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Anxiety is an increasingly common feeling in our society; it can be very debilitating and, if not properly treated, can evolve to more serious health problems. This paper describes a low-cost Virtual Reality solution to support the treatment of social anxiety, more specifically the anxiety of speaking in front of an audience. Our application involves: i) a simulation that takes place in a virtual auditorium inhabited by animated virtual humans with controllable behaviours; ii) an interface which allows the therapist to control these behaviors and a set of features and events of the simulation, inducing different levels of distress in the patients. The use of Virtual Reality environments for the treatment of phobias emerged in the 90s and usually implies expensive special purpose hardware. Our challenge was to conceive a low-cost solution, easy to install and use for people without expertise in informatics.

Augmented and Virtual Reality techniques are becoming more widespread and Medicine is one of the fields which can benefit from their use. In this paper we describe a smartphone application that applies these two techniques to provide visualizations of a patient's brain. This application was designed with the goal of guiding a physician in a medical procedure called Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS), however it can be adapted and extended to other uses. The application was submitted to user tests involving two experts in TMS and researchers in Biomedical Engineering, the results were positive and provided useful feedback that will be considered when further developing the application.

Augmented and Virtual Reality approaches are getting more and more advanced and consequently their use in various real world areas is increasing. Medicine is one of the fields in which more practical applications are surfacing, mainly approaches that enable new forms of visualization of data obtained from real patients. Our work focuses on providing a new simple, practical and efficient way to visualize the brain of a patient, both in an Augmented Reality and in a Virtual Reality approach, through a smartphone application.

This Virtual patients have been used since the 1990's in pharmacy education for teaching and assessment of clinical and communication skills. Although their use is still limited, they allow students' engagement in true-to-life situations in a controllable environment. This paper describes an interactive application to assist in the academic training and assessment of Pharmaceutical Sciences students. Virtual humans play the role of patients and communicate with the student by speech and by facial and body language. The application comprises two usage modes: (i) the training mode, used autonomously by the student, gives detailed information about his performance and indicates places where he may find additional information, and (ii) the assessment mode which is used by the teacher to evaluate the student's performance. The process used to feed case-scenarios in the application does not require informatics skills because it resorts to an easy-to-use graphical interface. A BackOffice Web application was implemented to allow the creation of new self-medication situations and the collection of data about students' performance. The application was tested by a restricted group of experts whose overall opinion was quite positive about the usefulness of the application as a tool to improve students' as well as professionals' communication skills.

Bullying is a real and serious problem with severe consequences for the young victims of this phenomenon. Serious Games have proven their effectiveness in therapeutic approaches to problems within the Conflict Resolution domain, thereby revealing a potential to be explored in the mitigation of peer violence in and outside the school. This paper presents a Serious Game whose main goal is to promote empathy as a mean to prevent bullying; the rationale for the prevention is that by helping victims and observers of these episodes of violence to practice an attitude/behavior change toward bullying one will be training and increasing those attitudes and behavioral competences for the real bullying situations. The relevance of our proposal is based on the high prevalence of bullying and the lack of demonstrated effectiveness of the current prevention interventions. The game runs on different platforms (smartphone, tablet, PC), provides flexibility in the choice of scenarios and in the game playing role. Player's decisions have obvious effects in the subsequent levels of the game. The treatment or intervention resorting to this game may take place at the therapist's office or outside, in an independent way. In every game session a data set is recorded for later analysis by the therapist. We also implemented a Back Office application integrated with the game to support the therapist in several monitoring tasks.

Virtual Reality in Exposure Therapy allows exposing patients to simulations of feared situations, even in cases where actual exposure is not possible or difficult. We have created a Web application that helps therapists performing this type of therapy when dealing with patients that suffer from anxiety of crossing road tunnels. The application contains a set of animations of virtual scenarios recreating a car journey across a tunnel visualized from the point of view of the traveler sitting beside the driver and exhibiting a set of potential anxiety inductors. In this paper we describe the application and report a user study to assess the adequacy of our application as a VRET tool and also to compare the impact of visualizing the animations resorting to two distinct low cost apparatus: a versatile immersive equipment and a big projection.

The Portuguese Sign Language (PSL) is the sign language used in Portugal by the depth community. This language has a lexicon, plus syntactic and semantic rules such as any oral language. This work's motivation was based primarily on two aspects: the PSL qualified interpreters are scarce, and the most common digital method to present sign language, namely the video with humans, it is a difficult medium to edit and reuse. After said that, it makes perfectly sense to use a deaf-signer virtual human capable of reproduce this language. With the advent of the Microsoft Kinect, the motion capture sessions turn out to be a easiest and more accessible process than the conventional systems. Our research involves this low-cost technology to support the animation of a virtual human. This paper describes an application within the education domain, which uses an avatar as a PSL virtual interpreter. The virtual signer objective is to teach basic concepts of PSL in a fun and easy manner, targeted especially to children. The tool allows the translation of Portuguese words to PSL, it allows to combine signs into simple sentences, and also illustrates several grammatical concepts such as: negative or interrogative sentence construction; gender and plural marking; and verbal time conjunction. It was included as well, a didactic component to test the user's knowledge, through a simple game of association between words and signs. The evaluation results shows that the application could contribute to the PSL education, and shows that avatars are useful in the sign language context.

The last teaching observatory of historical interest in Portugal, from the late 19th century, is one of the most charismatic buildings of the Museums of the University of Lisbon. After 100 years of intense use, the Observatory needs structural restoration before it can be fully returned to public fruition. Recently, a group of students from this University was engaged in the construction of virtual 3D models to recreate the Observatory building and collections. This paper describes the models constructed as a tool to be used for information dissemination among broader audiences.

The aim of our work is to propose a Virtual Reality solution to treat social anxiety, applying cognitive-behavioral therapies, that preserves the sense of immersion without requiring the use of expensive special purpose hardware. We have developed an application, called Virtual Spectators, that creates a simulation taking place in a virtual scenario inhabited by animated virtual humans whose behaviors are dynamically controlled by the therapist. To evaluate the effective usefulness of the tool from the point of view of the therapist, we performed an evaluation of the application with a set of these professionals familiarized with the use of exposure therapy. Their feedback was positive and they were enthusiastic about the possibility of using such a tool to support a session of exposure therapy.

The virtual recreation of a physical three dimensional (3D) exhibition or museum allows a visitor to navigate in this virtual scenario in a way closer to reality. This issue is particularly relevant when the museum building is by itself a piece of art, as it is often the case. In this paper, the use of virtual 3D models in the domain of cultural diffusion is analysed, considering the common aspects of its application either for collections of museum’s or for buildings and artifacts deteriorated or destroyed along the time. A wide range of applications are presented to exemplify the different requirements and techniques that can be considered in this domain. Techniques to create 3D models are reviewed as they are the base to generate a virtual environment and special attention is given to applications devoted to the development of 3D virtual museum exhibitions.http://dx.doi.org/10.14429/djlit.33.3.4608

This paper describes an interactive application conceived to improve non-prescription medicines consultation skills in undergraduate Pharmacy students and a user test carried out with two sets of participants. Resorting to virtual humans that play the role of patients and communicate with the students by speech and by facial and body language, the application stimulates students’ engagement in true to life situations in a controllable environment. Two usage modes are available: the training mode, used autonomously by the student, and the assessment mode which is used by the teacher to evaluate the student’s performance. A BackOffice Web application was also implemented to assist teachers’ work. It supports the collection of data about students’ performance, the creation of new self medication situations and their posterior insertion in the application. The overall opinion of the participants in the user-study was quite positive about the usefulness of the application as a tool to improve students’ non-prescription medicines consultation skills. Moreover, some valuable suggestions were gathered during this testing process.

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 Reality Exposure Therapy.