Anxiety Therapy

For years now, virtual environments have been used to treat anxiety problems with exposure therapy. Psychologists treat phobias and post traumatic stress disorder by exposing the patient to the thing that causes them anxiety and letting the anxiety dissipate on its own. But this proves difficult if your stressor is a battlefield in Iraq.

Enter virtual reality. Military psychologists use simulated Iraq war situations to treat soldiers. Other therapeutic VR uses include treating a fear of flying, fear of elevators, and even a "virtual nicotine craving" simulator for smoking addiction.

VR Training Programs

Virtual reality environments have also been used for training simulators. The earliest examples were flight simulators (most of us probably remember "Microsoft Flight Simulator"), but VR training has expanded beyond just that. There are many modern military examples, including Iraqi cultural situations and battlefield simulators for soldiers. Other examples include counter-terrorism, paratrooping, welding, and mining training sims.

Multiplayer Online Gaming

One result of virtual-reality research is the existence of entirely separate virtual worlds, inhabited entirely by the avatars of real world users. These worlds are sometimes referred to as massively multiplayer online games, and the World of Warcraft is the largest virtual gaming world in use now, with 11.5 million subscribers.

Another example is Second Life. The world of Second Life can't really be classified as a game, since the goal seems really just to be to wander around and interact with people, much like the real world. There is even a Second Life Shakespeare Company that performs Shakespeare's works within Second Life.

(Image: The Second Life Globe Theater, from Pathfinder Linden)

The Nintendo Wii

Probably the most successful cousin of virtual reality on the market today is the Nintento Wii. The Wii owes its motion capture and intuitive interaction concepts to the virtual reality technologies of the past. The controller is basically a simplified version of the "virtual reality glove." Both the Wiimote and the Wii Fit offer users another way of interacting with their virtual environment without having to wear any bulky equipment.

(Image: a new take on Wii tennis by Mesq)

Medical Procedures

Modern medicine has also found many uses for virtual reality. Doctors can interact with virtual systems to practice procedures or to do tiny surgical procedures on a larger scale. Surgeons have also started using virtual "twins" of their patients, to practice for surgery before doing the actual procedure.

(Image: the Karlsruhe Endoscopic Surgery Trainer)

Project Natal

The latest entry in the virtual reality inspired gaming world is Project Natal, a new piece of technology under development now for the Xbox. Project Natal proposes a new way of interacting with games, and indeed with computer systems in general. In their demo video, they propose a system that requires no keyboard and no controller, where a user's voice and motions serve as their method for interacting with the system.

The demo video is impressive, but the technology has not been completed and released yet. When it does get released, however, virtual reality will take another giant step towards total immersion and common home usage.

The Cave

The term "CAVE" refers to any virtual reality system that uses multiple walls with multiple projectors to immerse users in a virtual world. The first CAVE was built in 1992 as a method of showing of scientific visualizations. Now, many universities have their own CAVE systems. The CAVE is used for visualizing data, for demonstrating 3D environments, and for virtually testing component parts of newly developed engineering projects.

In an interview with military blog Defense Tech, the Army's Director of Research and Laboratory Management, Dr. John Parmentola described the military versions of some of the most advanced technology in development right now. For example, using electrical signals from the brain to control a wheelchair or output words to a computer is the civilian way of doing things. The Army envisions soldiers in contant, silent communication with each other, with the ability to silently activate and control machines just by thinking about it. That's a sci-fi action movie script that pretty much writes itself.

The quantum ghost effect is a little tougher to explain. Basically, you've got photons that pass across a smoke-obscured battlefield and simultaneously are and are not reflected by the smoke. Special computers could see through the smoke by taking advantage of the quantum link between both versions of the photons. Call it "Schrödinger's Howitzer."

Regarding the ultra-realistic holographic soldiers, the military wants them to act the part of enemies for more effective training exercizes. They can't just look real, though. They want AI that makes them act real. Dr. Parmentola seemed a bit credulous about the current state of development, however, saying, "I actually interact with virtual humans in terms of asking them questions and they're responding." Yeah, I was fooled by a bot on IM once too.

But what's this about World of Warcraft? The Army thinks online games are a perfect testing ground for their nascent AIs. They specifically mentioned WoW and EVE Online as games they want to infiltrate, sending in their "virtual soldiers" to see if they can deceive the human players. I think Blizzard should open up a bot only server.

Army Working On Science's Outer Limits. [Defense Tech]

French artist Mathias Verhasselt works as a concept artist at Blizzard Entertainment in Irvine California, although his art tends to lean more towards science fiction than it does World of Warcraft. Maybe he's working on some of the designs for the much anticipated Starcraft 2. If you want see a lot more (and we mean a lot more) of his designs, check out his website, which is basically one giant gallery of images so be warned when you click on the link. He's tossed everything from steampunk tankbots to alien species in there, and most of it is very impressive.

Terdiman writes:

My take was that the film—which focuses mainly on three distinct stories, a gamer who is so deeply addicted to World of Warcraft that he loses almost everything in his life; a household of gamers who spend almost every waking, non-working hour playing; and a couple in the early stages of a relationship that bloomed in EverQuest II—depicts these people as largely dysfunctional, out of touch with the world around them and not very capable of dealing with that world . . .

We're introduced to the film's main redemption figure, Dan, when he is vastly overweight and tells us his WoW addiction cost him his relationship, his business and his home. Now, he's living as what amounts to a patient in the home of a woman who runs a video game addiction support group . . . Another major story line is that of a group of grown-up adolescents who live together in a house in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, and who play WoW almost every minute they're not at work or asleep . . .

That leaves us with our lovers, Heather and Kevin. After meeting in EverQuest II, the two began to fall in love, even though Heather admits that she knows Kevin was also flirting with several other women in-game at the same time . . . Over time, they meet in person, consummate their love and eventually move in together. And while it's never fully spelled out, my take on their relationship was that both of them were passive aggressive, immature and that if they somehow managed to make it past a year living together, they would begin to hate each other.

My problem, I guess, is that the stories presented in this film did not present anyone living a life enhanced by their experiences with MMOs.

Imagine a movie about people who watch movies which introduced us to movie-watchers with broken relationships, addiction problems, and difficulty with socializing. Would these problems be traced back to their movie-watching, or to something else? Probably something else, because we think of movies as such a natural part of our lives that we hardly blame them for neurosis (except in extreme cases). And yet entering virtual worlds is still demonized, still held up as something terrifying, despite the fact that its as ubiquitous as movie-watching.

Second Skin is a kind of antifuture movie, which characterizes people who enjoy pop culture that is currently ascending as pathological. So what do we fear more? Virtual worlds or the future? Or is it really the same fear in the end?

Second Skin documentary bleak [C|Net]

You don't think of virtual worlds like Second LIfe as sensual — after all, there's no sense of touch at all — but watching the lush footage in Second Skin and hearing people talk about their hunger for Worlds of Warcraft may change your mind. Immersive virtual reality might never live up to the hype, but already more and more people are pouring so much of their hearts and minds into virtual worlds that they seem to "feel" their experiences in them.
Director Juan Carlos calls it "An Inconvenient Truth meets Errol Morris," which sounds like he's swinging for the fences. If Carlos was on death row, he'd pick Weird Science as his last movie to watch:

I've always really loved that comedy. I mean John Hughes is great, and he's made a bunch of good movies, but Weird Science to me gets the fan favorite award. The idea behind that movie was so inventive and hilarious. Plus there is just something awesome when aliens come to crash a party in the middle of a teen comedy. So I'd laugh to start, and then get a little Zen.

The plot is right out of a Pearl Jam song, or the headlines of a newspaper. When two bullies at school start knocking Ben around for his milk money, the lines between game and real life become blurred. Epect some angsty teen ass-kicking and emo music. Flemish director Nic Balthazar is working on the U.S. version of the film, and he is searching for "The new Leonardo DiCaprio" to star.

Balthazar to remake 'Ben X' in U.S. [Variety]

Over the past two years, there have been in-game protest marches and legal action against WOW because Blizzard had shut down guilds that advertised themselves as queer-friendly. And of course, WOW also tries to prevent players from getting into sexual positions with each other, though there are many ways around that.

Given the number of kids who play WOW, I get why Blizzard might want to limit sexual escapades. But preventing characters from calling themselves gay-friendly, or from switching genders? Isn't the whole point of MMOs that they offer us a chance to escape our biological bodies and plug into the post-human universe? C'mon, Blizzard people, get with the program. Switching genders is the whole point of MMOs. It's part of our cyber-destiny to be elves with twelve sexes.

Change Your Gender? Blizz Says No. [WOW Insider]

Sadly, it probably isn't. This is a clear case of male self-oppression, guys designing their own avatars to be so physically imposing that they are pretty much useless. One day, though, I hope to hear that there is a secret hacker army of female game developers who have infiltrated Blizzard Games and started designing male characters to look as ridiculous as possible. They would be a combination of ninja warriors and culture jammers. And they would all look like this:

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder [WOW Insider]

Creating a guild bazaar of sorts will not only make the players feel supported, it will also ensure that the group is decked out as best as they can be to face whatever challenges you have set for them, be it instances or raids. Remember to resist the urge to schedule every minute of available play time; giving guild members time to do what they wish will keep them from getting 'overworked' guild-wise.

Also, I recommend owning your anger, and not accusing the Tauren of being hostile all the time. That's just your projection, OK? The Tauren can't take responsibility for your feelings.

Guild drama [via WOW Insider]