Virtual Reality Assistive Treatment for Socio Phobia

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Inspiration

Having a childhood friend who suffered from social phobia, Chuyue heard a lot about how intimidating about the kinds of treatment she had been receiving. Therefore, we came up with an idea to use interesting technology of virtual reality to help people to overcome social phobia as an assistance of the therapy.

What it does

By exposing the user (patient) to animating characters and environment, our project prepares patients for the reality that they are not ready to deal with and help them to overcome their phobia step by step. The interface is a third person view which applies to the virtual reality technology that allows patients to undergo the intended treatment and to control their direction.

How I built it

As a team of rookies (one of us has never taken a CS course before), we started from following YouTube tutorials to install Unity, set up the game environment and picking up C# syntax from zero. We imported animated environment and characters and program their motion. The motion of the characters and other game objects is executed by script and animation.

Challenges I ran into

Since coding and Unity are completely new to us, finishing a project in 36hrs has proven to be a challenging path full of anxiety and frustration. Through searching for and understanding online resources, we determined the most suitable function only after many unsuccessful attempts.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Finished projects within limited time; add moving cars and non-player characters; add playerController which enables the user to move and interact in the camera (play) mode;

What I learned

The skill to acquire knowledge within such limited time is more important than knowledge itself.

What's next for Virtual Reality Assistive Treatment for Social Phobia

With advancement in college CS courses to prepare us better for software development, we will create a window for doctor to control several important parameters in VR social phobia assistive treatment, such as the density of the crowd, compactness of space, and enable more user interaction to the environment. We will improve the character image and to make it more like the real world in order to provide a holistic experience to users.