Over the last two decades, there has been a rapid increase of studies testing the efficacy and acceptability of virtual reality in the assessment and treatment of mental health problems. This systematic review was carried out to investigate the use of virtual reality in the assessment and the treatment of psychosis. Web of Science, PsychInfo, EMBASE, Scopus, ProQuest and PubMed databases were searched, resulting in the identification of 638 articles potentially eligible for inclusion; of these, 50 studies were included in the review. The main fields of research in virtual reality and psychosis are: safety and acceptability of the technology; neurocognitive evaluation; functional capacity and performance evaluation; assessment of paranoid ideation and auditory hallucinations; and interventions. The studies reviewed indicate that virtual reality offers a valuable method of assessing the presence of symptoms in ecologically valid environments, with the potential to facilitate learning new emotional and behavioural responses. Virtual reality is a promising method to be used in the assessment of neurocognitive deficits and the study of relevant clinical symptoms. Furthermore, preliminary findings suggest that it can be applied to the delivery of cognitive rehabilitation, social skills training interventions and virtual reality-assisted therapies for psychosis. The potential benefits for enhancing treatment are highlighted. Recommendations for future research include demonstrating generalisability to real-life settings, examining potential negative effects, larger sample sizes and long-term follow-up studies. The present review has been registered in the PROSPERO register: CDR 4201507776.

/pdf/virtual-reality-in-the-assessment-and-treatment-of-psychosis-189j5efhh9.pdf

Virtual reality in the assessment and treatment of psychosis: a systematic review of its utility, acceptability and effectiveness

https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/156253/1/EarlMartinezMalzbender2010.pdf

Archaeological applications of polynomial texture mapping: analysis, conservation and representation

The tools and standards of best practice adopted by natural science (NS) and cultural heritage (CH) professionals will determine the digital future of NS and CH digital imaging work. This tutorial discusses emerging digital technologies and explores issues influencing widespread adoption of digital practices for NS and CH. The tutorial explores a possible digital future for NS and CH through key concepts; adoption of digital surrogates, empirical (scientific) provenance, perpetual digital conservation, and ‘born archival’ semantic knowledge management. The tutorial discusses multiple image based technologies along with current research including; Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI), Photometric Stereo, and new research in the next generation of multi-view RTI. This research involves extending stereo correspondence methods. These technologies permit generation of digital surrogates that can serve as trusted representations of ‘real world’ content. The tutorial explores how empirical provenance contributes to the reliability of digital surrogates, and how perpetual digital conservation can ensure that digital surrogates will be archived and available for future generations. The tutorial investigates the role of semantically based knowledge management strategies and their use in simplifying ease of use by natural science and CH professionals as well as long term preservation activities. The tutorial also investigates these emerging technologies’ potential to democratize digital technology, making digital tools and methods easy to adopt and make NS and CH materials widely available to diverse audiences. The tutorial concludes with handson demonstrations of image-based capture and processing methods and a practical problem solving Q&A with the audience.

/pdf/image-based-empirical-information-acquisition-scientific-1a5g3xza8z.pdf

Image-Based Empirical Information Acquisition, Scientific Reliability, and Long-Term Digital Preservation for the Natural Sciences and Cultural Heritage

The relationship between neurocognition and symptomatology in people with schizophrenia has been established. The present study examined whether social cognition could mediate this relationship. There were 119 participants (58 people with paranoid schizophrenia and 61 healthy controls) participated in this study. Neurocognition was assessed by Raven’s Progressive Matrices Test, the Judgment of Line Orientation Test, and the Tower of London Test. Psychiatric symptoms in people with schizophrenia were assessed by the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale. Social cognition was measured by the Faux Pas Test, the “Reading the Mind in the Eyes” Test, and the Interpersonal Reactivity Index. Results were consistent with previous findings that neurocognition and social cognition were impaired in the clinical participants. A novel observation is that social cognition significantly mediated the relationship between neurocognition and symptomatology. These findings suggest that neurocognitive deficits predispose people with schizophrenia to worse psychiatric symptoms through the impairment of social cognition. Findings of the present study provide important insight into a functional model of schizophrenia that could guide the development of cost-effective interventions for people with schizophrenia.

/pdf/the-relationship-between-neurocognition-and-symptomatology-1fvra1wtig.pdf

The relationship between neurocognition and symptomatology in people with schizophrenia: social cognition as the mediator.

In recent years, virtual reality (VR) research on psychotic disorders has been initiated. Several studies showed that VR can elicit paranoid thoughts about virtual characters (avatars), both in patients with psychotic disorders and healthy individuals. Real life symptoms and VR experiences were correlated, lending further support to its validity. Neurocognitive deficits and difficulties in social behavior were found in schizophrenia patients, not only in abstract tasks but also using naturalistic virtual environments that are more relevant to daily life, such as a city or encounters with avatars. VR treatments are conceivable for most dimensions of psychotic disorders. There is a small but expanding literature on interventions for delusions, hallucinations, neurocognition, social cognition, and social skills; preliminary results are promising. VR applications for assessment and treatment of psychotic disorders are in their infancy, but appear to have a great potential for increasing our understanding of psychosis and expanding the therapeutic toolbox.

/pdf/brave-new-worlds-review-and-update-on-virtual-reality-4vb4l15cua.pdf

Brave New Worlds—Review and Update on Virtual Reality Assessment and Treatment in Psychosis

Psychotic disorders carry social and economic costs for sufferers and society. Recent evidence highlights the risk posed by urban upbringing and social deprivation in the genesis of paranoia and psychosis. Evidence based psychological interventions are often not offered because of a lack of therapists. Virtual reality (VR) environments have been used to treat mental health problems. VR may be a way of understanding the aetiological processes in psychosis and increasing psychotherapeutic resources for its treatment. We developed a high-fidelity virtual reality scenario of an urban street scene to test the hypothesis that virtual urban exposure is able to generate paranoia to a comparable or greater extent than scenarios using indoor scenes. Participants (n = 32) entered the VR scenario for four minutes, after which time their degree of paranoid ideation was assessed. We demonstrated that the virtual reality scenario was able to elicit paranoia in a nonclinical, healthy group and that an urban scene was more likely to lead to higher levels of paranoia than a virtual indoor environment. We suggest that this study offers evidence to support the role of exposure to factors in the urban environment in the genesis and maintenance of psychotic experiences and symptoms. The realistic high-fidelity street scene scenario may offer a useful tool for therapists.

/pdf/a-high-fidelity-virtual-environment-for-the-study-of-39t7lsjkzd.pdf

A high-fidelity virtual environment for the study of paranoia.

A key component of many Byzantine churches was the mosaics on the curved walls and ceilings, which included gold and silver glass tesserae. As the viewer or the light moved within the church, these tesserae sparkled. In this paper we describe how we captured a Polynomial Texture Map of the apse mosaic at the Angeloktisti Church at Kiti, Cyprus and used it to investigate how the position of the lighting may have affected the appearance of the mosaic. Our study showed that the appearance of the mosaics is indeed significantly different when lit from various directions.

Lighting and byzantine glass tesserae

High-fidelity computer reconstructions of cultural heritage sites attempt to create a faithful representation of the past physical environment. This includes modeling the scene to high precision, and accurately simulating the distribution of authentic light energy within the scene. This does not, however, ensure that the displayed image will have a high fidelity visual appearance due to the limited dynamic range of typical computer displays. Such displays only have a range of about two orders of magnitude between minimum and maximum luminance. A welldesigned cathode ray tube (CRT) monitor may do slightly better than this in a darkened room, but the maximum display luminance is only around 100 cd/m2, which does not even begin to approach natural daylight levels of approximately 105 cd/m2. Furthermore, their inability to display 'true black' means that standard displays also struggle to show low-light images accurately. In this paper we compare images of computer reconstructions of Byzantine art from Cyprus illuminated with simulated modern lighting and the candle light which was present in Byzantine times on both a traditional and a novel High Dynamic Range display.

High dynamic range display of authentically illuminated Byzantine art from cyprus

A human depends on all five senses: visuals, audio, smell, taste and touch to perceive an environment. It is not only the individual senses, but also their interaction that plays a key role in enabling us to understand the world around us. Virtual archaeology is being increasingly used to investigate the past. Failure to consider all senses in these reconstructions runs the very real danger of misrepresenting ancient environments and how they may have been perceived by our ancestors. This paper describes Real Virtuality: true high-fidelity multi-sensory virtual environments, and shows how such an approach may give historians a more valid means of considering the past.

https://polipapers.upv.es/index.php/var/article/download/4750/4879

Multi-Sensory Virtual Environments for Investigating the Past

Schizophrenia can be a devastating lifelong psychotic disorder with a poor prognosis. National guidelines in the UK recommend the provision of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) to all those suffering with psychotic disorders, but there is a lack of trained therapists in the UK able to provide such a treatment. Developing high quality automated technologies that can serve as an adjunct to conventional CBT should enhance the provision of this therapy, and increase the efficiency of the therapists in practice. The latter will occur by enabling alternate professionals to aid in the delivery of therapy, to enable behavioral experiments to be conducted in the clinic, and for sessions to be recorded and re-played such that the patient can deliver therapy to him or herself. As such the system will enable patients to become experts in, and providers of, their own treatment and decrease the number of sessions needed to be led by a trained CBT therapist. A key feature of any such system is the level of realism required to ensure a compelling session in which the user is not adversely affected by the system itself. This paper presents a high-fidelity virtual environment to help better understand the environmental triggers for psychosis.

Eva Zányi

Papers

A high-fidelity virtual environment for the study of paranoia.

Lighting and byzantine glass tesserae

High dynamic range display of authentically illuminated Byzantine art from cyprus

Multi-Sensory Virtual Environments for Investigating the Past

Interactive highly realistic virtual reality as a tool for understanding the genesis and treatment of psychotic symptoms.