Bravemind
While at USC I worked closely with Dr. Skip Rizzo on VR therapy for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, codenamed "Bravemind". This form of therapy is known as “Exposure Therapy”, and the idea behind it is to re-expose patients to traumatic stimuli in order to help them habituate to the stressful stimuli. Clinical trials comparing traditional talk-only therapy vs. VR have shown it may help reduce the total number of sessions required for a patient to reach habituation.
The following video of an early prototype provides an overview of the work.
This 2013 video provides a more in-depth overview of the work.
For the first phase of the project we were using the Gamebryo engine, and I was part of a small team creating VR prototypes to test the effectiveness of the treatment. I was handling everything from creating art assets, and scripting, to QA testing, and burning DVDs to be sent to clinics.
After Gamebryo went out of business, I helped lead a transition to the Unity game engine. Then during the beginning of the second phase of the project, I again handled a variety of duties, including:
Responsibilities:
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Design
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Level Editing
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Trigger placement
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Scripting
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Effects
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Lighting
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QA
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Distribution / Support
Contributions:
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Art Asset Creation
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Mel Scripts
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Exporting
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Overall Art Pipeline
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Workflow Documentation
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Naming Conventions
For the last phase of my participation, I handled day-to-day project administration of the software development team, in collaboration with other groups handling art, and virtual human simulation..
The following video shows off the variety of content and features we created inside Unity.