CONTENTS

VIRTUAL REALITY REHABILITATION ENVIRONMENT ... 255
him/her with a lesson during which several distractions are played out to test the
child’s reactions.
Our work differs from the Virtual Classroom in that the patient is required to
complete a real test in the virtual environment. Also, the distractions in our application
differ in nature from those of Rizzo’s virtual classroom
3. Virtual Environment
The virtual reality application developed for OCD treatment was implemented
using JOGL, a Java wrapper around the OpenGL library [6, 7]. The environment
consists of a virtual classroom in which the patient is positioned sitting at a desk
between two other students (see Figure 1a). The patient has a test in front of him and
is required to answer the questions in a certain time limit. The patient can interact
with the environment using a joystick. He/she can change the view direction or grab
objects on the table and reposition them as desired, or answer the test questions.
(a) (b)
Figure 1. Virtual environment. (a) Classroom; (b) Quiz
The patient’s virtual belongings (pencil, eraser, and cell phone) are placed randomly
around the test paper, so they would bother the patient and trigger the need
for a pattern. While the patient can grab and move or rotate the objects as desired,
they application intelligently replaces them after a certain time, thus breaking the
pattern created by the patient. The replacement is done with a slow progressive
motion. The level at which the application changes the positions of the objects is
controllable, thus allowing the therapist to choose the desired level of distraction for
each patient independently.
To add realism to the scene, the neighboring students and the professor at the
desk are controlled by the application to move their bodies (mainly the head) in a
pattern suggesting reading.
4. Measurements and Visualization
To provide the therapist and the patient to perform a quantitative evaluation of
the therapy session, the virtual environment stores in an Microsoft Access database