VIRTUAL REALITY IN PSYCHOLOGICAL, MEDICAL AND PEDAGOGICAL APPLICATIONS Edited by Christiane Eichenberg Virtual Reality in Psychological, Medical and Pedagogical Applications http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/2607 Edited by Christiane Eichenberg Contributors Giuseppe Riva, Fabrizia Mantovani, Christiane Eichenberg, Carolin Wolters, Birgit U. Stetina, Anna Felnhofer, Oswald D. Kothgassner, Mario Lehenbauer, Stéphane Bouchard, Geneviève Robillard, Serge Larouche, Claudie Loranger, Annie Aimé, Karine Cotton, Tanya Guitard, Stéphane Bouchard, Linda Garcia, Adi Kartolo, Eric Méthot-Curtis, C.E. Buckley, E. Nugent, D. Ryan, P.C. Neary, Bernadette McElhinney, Angela Beard, Krishnan Karthigasu, Roger Hart, Kristiina M. Valter McConville, Ying-hui Chou, Carol P. Weingarten, David J. Madden, Allen W. Song, Nan-kuei Chen, José Luis Mosso, Gregorio T. Obrador, Brenda Wiederhold, Mark Wiederhold, Verónica Lara, Amador Santander, Claudio Kirner, Christopher Shneider Cerqueira, Tereza Gonçalves Kirner, Jamshid Beheshti Published by InTech Janeza Trdine 9, 51000 Rijeka, Croatia Copyright © 2012 InTech All chapters are Open Access distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, which allows users to download, copy and build upon published articles even for commercial purposes, as long as the author and publisher are properly credited, which ensures maximum dissemination and a wider impact of our publications. After this work has been published by InTech, authors have the right to republish it, in whole or part, in any publication of which they are the author, and to make other personal use of the work. Any republication, referencing or personal use of the work must explicitly identify the original source. Notice Statements and opinions expressed in the chapters are these of the individual contributors and not necessarily those of the editors or publisher. No responsibility is accepted for the accuracy of information contained in the published chapters. The publisher assumes no responsibility for any damage or injury to persons or property arising out of the use of any materials, instructions, methods or ideas contained in the book. Publishing Process Manager Mirna Cvijic Typesetting InTech Prepress, Novi Sad Cover InTech Design Team First published September, 2012 Printed in Croatia A free online edition of this book is available at www.intechopen.com Additional hard copies can be obtained from orders@intechopen.com Virtual Reality in Psychological, Medical and Pedagogical Applications, Edited by Christiane Eichenberg p. cm. ISBN 978-953-51-0732-3 Contents Preface IX Section 1 VR in Psychological Applications 1 Chapter 1 Being There: Understanding the Feeling of Presence in a Synthetic Environment and Its Potential for Clinical Change 3 Giuseppe Riva and Fabrizia Mantovani Chapter 2 Virtual Realities in the Treatment of Mental Disorders: A Review of the Current State of Research 35 Christiane Eichenberg and Carolin Wolters Chapter 3 Games for Health: Have Fun with Virtual Reality! 65 Birgit U. Stetina, Anna Felnhofer, Oswald D. Kothgassner and Mario Lehenbauer Chapter 4 Description of a Treatment Manual for in virtuo Exposure with Specific Phobia 81 Stéphane Bouchard, Geneviève Robillard, Serge Larouche and Claudie Loranger Chapter 5 Virtual Reality and Body Dissatisfaction Across the Eating Disorder’s Spectrum 109 Annie Aimé, Karine Cotton, Tanya Guitard and Stéphane Bouchard Chapter 6 A Discussion of the Use of Virtual Reality in Dementia 123 Linda Garcia, Adi Kartolo and Eric Méthot-Curtis Section 2 VR in Medical Applications 137 Chapter 7 Virtual Reality – A New Era in Surgical Training 139 C.E. Buckley, E. Nugent, D. Ryan and P.C. Neary VI Contents Chapter 8 Virtual Reality Simulation: A Valuable Adjunct to Surgical Training 167 Bernadette McElhinney, Angela Beard, Krishnan Karthigasu and Roger Hart Chapter 9 Virtual Rehabilitation and Training for Postural Balance and Neuromuscular Control 185 Kristiina M. Valter McConville Chapter 10 Applications of Virtual Reality Technology in Brain Imaging Studies 203 Ying-hui Chou, Carol P. Weingarten, David J. Madden, Allen W. Song and Nan-kuei Chen Chapter 11 Cybertherapy in Medicine – Experience at the Universidad Panamericana, IMSS and ISSSTE Mexico 229 José Luis Mosso, Gregorio T. Obrador, Brenda Wiederhold, Mark Wiederhold, Verónica Lara and Amador Santander Section 3 VR in Pedagogical Applications 245 Chapter 12 Using Augmented Reality Artifacts in Education and Cognitive Rehabilitation 247 Claudio Kirner, Christopher Shneider Cerqueira and Tereza Gonçalves Kirner Chapter 13 Virtual Environments for Children and Teens 271 Jamshid Beheshti Preface Virtual reality applications (VR) allows creation of computer-based models of the real world, which interacte by using the human-machine interfaces. This research field developed in the last 20 years for potential use also in the human sciences. While first applications were implemented mostly in industry, (e.g. virtual prototyping and assembly training in the automotive industry, ergonomic assessments of the operation of cockpits through the simulation of different body sizes), in the military (e.g. operational training, using simulated parachute jumps), in geology and architecture (e.g. spatial studies, or archaeological reconstructions) and last but not least in the entertainment area (especially games development), the scientific and practical field of application extended to VR in recent years. The medical field has used VR for example in surgery, for laparoscopic surgery and applications have been developed for rehabilitation, which enabled mute patients to communicate verbally, by capturing mute gestures with the aid of a data glove, interpreted by the computer and routed to a voice system, which translated it into synthetic speech. This book has an aim to present latest applications, trends and developments of virtual reality technologies in three humanities disciplines: in medicine, psychology and pedagogy. In the medical field the potential uses in the various specialized medical areas are wide spread and go far beyond surgical options. VR is successfully applied e.g. in anatomical education, in functional diagnostics and before and during interventions for pain and anxiety reduction. The same is true for simulations of the musculoskeletal system, for example in the diagnosis and training of patients whose posture balance is impaired due to osteoporosis. VR also shows great promise as a new paradigm of imaging in the neurosciences. In psychology, VR is utilized in addition to fundamental research (especially in general psychology and cognitive and social psychology), which has in recent years very greatly contributed to our understanding of presence- experience in virtual environments, in particular in the application in clinical psychology and psychotherapy. The observation that virtual stimuli cause real fear led to VR to be integrated into the spectrum of therapeutic interventions. While initially VR was rather intuitively integrated into the behavioral treatment of mostly specific phobias, there meanwhile X Preface exist evaluated treatment manuals for a broader spectrum disorder. Thus, the benefits to body image disorders, as well as in the neuropsychological contexts such as the treatment of dementia, were examined. On the other hand meanwhile, even if only hesitantly, other therapeutic schools which traditionally are more restrictive in the flexibility of the therapeutic setting - such as psychoanalysis, are open to the integration of VR. Other constructive uses of VR have been recognized for other target groups, e.g. for children and young people for whom VR-based games can also have both therapeutic and pedagogical value (so-called serious games). This relativizes the often single-sided debate about the harmful effects of computer games. In pedagogy the term edutainment is applied to such applications that provide entertainment-oriented knowledge. Utilizing the affinity of young people to modern technologies in the field of education, different VR-based scenarios were developed for integration into elaborate didactic concepts (e.g. so-called integrated augmented reality, which incorporate virtual objects into the real world, in geometry or biology lessons). Studies show that people in both educational as well as in the medical therapeutic range expect more and more that modern media are included in the corresponding demand and supply structures. For the Internet and various mobile media, associated research and application projects now have fixed key words such as "E-learning" and "E-Mental Health" or "M-Learning", "M-Mental Health". This book aims to contribute to the current state of the corresponding efforts in the area of further promising technology - the Virtual Reality - designed to give an overview and secondly to provide a stimulus on specific projects, associated with the hope of giving to scientists and practitioners from the humanities an impulse for their own (further-) development, evaluation and implementation of various VR scenarios in the education and health sectors. Dr. Christiane Eichenberg Department of Psychology Sigmund Freud University Vienna, Vienna, Austria . VIRTUAL REALITY IN PSYCHOLOGICAL, MEDICAL AND PEDAGOGICAL APPLICATIONS Edited by Christiane Eichenberg Virtual Reality in Psychological,. experience and Virtual Reality in Psychological, Medical and Pedagogical Applications 6 thus rendered intuitive [16]. In the case of motor skill learning,