Communications of the ACM New Technologies in Health Care August, 1997 The following is a list of titles and authors of articles in above journal. Overcoming Phobias by Virtual Exposure Agoraphopia and fears of heights, flying, spiders, public speaking, and driving are addressed. Dorothy Strickland, Larry Hodges, Max North, and Suzanne Weghorst dorothy.strickland@stetson.edu Health and Safety Issues for VR Hearing issues, motion and motion sickness, injury, nervous system issues, and pschological effects are addressed. Erik Viire erikv@hitl.washington.edu Applying VR to Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation Topics include functional evaluation of human movement, rehabilitation, and disability solutions. Walter J. Greenleaf walterg@netcom.com Augmented Reality and Parkinson's Disease Augmented reality therapy and cueing device requirements are discussed. Suzanne Weghorst weghorst@u.washington.edu Rehabilitative Environments for Attention and Movement Disorders Attentional disorders, neglect, movement disorders, and cerebral palsy are discussed. John P. Wann, Simon K. Rushton, Martin Smyth, and David Jones j.p.wann@reading.ac.uk VR Education and Rehabilitation VR training platform, virtual training scenarios, findings, virtual science education are headings. Dean P. Inman, Ken Loge, and John Leavens deani@ori.org VR Meets Physical Therapy Tim Bowman bowmanr@allina.com Responsive Virtual Environments The synthetic other, first-person immersion, responsive VE are discussed. David Zeltzer and Rita K. Addison dzeltzer@sarnoff.com The Psychometrics of Cybersickness Kay M. Stanney and Robert S. Kennedy stanney@iems.engr.ucf.edu Treating Body Image Disturbances Guiseppe Riva, Luca Melis, and Mirco Bolzoni auxo.psylab@gse.it Virtual Environments in Special-Needs Education Special needs and learning in VEs, VEs as a tool to teach Makaton symbols, experiential virtual learning environments, VEs for students with autism, and adaptive design through VE are discussed. David J. Brown, Steven Kerr, and John R. Wilson epzdjb@epn1.maneng.nottingham.ac.uk Virtual and Spatial Awareness in Disabled Children Nigel Foreman, Paul Wilson, and Danae Stanton for@le.ac.uk The following is a summary or Virtual Reality work being done in various rehabilitative fields. Alzheimer's Disease Damaged visuospatial object judgment due to Alzheimer's and other brain disorders and trauma are treated. 3D blocks are rotated and superimposed on similalLy rotated target blocks while in a virtuaL headset. Participants manipulate the blocks in virtual space by grasping and moving a block- like "cyberprop" that contains the tracking device and provides tactile feedback. Albert Rizzo, J.Galen Buckwalter University of Southern CaUfornia arizzo@mizar.usc.edu Autism Virtual street scenes created in a headset help children with autism learn preliminary street-crossing skills. Object learning in a headset and generalization to real-world objects for children with autism is being measured. Dorothy Strickland Stetson University dorothy.strickland@stetson.edu Using sound and both headset and flat-screen images, children with autism were taught to navigate in virtual scenes. Mayer Max S.H.A.R.K. Laboratory, NSA mayer@afterlife.ncsc.mil Brain Injuries Seventeen hospital patients were required to move around a virtual house using a joystick and flat screen to find an object. Passive participants watched and searched for the same object. Active negotiation of the VE, but not observation alone, resulted in better spatial memory. Barbara Brooks, Elizabeth Attree, David Rose Univeisity of East London b.m.brooks@uel.ac.uk Brain Rehabilitation Using choice criteria in navigating through varying doorways in a virtual building, neurological patients are retrained to improve their concrete problem-solving skills. A side result of their study was to confirm that individuals who merged thinking and action well in the real world were better performers of the virtual task. Researchers are including neuro-physiological measures to establish if VR produces patterns of brain activation distinguishable from those of traditional computer-assisted retraining and if VR can produce long- lasting changes in the brain. Luigi Pugnetti, Laura Mendozzi Scientific Institute S. Maria Nascente, Italy melau@mbox.vol.it Cancer Adjustment Headset and flat-screen VR bedside systems help reduce cancer patients' stress and speed rehabilitation. Virtual cancer models explain associated symptoms and medical treatment to patients. Hiroshi Oyama National Cancer Center Hospital, Tokyo hoyama@ncc.go.jp Intellectual Difficulties Cognitive strategies in children for overcoming varying levels of intellectual difficulty and improving performance are compared using virtual scenes. Measurements gauge how learned virtual concepts are generalized Umesh Thakkar, Dee Chapman, Frank Rusch National Center for Supercomputing Applications, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign uthakkar@ncsa.uluc.edu Motion Therapy By juxpositioning human images with computer objects on a screen in virtual scenes, movements of the body can be scored according to therapeutic goals and rewarded with rich sensory feedback. Using the same technology, blind users can probe virtual maps with their fingers and hear what they have touched through synthesized speech and audio codes. Myron Krueger Artificial Reality Corp. myronkru@aol.com Movement Control for the Handicapped Devices have been developed to control movement in virtuat and real environments through muscle electrical signals and eye movement. Hugh Lusted Biocontrol Systems lusted@biocontrol.com Multiple Sclerosis and Spinal Cord Injury VR with haptic feedback is helping retrain patients to guide their hands toward target objects Morris Steffin The Swank MS foundation morste@delphi.com Post Traumatic Stress Vietnam Veterans are being treated by reproducing virtual war scenarios in a headset. Larry Hodges, Barbara Rothbaum Georgia Tech, Emory hodges@cc.gatech.edu Vision Enhancement A portion of a PC video screen is enlarged using a standard screen enlarger and feed to a headset. A tracker allows the user to select which portion of the screen gets magnified for viewing by turning his or her head. Arthur Zwern General Reality arthur@genreality.com Remote Control fbr the Handicapped Using special sensors, a quadriplegic girl with no control of her limbs was able to set the flight pattern and experience the flying sensation through a TV image fed from a camera mounted on the front of a 10-foot helicopter to a VR headset. David Warner Institute for Interventional Informatics http://www.pulsar.org Therapeutic Immersion Therapeutic encounters in which the therapist and patient are immersed together in a VE are examined. Ian Alger Cornell University College of Medicine ianalger@aol.com Therapeutic Intervention An institute to develop VR tools for the delivery of therapeutic interventions, conduct clinical trials to evaluate the effectiveness of these tools, and operate a clinic that uses these tools in treating relevant populations. Susan Ruderman, Nat Durlach, Kal Glantz, Roz Barnett, Walt Aviles Virtual Realky Therapy Institute ruderman@tiac.net VR Studies Studies to determine which characteristics immersive virtual-world actions have in common with real-world actions and conventional 3D flat screen svstems found search time to look for an object in a virtual room using a stationary monitor and joystick were significantly longer than with a tracked headset if the object was absent, but equal when an item was present. Another study compares a subject's ability to judge the height of objects in a headset to those made using a television and joystick. James Patten, Randy Pausch University of Virginia, CMU jmp7d@cobra.cs.virginia.edu VR Effects Headset, cave-like, and fish-tank VR technologies and their effect on human performance within virtual environments are tested and compared. Carolina Cruz-Neira Iowa State University cruz@iastate.edu VR Evaluation The potential and consequences of VR in medicine and human interactions is being researched. Richard Bloom Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University bloomr@pr.erau.edu VR Software ALICE, a free VR software program, was designed to make it easy for programmers to create 3D interactive graphics environments. ALICE doesn't require any hardware acceleration or special input devices. It runs under Windows 95 on a Pentium-class machine, a VGA graphics card capable of 16- bit color, 16MB RAM and 20MB free disk space. ALICE is primarily a scripting and prototyping environment for 3D object behavior, not a 3D modeler. It does read many common 3D file formats including VRML 1.0, DXF, and OBJ. A variety of existing object models are available on the ALICE Web pages and the latest version includes a texture painting tool. The primary method of interaction with objects in an ALICE scene is through short scripts that allow the user to interactively manipulate objects with a mouse and make objects react to keyboard input. The code is well documented, easy to follow, and contains many example demos and scripts to get started. Randy Pausch Carnegie Mellon University http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~alice/