This page is organized to describe some of the ideas for Psychiatrically oriented projects for the Eng477 class

My name is Milton Huang, and I am a psychiatrist at the University of Michgan Hospital.  I am interested in the applications of Virtual Reality to the treatment of psychiatric illness as well as understanding more about the psychological implications of VR use.  I have been working with students in Eng 477 for the last three years on such projects and am looking to continue this tradition this year.  Below are some of my interests.  If any of these match with yours, talk to me and we can see if we can generate ideas or specific projects.

Many of you are already familiar with the height estimation protocol we created using the model from the Acrophobia project (below).  There are many variations I'd like to test out: Separate the binocular and visual angle clues to height by changing the size of the model and moving it closer or farther away.  This could give the eye the same information about judging height based on shape, but the height estimate from the binocular clues would be different. Rotate the model so instead of looking down, you are looking across.  See if there are differences in ability to estimate distance/height. Eliminate textures and use a lighting model to see how effective it is in cueing. If a group wants to work on other perceptual experiments/illusions, I would be glad to help out.

This project has involved Eng477 students for the last few years.  You can read the report from last year which recreated part of the UM hospital in VRML2.  We have since put the environment into the CAVE.  The current goal of this project would be to optimize the CAVE experience for realism by reconstructing some of the buildings to be more accurate, adding appropriate lighting, taking higher quality photos for texture maps, or even adding people walking around.

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Many other groups have created environments for treating acrophobia, as well as fear of spiders, fear of flying, fear of public situations, etc.  I would be happy to work with others in designing other types of exposure environments.  The key of course, is to make the experience engaging and real enough to emotionally affect the viewer.  (i.e. make them afraid)  You pick a fear you are interested in.

The sense of "Presence" or "being there" one has when experiencing VR is a current research interest of mine.  This project would aim at creating a virtual environment involving objects and simple manipulation tasks that could compare how "present" people feel when the VE is experienced via the CAVE versus via the BOOM versus through a screen.  Tasks would involve creating a storyline for the participant, then having them move through the environment and manipulate virtual objects with a particular goal in mind.

Virtual Humans are models of people created for virtual environments.  From a psychiatric perspective, I am interested in studying the emotional response people have towards virtual people compared to real people.  This can involve anything from creating models of facial expressions to animating video on top of a model.  The goal in this kind of project is getting an emotional response or to create a system that allows us to examine how people respond to different types of facial expressions.

I am interested in taking brain mapping data and creating a three dimensional surface model that one could walk through (literally!).  Extensions could allow labeling of structures or even the ability to add new neural pathways with information about receptors like serotonin and dopamine.