Bravemind

From 2005-2012 I spent part of my time working with Dr. Skip Rizzo on VR therapy for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. This form of therapy is known as “Exposure Therapy”, and the idea behind it is to re-expose patients to traumatic stimuli in order to help them habituate to the stressful stimuli. Clinical trials comparing traditional talk-only therapy vs. VR have shown it may help reduce the total number of sessions required for a patient to reach habituation.

More info on this project can be found here: http://medvr.ict.usc.edu/projects/bravemind/

The following video from a 2010 prototype gives an overview of the work:

This 2013 video provides a more in-depth overview of the work:

For the first phase of the project (2006-2010), we were using the Gamebryo engine and I was part of a small team creating VR prototypes to test the effectiveness of the treatment. I was handling everything from creating art assets, and scripting, to QA testing and burning DVDs to be sent to clinics.

After Gamebryo went out of business I helped lead a transition to the Unity game engine in 2010. And during the beginning of the second phase of the project I again handled a variety of duties, including:

Responsibilities:

Design
Level Editing
Trigger placement
Scripting
Effects
Lighting
QA
Distribution / Support

Contributions:

Art Asset Creation
Mel Scripts
Exporting
Overall Art Pipeline
Workflow Documentation
Naming Conventions

The following video shows off the variety of content and features we created inside Unity:

For the last phase of the project I handled day-to-day project administration of the software development team, in collaboration with the ICT Art Group and Virtual Humans Group.