As part of our teamwork project, the Virtual Embodiment Lab and the Group and Interpersonal Communication Research Laboratory spend time playing team strategy and bonding games. Here, the groups get together over some pizza and a fun game of One Night Ultimate Werewolf.
The Virtual Embodiment Lab recently welcomed four faculty from the VinUniversity College of Arts & Sciences to discuss the usage of XR technologies in communication. Visitors included Prof. Myles Lynch (Faculty and Senior Lecturer in the OASIS Program), Daniel Ruelle (Program Director of English & Communications, Director of Learning & Teaching Excellence Center), Stephen Lindhorst (Senior Academic English Lecturer) and Nhu Dinh Ngoc Anh (Andy) (Senior Lecturer in English). The Cornell-VinUniversity Project is a six-year initiative between Cornell University and Vingroup (a Vietnamese conglomerate) to establish the first private world-class university in Vietnam – VinUniversity.
This past June and July I visited the Virtual Embodiment lab as a visiting scholar. I worked on a project that aimed to raise awareness about Obsessive Compulsive Disorder through a Virtual Reality video game experience. The theory behind the video game is that we can simulate the experience of OCD by putting the player through negative interactions that mimic the symptoms of OCD. I researched the different components that make up a lucid experience and hope that by going through similar obstacles to people with OCD, the player could increase their empathy.
For this experiment, I chose to disregard the more abstract aspects of OCD, like intrusive thoughts, and focused on the ritualistic compulsions of the disorder. To make a realistic narrative, I used testimony from the Obsessive Compulsive Disorder Association of Spain:
“In the mornings, it took me no one knew how long to leave the house to go to school. My brain told me “Ana, every morning before you leave the house, you have to make sure all your shoes are perfectly aligned in the wardrobe”. For almost a year, I spent at least an hour a day trying to get my shoes in the
wardrobe “right” so I could leave for school. Until it didn’t feel “right”, I couldn’t stop.”
I worked with two undergraduate research assistants, Kevin Kim and Ishan Juneja, to build the program in Unity 3D. During the experience, the player finds themself in the protagonist’s bedroom.
After a brief introduction that includes the testimony of the main character, they must perfectly align their shoes. Meanwhile, a countdown timer indicates the time remaining before they have to go to school. However, the shoes will never appear perfectly aligned, leading to a “Game Over” screen and the end of the game.
Thus, the aim is to develop a “ludonarrative of awareness.” In other words, this project intersects ways of transmitting emotions and information between individuals and groups of people using the game narrative.
As a next step I will present the current version of the game to the Grupo de Investigación en Investigación y Tratamiento de Obsesiones y Compulsiones (I’TOC) at University of Valencia for feedback and modify it accordingly.
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On October 24th and 25th, the Cornell campuses came together for a cross-campus Immersive Media in Medicine Symposium. Meeting at the Belfer Research Building in NYC, approximately 175 people registered to attend the conference in person, with 25 joining remotely from the Ithaca campus.
The symposium, co-chaired by Dr. Andrea Stevenson Won and Dr. JoAnn Difede, focusing on translational research in immersive media (augmented and virtual reality) for use in medicine and healthcare education, offered talks, panel discussions, workshops, and a poster session.
The symposium included talks on Embodiment in Immersive Media, Accessibility in Immersive Media, Immersive Media and Entrepreneurship, and more. There were also panel discussions highlighting topics such as Immersive Media in Medical Education and Immersive Media in Psychiatry, as well as hands on workshops.
Dr. Andrea Stevenson Won giving her talk on Embodiment in Immersive Media
PhD candidate Swati Pandita led a panel discussion highlighting VR for beginners, and VEL research assistants Hal Rives, Jessie Yee, and Josh Zhu, also participated.
Graduate student Swati Pandita leading a panel discussion on VR for beginners. Panel members L-R: Mariel Emrich, Joshua Zhu, Hal Rives, Harrison Resnick, Jessie Yee.
The results of our first study in collaboration with the Cornell Physics Education Research Lab (C-PERL) were recently featured in the Cornell Chronicle:
Thanks to Linda Glaser for her great article, which points out the importance of distinguishing between enthusiasm for VR and actual learning gains. VEL is currently preparing to launch the second study in this series this semester.
Pictured left to right: Dr. JoAnn Difede, Mariel Emrich, Stephanie Belina, and Fuyu Wang.
In February of this year, the International Virtual Reality Healthcare Association hosted its very first Healthcare Hackathon Invitational in Tampa Bay, Florida. The event aimed to encourage innovation and provide an open platform for immersive technologies in healthcare. The hackathon was open to undergraduate and graduate students from universities across the globe. Representing Cornell University were Ph.D. and graduate students Mariel Emrich, Stephanie Belina, and Fuyu Wang, accompanied by Dr. JoAnn Difede. Their virtual reality intervention for insomnia, with the military as a case study population, presented innovative solutions for sleep therapy that earned them second place at the IVRHA’s Hackathon. We’re proud to congratulate the Cornell University team, including our Virtual Embodiment Lab’s PhD Student Stephanie Belina, for their accomplishment and contribution to healthcare technology!
Last week, Andrea Stevenson Won sat down with her colleague, Christopher Byrne, for the latest installment of his podcast, Communication Breakdown, to chat about the Virtual Embodiment Lab.
One of the newer labs in the Communication department, the VEL has the advantage of a wide array of students with varying skill sets in the lab. Some students are Communication majors, others are from Information Science and some join from the College of Engineering. This diverse research group is trained to program virtual worlds, run experiments (including safely spotting participants as they experience virtual worlds), and even explaining the lab’s research (like this blog post)!
Won credits the recent jump in interest in consumer virtual reality to the gaming industry. “Popular culture initially saw VR as a tool for the gaming community,” said Won. With headsets now becoming increasingly affordable, Won hopes to see the technology breakthrough at an “institutional level” prompting wider research in the clinical, educational and collaborative potential of virtual reality.
Regarding clinical applications, Christopher Byrne and skeptics around the world beg the question, “Does it work?” In short, yes. Won referenced research by Hunter Hoffman where VR was used for burn victims undergoing painful procedures where they found immersive VR technology to help reduce the pain. Now, I don’t think virtual beaches are going to replace anesthesia, but the power of this detail-rich technology is undeniable.
With all the good things about VR, there are some drawbacks Byrne knows first hand. “The first time I tried VR was my 50th birthday and I fell backward over a coffee table.” While this is a possible danger of the technology Won quickly explained that he was most likely not being properly spotted and, while knocking on wood, she has yet to experience any sort of injury in her lab.
Click here for the complete podcast and make sure to follow us on Twitter and Instagram @Cornell_VR for daily updates and cool inside info!
Where was Professor Won from March 18th-22nd? Venice Beach? Nope. Aruba? Not quite. How about Reutlingen, Germany? You got it!
Won traveled to IEEE VR 2018, the 25th IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces at the Stadthalle Reutlingen in Reutlingen, Germany. On March 21st, Professor Won presented on a panel that discussed how social reality should work. Because there are now several social applications for virtual reality systems that are reaching a broader audience, more users are starting to immerse themselves in these environments for longer periods of time. By using these applications, users are performing tasks in different spaces with a different representation of humans.
The lab’s presence at the conference is not ephemeral, however. On March 21st, Omar Shaikh, a member of the Virtual Embodiment Lab since 2016, presented research from the VEL’s Idea Generation project headed by Yilu Sun. The “Movement Visualizer for Networked Virtual Reality Platforms” tracked and presented two individual’s live movements and their association (in this case, a measure of nonverbal synchrony) in a consumer networked virtual reality platform. Such a visualizer can be useful when comparing other variables such as the topics of conversation and self-reported variables (e.g., concentration level).
To take a deeper dive into the research, click here to see the poster abstract! The code for the visualizer can also be downloaded through the published link in the abstract.
Earlier this month, Virtual Embodiment Lab (VEL) Director Andrea Stevenson Won sat down with the folks at Teach Better to talk about VR, her research, and their impact on education.
The Teach Better Podcast, run by Doug McKee and Edward O’Neill, focuses on teachers in higher education and has created a community of people looking to better understand teachers and their tactics. They asked Professor Won to join the podcast to discuss her research exploring whether and how a virtual world can be created to provide a more engaging learning experience for students.
Won spoke on the advantages of simulations versus hands-on demonstrations, saying, “Often times physics experiments or demonstrations don’t work out as planned and the instructor has to spend valuable time tinkering with the apparatus. In VR you can get “perfect” results, every time.” This could be good for the next generation of students, who will be some of the most tech-savvy learners of our time.
Apart from learning, Professor Won also is interested in studying VR as a way to communicate. “Learning is usually a social activity and I think that we shouldn’t forget that when doing it in VR.”
Check out the podcast to listen to the entire interview, and browse past shows to find more teachers leading the way into the future. Also, keep this page bookmarked for ongoing updates on VEL research.
When you think of VR where does your mind go? Is it an ultra-realistic video game providing the complete entertainment experience? Or maybe it’s being able to view the Grand Canyon while sitting in your living room. But what about putting on a headset and going to work?
The Cornell Virtual Embodiment Lab is asking questions about collaboration and competition, something anyone with a 9-5 job is all too familiar with.
So why should you care about this? Well, if you’ve had to travel for work meeting you may want to pay attention. Companies spend a total of $111.7 billion a year in domestic travel for conventions, meetings, and training purposes. However, as VR technology becomes more advanced some of these trips may not be needed. Instead of flying to corporate headquarters employees could simply meet in a virtual space. This would save valuable resources in time, money, and fuel expenses that come with travel.
This study was headed by Yilu Sun, who came to the lab as a MPS student in Information Science. Her experiment was inspired by an earlier study that tracked movement of participants in collaborating pairs to predict their success at a collaborative task.
the Virtual Embodiment Lab 
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