust their own efforts. Evolution of computer technology gives an opportunity to improve the classical approaches in stroke rehabilitation. To make rehabilitation process met necessary terms, in everyday practice often used high technological devices, such as virtual reality (VR) systems. The technical basis of VR is an artificial three-dimensional environment that is created with computer and displayed on the screen. These technologies allow recreating the necessary training environment for motor skills relearning, as well as to provide interactive biofeedback and make rehabilitation process more intensive. This review present an information about history of VR technology developments, experience of upper limb rehabilitation using VR systems and comparative analysis of different VR based rehabilitation approaches.     

The use of Biofeedback in Clinical Virtual Reality: The INTREPID Project

Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) is a psychiatric disorder characterized by a constant and unspecific anxiety that interferes with daily-life activities. Its high prevalence in general population and the severe limitations it causes, point out the necessity to find new efficient strategies to treat it. Together with the cognitive-behavioral treatments, relaxation represents a useful approach for the treatment of GAD, but it has the limitation that it is hard to be learned. The INTREPID project is aimed to implement a new instrument to treat anxiety-related disorders and to test its clinical efficacy in reducing anxiety-related symptoms. The innovation of this approach is the combination of virtual reality and biofeedback, so that the first one is directly modified by the output of the second one. In this way, the patient is made aware of his or her reactions through the modification of some features of the VR environment in real time. Using mental exercises the patient learns to control these physiological parameters and using the feedback provided by the virtual environment is able to gauge his or her success. The supplemental use of portable devices, such as PDA or smart-phones, allows the patient to perform at home, individually and autonomously, the same exercises experienced in therapist''s office. The goal is to anchor the learned protocol in a real life context, so enhancing the patients'' ability to deal with their symptoms. The expected result is a better and faster learning of relaxation techniques, and thus an increased effectiveness of the treatment if compared with traditional clinical protocols.     

浸入式虚拟现实技术在心理学研究中的应用

文章简要介绍了虚拟现实技术的概念、分类以厦构建浸入式虚拟环境的方法。对采用浸入式虚拟现实技术在视空间认知、知觉一运动的协调、心理治疗、社会心理学等领域取得的成果作了简要的评论。讨论了利用虚拟现实技术进行心理学研究的一些独到的优点和局限性,并对未来的研究趋势进行了展望。     

Virtual Reality Cue Reactivity Assessment: A Case Study in a Teen Smoker

Cigarette smoking in adolescents is a major public health problem. To address the increasing need for efficacious assessment and treatment methods, we developed and tested a novel virtual reality cue reactivity assessment system. A case study of a controlled virtual reality cue reactivity trial with a 17-year-old adolescent cigarette smoker is presented. During the trial, the participant was exposed to virtual reality (VR) smoking cues and VR neutral cues and assessments of subjective craving and skin conductance response (SCR) were recorded. Upon exposure to VR smoking cues, craving increased. A novel methodology for collecting and analyzing SCR in VR was developed and explored to expand the role of physiological variables in VR research. SCR data indicated specific reactions to smoking cue stimuli, with the subject experiencing increased reactivity to smoking cues (i.e., cigarettes) compared to food or drinks. Based on this case study, further research using VR cue reactivity assessment in adolescent smokers is warranted. The impact of VR in drug research and future applications in research are also discussed.     

Beyond the Virtual Intracranial Stenting Challenge 2007: Non-Newtonian and flow pulsatility effects

The Virtual Intracranial Stenting Challenge 2007 (VISC’07) is becoming a standard test case in computational minimally invasive cerebrovascular intervention. Following views expressed in the literature and consistent with the recommendations of a report, the effects of non-Newtonian viscosity and pulsatile flow are reported. Three models of stented cerebral aneurysms, originating from VISC’07 are meshed and the flow characteristics simulated using commercial computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software. We conclude that non-Newtonian and pulsatile effects are important to include in order to discriminate more effectively between stent designs.     

Two-photon Calcium Imaging in Mice Navigating a Virtual Reality Environment

In recent years, two-photon imaging has become an invaluable tool in neuroscience, as it allows for chronic measurement of the activity of genetically identified cells during behavior^1-6. Here we describe methods to perform two-photon imaging in mouse cortex while the animal navigates a virtual reality environment. We focus on the aspects of the experimental procedures that are key to imaging in a behaving animal in a brightly lit virtual environment. The key problems that arise in this experimental setup that we here address are: minimizing brain motion related artifacts, minimizing light leak from the virtual reality projection system, and minimizing laser induced tissue damage. We also provide sample software to control the virtual reality environment and to do pupil tracking. With these procedures and resources it should be possible to convert a conventional two-photon microscope for use in behaving mice.     

Development of a Virtual Reality Assessment of Everyday Living Skills

Cognitive impairments affect the majority of patients with schizophrenia and these impairments predict poor long term psychosocial outcomes.  Treatment studies aimed at cognitive impairment in patients with schizophrenia not only require demonstration of improvements on cognitive tests, but also evidence that any cognitive changes lead to clinically meaningful improvements.  Measures of “functional capacity” index the extent to which individuals have the potential to perform skills required for real world functioning.  Current data do not support the recommendation of any single instrument for measurement of functional capacity.  The Virtual Reality Functional Capacity Assessment Tool (VRFCAT) is a novel, interactive gaming based measure of functional capacity that uses a realistic simulated environment to recreate routine activities of daily living. Studies are currently underway to evaluate and establish the VRFCAT’s sensitivity, reliability, validity, and practicality. This new measure of functional capacity is practical, relevant, easy to use, and has several features that improve validity and sensitivity of measurement of function in clinical trials of patients with CNS disorders.     

虚拟现实技术在健康医疗领域的应用

介绍虚拟现实技术的发展历程及基本概况,综述VR/AR技术在临床技能培训与教育、康复治疗、心理治疗及远程医疗等方面的应用研究,提出健康医疗领域虚拟技术的应用还处于起步阶段,未来将在疾病诊疗、手术模拟、远程医疗、健康管理监测等方面不断发展,对提高医护工作人员的服务水平、改善患者就医体验有重大的意义。