Positive Technology Journal

“Virtual Reality and Motor Disorders” Symposium
April 27th, 2006, Laval (France)
 
Laval Virtual is historically the biggest convention for Virtual Reality (VR) in Europe. With its industrial exhibition and its live demonstrations, it offers the possibility to discover and to test a wide range of interfaces and VR-based applications. Laval Virtual is also a scientific conference VRIC 2006 (Virtual Reality International Conference). On April 26-27-28th, 2006, it offers multiple opportunities of meetings, exchange of ideas, information as well as the possibility to attend the presentation of the most innovative applications of the field with lecturers from about 15 different countries and international papers published in the symposium Proceedings.
 
The “Virtual Reality and Motor Disorders” Symposium is a component of VRIC 2006. It will be held on April 27th, 2006. This full day symposium is dedicated to all issues regarding Motor Disorders with Virtual Reality. 
 
Areas covered include:

    - Motor disorders due to nervous system injuries;
    - Motor disorders due to orthopaedic injuries;
    - Balance and gait disorders;
    - Wheelchair mobility.

Interest is given to the consequences of VR use on functional activities of daily living.
 
The “Virtual Reality and Motor Disorders” Symposium will propose a wide range of works carried out to examine the different facets of the question; will allow meetings and exchanges between experts of these different fields; and will present VR-based systems designed for the affected people.
 
Our guest speaker is Tamar Weiss, Director of the Laboratory for Innovations in Rehabilitation Technology (LIRT) at the University of Haifa, Israel.
 
Call for Papers
 

        Submission of abstracts: January 27 th , 2006
        Notification of acceptation: February 10 th , 2006
        Submission of selected full papers: March 10 th , 2006
        Deadline for final revisions of full papers: March 24 th , 2006
 
If you need more information, please contact Evelyne Klinger (klinger@enst.fr), Scientific Chair of the symposium.

We are definitely looking forward to meet you personally at Laval Virtual 2006.
Evelyne Klinger, Simon Richir  & the Symposium’s Committee Program

Laval Virtual 8th International Conference on Virtual Reality

Mirella Dapretto, Mari S Davies, Jennifer H Pfeifer, Ashley A Scott, Marian Sigman, Susan Y Bookheimer, Marco Iacoboni

To examine mirror neuron abnormalities in autism, high-functioning children with autism and matched controls underwent fMRI while imitating and observing emotional expressions. Although both groups performed the tasks equally well, children with autism showed no mirror neuron activity in the inferior frontal gyrus (pars opercularis). Notably, activity in this area was inversely related to symptom severity in the social domain, suggesting that a dysfunctional 'mirror neuron system' may underlie the social deficits observed in autism.

via Science Daily

Robotic, simulated patients are allowing students in the Michael G. DeGroote School of Medicine to practise clinical skills before they reach human patients. A simulator lab training centre set up by the anesthesia department allows students to experience the challenges of working in a hospital operating room in a setting that looks and functions as close as possible to the real thing...

Read full article

Biol Psychiatry. 2005 Nov 30;

Authors: Cornwell BR, Johnson L, Berardi L, Grillon C

Startle reflex modification has become valuable to the study of fear and anxiety, but few studies have explored startle reactivity in socially threatening situations. METHODS: Healthy participants ranging in trait social anxiety entered virtual reality (VR) that simulates standing center-stage in front of an audience to anticipate giving a speech and count backward. We measured startle and autonomic reactivity during anticipation of both tasks inside VR after a single baseline recording outside VR. RESULTS: Trait social anxiety, but not general trait anxiety, was positively correlated with startle before entering VR and most clearly during speech anticipation inside VR. Speech anticipation inside VR also elicited stronger physiologic responses relative to anticipation of counting. CONCLUSIONS: Under social-evaluative threat, startle reactivity showed robust relationships with fear of negative evaluation, a central aspect of social anxiety and clinical social phobia. Context-specific startle modification may be an endophenotype for subtypes of pathological anxiety.

Via Neurodudes

From Eugene Izhikevich’s website

On October 27, 2005 I finished simulation of a model that has the size of the human brain. The model has 100,000,000,000 neurons (hundred billion or 10^11) and almost 1,000,000,000,000,000 (one quadrillion or 10^15) synapses. It represents 300×300 mm^2 of mammalian thalamo-cortical surface, specific, non-specific, and reticular thalamic nuclei, and spiking neurons with firing properties corresponding to those recorded in the mammalian brain. The model exhibited alpha and gamma rhythms, moving clusters of neurons in up- and down-states, and other interesting phenomena (watch a 25M .avi or .mov movie). One second of simulation took 50 days on a beowulf cluster of 27 processors (3GHz each). Why did I do that?...

Via Networked performance

Ana Paiva, Rui Prada, Ricardo Chaves, Marco Vala, Adrian Bullock, Gerd Andersson, and Kristina Hook, ICMI’03, November 5–7, 2003, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

In this paper, we describe a way of controlling the emotional states of a synthetic character in a game (FantasyA) through a tangible interface named SenToy. SenToy is a doll with sensors in the arms, legs and body, allowing the user to influence the emotions of her character in the game. The user performs gestures and movements with SenToy, which are picked up by the sensors and interpreted according to a scheme found through an intial Wizard of Oz study. Different gestures are used to express each of the following emotions: anger, fear, happiness, surprise, sadness and gloating. Depending on the expressed emotion, the synthetic character in FantasyA will, in turn, perform different actions. The evaluation of SenToy acting as the interface to the computer game FantasyA has shown that users were able to express most of the desired emotions to influence the synthetic characters, and that overall, players, especially children, really liked the doll as an interface."

Read full paper:

Towards Tangibility in Gameplay: Building a Tangible Affective Interface for a Computer Game [pdf]

From Wikipedia

The Uncanny Valley is a principle of robotics concerning the emotional response of humans to robots and other non-human entities. It was theorized by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori in 1970. The principle states that as a robot is made more humanlike in its appearance and motion, the emotional response from a human being to robot will become increasingly positive and empathic, until a point is reached at which the response suddenly becomes strongly repulsive; as the appearance and motion are made to be indistinguishable to that of human being, the emotional response becomes positive once more and approaches human-human empathy levels.

Emotional response of human subjects is plotted against anthropomorphism of a robot, following Mori's results. The Uncanny Valley is the region of negative emotional response for robots that seem "almost human".

This gap of repulsive response aroused by a robot with appearance and motion between a "barely-human" and "fully human" entity is called the Uncanny Valley. The name harkens to the notion that a robot which is "almost human" will seem overly "strange" to a human being and thus will fail to evoke the requisite empathetic response required for productive human-robot interaction.

The phenomenon can be explained by the notion that if an entity is sufficiently non-humanlike, then the humanlike characteristics will tend to stand out and be noticed easily, generating empathy. On the other hand, if the entity is "almost human", then the non-human characteristics will be the ones that stand out, leading to a feeling of "strangeness" in the human viewer.

Another possibility is that infected individuals and corpses exhibit many visual anomalies similar to the ones we see with humanoid robots and so we react with the same alarm and revulsion. The reaction may in fact become worse with robots since there is no overt reason for it to occur; when we see a corpse we understand where our feelings come from. Behavioural anomalies too are indicative of illness, neurological conditions or mental dysfunction, and again evoke acutely negative emotions.

Some roboticists have heavily criticized the theory, arguing that Mori had no basis for the right part of his chart, as human-like robots are only now technically possible (and still only partially). David Hanson, a roboticist who developed a realistic robotic copy of his girlfriend's head, said the idea of the Uncanny Valley was "really pseudoscientific, but people treat it like it is science." Sara Kiesler, a human-robot interaction researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, questioned Uncanny Valley's scientific status, noting that "we have evidence that it’s true, and evidence that it’s not."