| NeuroVR reserchers received the "Best Paper Award" at the Virtual Rehabilitation Conference |
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| Tuesday, 23 October 2007 | |
NeuroVR reserchers received the "Best Paper Award" at the Virtual Rehabilitation Conference, in Venice, Italy
 
Nine NeuroVR researchers received the "Best Paper Award" at the recent Virtual Rehabilitation Conference for their study of how the NeuroVR software can be used to develop a new breed of clinical and rehabilitative applications for health care. The paper “A free, open-source virtual reality platform for the rehabilitation of cognitive and psychological disorders,” describes the main features of NeuroVR, a cost-free virtual reality platform used for therapeutic and research applications. NeuroVR allows non-expert users to easily customize a VE, by using a set of pre-designed virtual scenes, and to display them using either an immersive or non-immersive system.  | View | Athough VR has finally come of age for clinical and research applications, the majority of them are still in the laboratory or investigation stage. Key limitations to the adoption of this approach include the lack of standardization in VR hardware and software, and the high costs that are required for building and testing a VE from scratch. Actually, the development of a VE requires special software and programming skills that are often unavailable for researchers and clinical professionals. Further, the majority of existing VEs are proprietary and have closed source, meaning that they cannot tailored to fit the needs of a specific clinical or experimental setting. “Most of the virtual reality tools available for health care are proprietary and expensive,” said Prof. Giuseppe Riva, Catholic University professor and lead researcher. “NeuroVR is the first attempt to introduce in the world of virtual reality the open-source, community driven approach that is behind the worldwide diffusion of Web 2.0 applications. ” The other authors are A. Gaggioli, D. Villani, A. Preziosa, F. Morganti, and L. Strambi - working at the Applied Technology for Neuro-Psychology Lab. , Istituto Auxologico Italiano - and R. Corsi, G. Faletti, L. Vezzadini - working at the Virtual Reality Multimedia Park . The NeuroVR software is available for download on the NeuroVR project website which has been created to provide researchers and clinical professionals interested with state-of-the art information on VR hardware and software as well as the latest clinical protocols published by the VR community. The research was supported by a grant from the Italian MIUR Firb programme. |
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