The NeuroVR Project

What we are doing for you...

In the past decade, the use of virtual reality for clinical and research applications has become more widespread. However, the diffusion of this approach is still limited by three main issues: poor usability, lack of technical expertise among clinical professionals, and high costs.

NeuroVR is a cost-free virtual reality platform (wikipedia definition) platform based on open-source software (wikipedia definition) , that allows providing the clinical professional with a cost-free VE editor, which allows non-expert users to easily modify a virtual world (wikipedia definition) , to best suit the needs of the clinical setting.

The NeuroVR platform includes two main components, the Editor and the Player; they are implemented using open-source components that provide advanced features; this includes an interactive rendering (wikipedia definition) system based on OpenGL (wikipedia definition) which allows for high quality images.

The NeuroVR Editor is developed by customizing the User Interface of Blender, an integrated suite of 3D (wikipedia definition) creation tools available on all major operating systems, under the GNU General Public License (wikipedia definition) ; this implies that the program can be distributed even with the complete source code.

Using the NeuroVR Editor, the user can choose the appropriate psychological stimuli/stressors from a database of objects (both 2D and 3D) and videos, and easily place them into the virtual environment.

An interesting feature of the NeuroVR Editor is the possibility to add new objects to the database. This feature allows the therapist to enhance the patient’s feeling of familiarity and intimacy with the virtual scene, i.e., by using photos or movies of objects/people that are part of the patient’s daily life, thereby improving the efficacy of the exposure.

The edited scene can then be visualized in the NeuroVR Player using either immersive or non-immersive displays.

• The immersive modality allows the scene to be visualized using a head-mounted display (wikipedia definition), either in stereoscopy (wikipedia definition) or in mono-mode; compatibility with head-tracking sensor is also provided.
• In the non-immersive modality, the virtual environment can be displayed using a desktop monitor or a wall projector. The user can interact with the virtual environment using either keyboard commands, a mouse or a joypad, depending on the hardware configuration chosen.

The NeuroVR Player, leverages two major open-source projects in the VR field:

When running a simulation, the system offers a set of standard features that contribute to increase the realism of the simulated scene. These include collision detection (wikipedia definition) to control movements in the environment, realistic walk-style motion, advanced lighting techniques for enhanced image quality, and streaming of video textures using alpha channel for transparency.

Currently, the NeuroVR library includes different virtual scenes (apartment, office, square, supermarket, park, classroom, etc.), covering two of the most studied clinical applications of VR : specific phobias and eating disturbances .

The NeuroVR platform runs on standard personal computers with Microsoft Windows; the only requirement for the hardware is related to the graphics card, which must support OpenGL (wikipedia definition).