Texte intégral / Full text (pdf, 20 MiB) - Infoscience - EPFL

CHAPTER 3
VRET For Social Phobia
Much work has already been conducted with regards to the use of VR as therapeutic tool
for the treatment of phobias. Many types of phobias have thus been tackled such as acrophobia,
arachnophobia, and claustrophobia. It is quite simple to simulate heights, spiders, or
closed spaces in VEs. On the other hand, it is much harder to simulate humans. Indeed, as
human beings, we are experts in human being representation and movement. For this reason,
much less work has been undergone in social phobia. VRET for social phobia, and more
specifically, for fear of public speaking is only about a decade old.
In this chapter, we first present the various scenarios we have created, including environments,
characters and scenario scripting. We then present a method we have developed in
order to obtain interaction between the user and a character using eye-tracking data. We then
discuss how this has motivated us to further work on character gaze behaviors.
3.1 Preliminaries
The first part of this thesis is based on previous work which has been undergone in the Virtual
Reality Laboratory (VRLab, EPFL). More specifically, the platform which we use has been
developed by Herbelin during his PhD thesis [Herbelin, 2005].
This framework allows for the real-time animation of a small group of characters. They
are endowed with gaze control and facial animation. The platform works with Python scripts.
These scripts allow interactive control of characters in order to make them talk for example;
this actually consists of playing a pre-recorded sentence and animating the character’s face
and eyes accordingly.
35