Eric Chance

Extending the Reach of Health Care for Obesity and Diabetes Using Virtual Worlds

Todays epidemic of obesity and diabetes poses challenges to health care similar to those facing soldiers who return with postdeployment mental health issues. These include geographic barriers, social stigma, and the need for behavioral change. Researchers at University of Southern Californias Institute for Creative Technologies are adapting their extensive experience in technological solutions for training to techniques that can aid veterans in need. These techniques show promise for concerns in the growing crisis of “diabesity.” Virtual reality (VR) has already demonstrated itself as an impactful treatment method for several behavioral and mental health domains. Virtual worlds, the successor technology of original VR, inherited many of its predecessors strengths but also presents the new affordances of accessibility, social connectivity, and avatar usage, which pave the way toward future treatment options on a broader scale.

Embodied Conversational Agent Avatars in Virtual Worlds: Making Today’s Immersive Environments More Responsive to Participants

Intelligent agents in the form of avatars in networked virtual worlds (VWs) are a new form of embodied conversational agent (ECA). They are still a topic of active research, but promise soon to rival the sophistication of virtual human agents developed on stand-alone platforms over the last decade. Such agents in today’s VWs grew out of two lines of historical research: Virtual Reality and Artificial Intelligence. Their merger forms the basis for today’s persistent 3D worlds occupied by intelligent characters serving a wide range of purposes. We believe ECA avatars will help to enable VWs to achieve a higher level of meaningful interaction by providing increased engagement and responsiveness within environments where people will interact with and even develop relationships with them.

Warriors' Journey: A Path to Healing through Narrative Exploration

Abstract The Warriors’ Journey is an interactive narrative experience that is part of the online, virtual world healing space of the Coming Home Project (www.cominghomecenter.org) at the University of Southern California’s Institute for Creative Technologies. This project is exploring new ways to reach veterans who are returning from recent conflicts and who often have mental health issues or difficulty fitting back into their home communities. We are looking at the affordances of online 3D virtual worlds to address some of the issues that may prevent or deter veterans from getting the help they need. We are exploring the use of specific therapies within the virtual world space, as well as social and enrichment activities designed around the needs of this group. The Warriors’ Journey is one such activity that engages participants in stories to emphasize and reinforce common ideals of honorable warriors throughout history. After experiencing these stories, participants are then encouraged to construct their own warrior’s story within the Coming Home space. It is hoped that such activities may help contribute to a more positive sense of self-esteem, a restructured life narrative, and a feeling of control over the stresses incurred during their service to their country.

Maintaining Psycho-Social Health on the Way to Mars and Back

In future long duration Mars exploration missions, network limitations and the lack of real-time communication capabilities will impact various aspects of space crew performance as well as behavioral health. Studies in ground-based analogs of Isolated and Confined Environments (ICE) such as Antarctica have identified sensory and social monotony as threats to crew psychological well-being. Given the importance of behavioral health to mission success and the extreme conditions of space travel, new methods of maintaining psycho-social health and social connections to support systems are critical. We describe ANSIBLE -- A Network of Social Interactions for Bilateral Life Enhancement. ANSIBLE leverages Virtual Environments (VEs) to deliver evidence based wellness promoting strategies and socially intelligent Virtual Agents (VAs) as tools to facilitate asynchronous human-human communication, and counteract behavioral health challenges associated with prolonged isolation and deep space exploration.

Checkpoint exercise: training with virtual actors in virtual worlds

We have implemented a checkpoint exercise in Second Life where the user interacts with several computer avatars in a team based activity. We describe the experience and the implementation of our solution and show some evaluation results.

Method for Custom Facial Animation and Lip-Sync in an Unsupported Environment, Second LifeTM

The virtual world of Second LifeTM does not offer support for complex facial animations, such as those needed for an intelligent virtual agent to lip sync to audio clips. However, it is possible to access a limited range of default facial animations through the native scripting language, LSL. Our solution to produce lip sync in this environment is to rapidly trigger and stop these default animations in custom sequences to produce the illusion that the intelligent virtual agent is speaking the phrases being heard.

ANSIBLE: A Virtual World Ecosystem for Improving Psycho-Social Well-being

We describe preliminary results of ANSIBLE – A Network of Social Interactions for Bilateral Life Enhancement. ANSIBLE leverages virtual worlds to deliver evidence based wellness promoting strategies and virtual agents as tools to facilitate asynchronous human-human communication in order to counteract behavioral health challenges associated with prolonged isolation and deep space exploration. ANSIBLE was deployed in August 2015 in a 12 month study with six crew members in an isolation simulated Mars habitat facility. In this paper, we compare the data for the first five months of this mission to a previous control mission for which ANSIBLE was not used. We found initial support for ANSIBLE to increase perceptions of closeness and satisfaction with friend and family relationships (but not other crew members) during prolonged isolation as well as a trend in stress reduction and increased feelings of ANSIBLE usability over time.

Social Maintenance and Psychological Support Using Virtual Worlds

In the space exploration domain, limitations in the Deep Space Network and the lack of real-time communication capabilities will impact various aspects of future long duration exploration such as a multi-year mission to Mars. One dimension of interest is the connection between flight crews and their Earth-based social support system, their family, friends, and colleagues. Studies in ground-based analogs of Isolated and Confined Environments (ICE) such as Antarctica have identified sensory deprivation and social monotony as threats to crew psychological well-being. Given the importance of behavioral health to mission success and the extreme conditions of space travel, new methods of maintaining psycho-social health and social connections to support systems are critical. In this paper we explore the use of Virtual Environments (VEs) and Virtual Agents (VAs) as tools to facilitate asynchronous human-human communication, and counteract behavioral health challenges associated with prolonged isolation and deep space exploration.

The eHealth Arena and Online Virtual Worlds: A New Paradigm for Internet Delivered Health Care

Virtual Worlds, a recent addition to Internet offerings, are connected social spaces that have geographies and are populated by people using avatar representations. These spaces hold a great deal of promise as part of a future portfolio of eHealth offerings. Utilizing virtual worlds, health care can be widely distributed and accessible via the Internet. They have particular affordances that lend themselves to achieving and supporting many types of health care. This paper describes some of the current applications that use virtual worlds as part of eHealth care, as well as future research that will factor into the way these activities develop. These examples are paving the way for virtual worlds to be part of the way people access health care in the future.

I want my virtual friends to be life size!: adapting Second Life to multi-screen projected environments

Second Life (SL) is a popular 3D online virtual world designed for human interaction (also known as a MUVE, or multi-user virtual environment). It typically supports 60--70 thousand concurrent users. The assets and physical environments within SL are easy to create and use, and the environments themselves are very much part of the human interaction experience. However, the typical means of accessing SL is through a single computer screen, which lessens the immersion that is inherent in such a rich 3D world. Because of this, the SL virtual world is a good candidate for adaptation to large scale immersive displays such as a CAVE#8482; or other multi projector systems.