Authors:
Ana Paula Cláudio
1
;
Maria Beatriz Carmo
1
;
Augusta Gaspar
2
and
Renato Teixeira
1
Affiliations:
1
Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal
;
2
ISCTE Instituto Universitário de Lisboa and Universidade Católica Portuguesa, Portugal
Keyword(s):
Virtual Reality, Virtual Reality in Exposure Therapy (VRET), Social Anxiety, Fearing of Public Speaking, User Study, Nonverbal Behaviour Research.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Animation and Simulation
;
Animation and Simulation of Natural Environments
;
Anthropometric Virtual Human Models
;
Character Animation
;
Computer Vision, Visualization and Computer Graphics
;
Facial Animation
;
Geometry and Modeling
;
Graphical Interfaces
;
Human Figure Animation
;
Interactive Environments
;
Social Agents in Computer Graphics
;
Social and Conversational Agents
Abstract:
Social Anxiety affects a significant number of people, limiting their personal and social life. We describe an interactive Virtual Reality approach to the exposure therapy for social anxiety, resorting to virtual characters that exhibit combinations of facial and body expressions controllable in real-time by the therapist. The application described in this paper updates and significantly improves a former version: ameliorating the graphical quality of the virtual characters and providing them with the ability of articulating a set of sentences. The application executes in ordinary computers and it is easily used in counselling and research contexts. Although we have only resorted to free or very low cost 3D models of virtual humans, we adopted strategies to obtain an adequate final quality that we were able to validate with a significant number of observers. Moreover, a set of therapists tested the application and gave positive feedback about its potential effectiveness in Virtual Re
ality Exposure Therapy.
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