Unity meets Experimental Psychology

Hello everyone

After using Unity for just about a year now, I thought I'd share what I have worked on recently.
I am an experimental psychologist/neuropsychologist and a PhD candidate in Human Interface Technology and Psychology.

My PhD thesis at the University of Canterbury, New Zeland, is based on the development of virtual environments for use in neuropsychological rehabilitation.

That means what? Somebody has a

• - car accident
  - stroke
  - brain cancer
  - parkinson's disease
  - any other incident where brain functions are affected

and while they are at a rehabilitation hospital, I use virtual environments to train their memory, attention and problem solving skills.

Now make an educated guess which engine I am using for those virtual environments, my data recording and also visual data analysis.
Most of my ongoing work can be found on my website www.virtualgamelab.com

A study I just finished recently compared navigation behavior in a real complex building with navigation in a virtual model of the same building. PM me if you are interested in a copy.

36 participants walked through the Erskine building on campus of the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. After this initial learning phase, they had to find target locations either in the real building or a virtual model of the building which was displayed in the VisionSpace Theater of the HIT Lab New Zealand.

The study was accepted as a paper and presentation at the ICDVRAT conference in Chile which is just a few weeks away. Yay for conference travel!

I am currently conducting two more experiments about visual attention and spatial memory. All of those experiments will lead to a larger clinical trial in a rehabilitation hospital in Germany, October 2010 - April 2011. Unity goes Rehab!

For this clinical trial I am mostly working on an optimized workflow to create walkthroughs in Unity as quickly as possible. For each and every patient, I will remodel their home or work place to give them a meaningful training environment while they are still at the hospital. Needless to say that it's a huge challenge to create an interactive walkthrough of a house within 48-72 hours. In addition I need to be able to drag and drop my tasks and training content into these environments. I am spending most of my time now working on editor scripting to create an easy interface for my upcoming trial, so that I can spend more time training my patients than fiddling with Unity. Do I need to mention that Unity has been my savior in all of this work? I couldn't ask for anything easier with my lack of a proper game/simulation development background.

I will post updates regarding my studies here and will also put up a web player for an online data collection over the next weeks. I have ethics approval to collect data online with Unity, so you guys are hopefully going to be participants for my PhD at some stage.

Besides my clinical trials I am also working on interactive walkthroughs which can be used to train people in emergency procedures. I remodeled parts of the HIT Lab NZ for that purpose and a prototype with some content relevant for fire emergencies is in the pipeline already. A walkthrough without interactive content is already online at my website (it's a very rough prototype, the models are messed up on purpose )

Below I attached some screenshots. For all of these, please keep in mind that I do not have any background as a 3D artist, programmer or designer. I am a research psychologist with an interest in user research and neuropsychology. I love to fiddle with computers and teach myself some 3D modeling and programming.

I am mostly using SketchUp Pro (learning Modo and 3DS Max in my spare time) and Unity Pro for my work. I just purchased Genetica to make my life easier with creating textures from photographs.

I have the advantage that my applications don't need to be optimized and don't need to be pretty. My priorities are accuracy of my models and my data recording and meaning/purpose of the content to draw reliable and valid conclusions from my experiments.


Erskine building: real and virtual


WIP: HIT Lab NZ model for training of emergency procedures (we had earthquakes and tsunamis lately)

I welcome all questions and feedback. I also enjoyed meeting some of you guys during GDC in SanFran earlier this year. The IGDA thought it was worthwhile to get me in contact with game developers and user researchers and sponsored my GDC ticket. I had a great time there and had a blast talking to some Unity folks there as well. Hope to see you again next year. I might make it to being a games user researcher until then

Keep rocking,
-Sebas

 

Cool stuff! I'm interested in seeing how the rehabilitation will work in detail, keep us updated.

I'd also like to read your research on navigation, I'll send you a PM.

 

Thanks, Tinus.
I've sent you the paper.
Also purchased an Emotiv EPOC yesterday. Am curious to see how that works together with Unity and my experiments.

 

Congrats Sebas.

This is a great use for a great tool. Having a mother-in-law that had a mild stroke a few weeks after a serious car accident, I am interested if the clinical study helps in the recovery time for mental disruption. Also, will the simulation therapy increase the patient's confidence and feelings of self worth?

HIT lab NZ sounds like a cool project too. You guys always have earth quakes.

Good luck.

Cheers,

 

Thanks DC9,

I am hoping to find that my simulations will speed up recovery and mostly also improve functional outcome. You can't always speak of recovery, as most people never really recover after a major stroke or during neurodegenerative diseases (e.g. Parkinson's).
If a patient still gets lost after normal rehabilitation, but my simulations enable him/her to find their way around their house, this would be a huge success.

Using the 3D (spatial) nature of those simulations, I am mostly concerned about interactions in such environment: wayfinding/navigation, spatial memory (memory of where objects are in the environment), solving everyday tasks (e.g. making breakfast, taking a shower, etc.). "Mental disruption" could encompass any of this and much more.

I will compare 3 different groups with each other: a training in which I model the individual environment of the patient (work or work place), a standard set of training environments, and a control group which uses something like Wii Big Brain Academy as a training.

Confidence and self-worth are no central aspects of my work. I am a neuropsychologist and mostly working on memory, attention or problem solving. Confidence/Self worth are important and while training and educating the patient, we try to build up confidence and also help the patient understand their deficits, but this is not the core aspect of neuropsychological rehabilitation. Depression or anxiety are often either cause or result of cognitive deficits and I definitely have to be familiar with them, but I am not the specialist there.
Psychotherapy as for example in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy would be more appropriate for that.

And yes, the HIT Lab NZ has been a great place to work at so far.

Cheers,
-Sebas

 

Hi Sebas... How can you make unity working with emotiv's output?
I am also planning to buy the headset and sdk but I need to be sure about the workflow... And to don't get mad pheraps