Assignment 3 Report

KIT208 AT3 - VR Application

Exposure therapy for dangerous phobias can be unsafe, scary, and actually make the phobia worse for certain people. Cue Generic Heights VR Application, a program which allows any one to face their fear of heights in a safe, controlled environment! With 4 different heights to choose from, Generic Heights VR Application has an option for any level of exposure therapy required!

Description

This application utilises Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy (VRET) to treat acrophobia, the fear of heights. It provides people suffering from acrophobia a safe, mutable environment to slowly be exposed to their fear. The program has 5 height levels, the ground, 3 increasingly sized buildings, and a plane that is the highest option. The user interacts with a button (walks into the button) and is teleported, in order, from the lowest height to the highest. For this to be an effective alternative to traditional exposure therapy, the environment that the user is exposed to needs to be adaptable, open, and realistic. This ensures the user gets near the same experience that they would get in the real world, while being in control. The importance of this program comes from the accessibility of the therapy for acrophobia. Normally, a person with acrophobia has to face their fear in a very confronting, potentially dangerous situation. This application allows these people the ability to adjust and work with their fear in a way that works for them. It allows them to easily be exposed to their fear in small doses, in a method which does not require the commitment of traditional exposure therapy. Furthermore, it has been proven that VRET is an effective treatment for sufferers of acrophobia (Akpewila et al. 2022), and thus the significance of this technology can not be understated.

Interaction Design

Note: This paragraph assumes to some extent that the controller is a VR controller. Due to the lack of an Oculus, this was not the case. This will be discussed in Technical Development.

The interactions in this environment are important for two reasons. Firstly, the ability to interact with a dangerous environment in VR has been proven to be beneficial to the therapy taking place (Yang & Wang 2022). Having a strong feeling of control over the environment in a situation that makes you anxious or afraid can lessen those effects greatly. Secondly, the actual interaction, which involves the user poking a “button”, is an incredibly human-like interaction, which means the immersion of the program is deeper, and thus so is the effectiveness of the therapy. These both provide the interaction for being in the application, but 

Technical Development

Throughout this assignment, my lack of experience with Unity became increasingly evident. This, combined with the lack of an Oculus, really affected the development plan of this assignment. A discussion with Lindsay in a tutorial put me on the right track for teleportation, as he mentioned that with an Oculus, the player movement had to be disabled first, then the player teleported, and then the movement re-enabled. This was true for a traditional FPS controller as well. Despite this help, a large amount of time was used up trying to figure out the code for the teleportation script, which is actually just code inside the FPS controller script. Google and Youtube proved no help at all. Despite what felt like hours of talking to ChatGPT, nothing came to fruition. It seemed that somehow, despite stopping the characters movement, the teleporting was being interrupted. Finally, a forum post from gjcampbell pointed me in the right direction. It was the constant CharacterController.move() calls in the update function which prevented the teleportation. I would have liked to put more interactions in with more combinations, such as a field of view slider, to lessen or worsen vertigo effects, but the rocky development path prevented this. Lastly, I was unable to create an APK file, as I got this error: 

Google once again had almost no answers, and ChatGPT's suggestions didn't work. I will be attempting to build it again on the 26/09, so maybe it will work then.

Bibliography

Yang, Y. and Wang, T. (2022) ‘The Treatment and Development Prospect of VR Exposure Therapy for Mental Diseases’, 2022 3rd International Conference on Electronic Communication and Artificial Intelligence (IWECAI), Electronic Communication and Artificial Intelligence (IWECAI), 2022 3rd International Conference on, IWECAI, pp. 339–342.

Fitryanda Akpewila, Muhana Sofiati Utami and Neila Ramdhani (2022) ‘The Effectiveness of Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy Module for Reducing Acrophobia Symptoms’, Gadjah Mada Journal of Professional Psychology, 8(2), pp. 191–209. doi:10.22146/gamajpp.76407.

Gjcampbell (2017) Teleporting player using transform.position only works sometimes, Unity Forum, https://forum.unity.com/threads/teleporting-player-using-transform-position-only-works-sometimes.807420/

Low-poly plane model - Alstra Infinite (2021) Planes and Choppers - Poly Pack, https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/3d/vehicles/air/planes-choppers-polypack-194946

Basic grass terrain - ALP (2019) Terrain Textures Pack Free, https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/2d/textures-materials/nature/terrain-textures-pack-free-139542

Buildings - CGY (2014) Block Building Pack, https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/3d/environments/urban/block-building-pack-13925

Simple Fps Controller Script - Sharpcoderblog (no date) Unity FPS Controller, https://sharpcoderblog.com/blog/unity-3d-fps-controller

ChatGPT Conversation - https://chat.openai.com/share/f39d05d3-16cb-40ce-893f-62d2e2340225