Larry F. Hodges - US grants

DESCRIPTION: This study will test the feasibility of virtual reality exposure (VRE) therapy for fear of public speaking. Recent studies suggest social phobia, which includes but is not limited to fear of public speaking, is one of the three most common psychological disorders, with lifetime prevalence rates of 10-13 percent of the general population. Discrete fear of public speaking affects up to 57 percent of the general population. Although studies have demonstrated the efficacy of in vivo exposure therapy for fear of public speaking, it is logistically difficult to arrange and control. VRE would eliminate the uncertainty involved with live audiences. Primary goals of Phase I are to develop a VR environment for treatment of fear of public speaking and to determine the effectiveness of VRE as compared to pre-treatment. Ten participants who meet criteria for either generalized or specific (fear of public speaking) Social Phobia will be assessed using standard self-report and clinician-rated measures prior to and following VRE treatment and again at three-month follow-up. Phase II will test the relative efficacy of VRE and standard therapy versus a waitlist. The long-term objectives include development of effective and affordable virtual reality PC-based systems available to other researchers and therapists. PROPOSED COMMERCIAL APPLICATION: The commercial applications include (1) the sale of these PC-based systems to researchers and therapists to deliver virtual reality exposure therapy, (2) the delivery of VRE therapy in clinics to individual patients, (3) the training of researchers and therapists in this type of therapy.

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).

This award provides funding for a new Research Experiences for Undergraduate site focused on human-centered computing at Clemson University. The objective of the REU site is to provide talented undergraduate students genuine research experiences through immersion into the activities of and culture of a research lab. The project recruits students locally and nationally from undergraduate institutions with emphasis on minority and women students. Each year 10 students participate in on-going research being conducted in the Cybersociety Lab and the Virtual Reality and Eye Tracking Lab. The students receive 8 weeks of intensive training in the research areas, support from peer and faculty mentors, and professional development opportunities.

The intellectual merit of this project lies in the potential contributions to the field human-centered computing of the research. The project has an excellent faculty leadership team that has an outstanding track record in advances in the timely and important areas studied within their labs. The topics are current and of interest to both students and the research community at large and well suited to undergraduate exploration.

The broader impacts of the project include providing a quality research experience to undergraduate students, particularly women and students from underrepresented groups. The participating faculty members are committed to including under-represented minority students in their research. Thus this project has the potential to produce new computer science graduate students and faculty members and to advance discovery and understanding while promoting learning.

Clemson University's Human-Centered Computing Scholars (HCCS) program supports ten financially disadvantaged doctoral students in its School of Computing. The Scholars conduct research in Human-Centered Computing and work on projects related to accessibility, biometrics, virtual humans, virtual reality, educational technologies, information technology policy and social computing. During the summer months, the project also supports two undergraduate researchers who work in teams with and are mentored by the doctoral students. Each doctoral Scholar is also given an opportunity to participate in a summer internship with a government or industrial research lab.

Human-Centered Computing Scholars are recruited from Historically Black Colleges and Universities and other universities in cooperation with the Alliance for the Advancement of African-American Researchers in Computing. The project is intended to broaden the participation of underrepresented groups, primarily African-Americans, through engagement in research and mentoring activities.

This project, developing a highly reconfigurable collaborative visualization instrument named Enodia, aims to support virtual reality (VR) and 2D content, and multiple interaction modalities (supporting very different physical display constellations) at the institution and within satellite nodes at several collaborating colleges and universities. Enodia operationalizes the idea that different activities call for different physical arrangements of tools, workspaces, and people for intensive research engagement with screen mediated content, especially for collaboration and communication-oriented research activities. It builds upon groundbreaking hybrid tangible multitouch and gestural interaction support and allows highly diverse room-scale display geometries to be reconfigured within minutes/seconds, flexibly driving many displays in diverse locations across several campuses (outreach partners). It also permits its compute cluster to be back-filled at lower priority.

The approach allows for several large stage screens of the anchor visualization environment and multiscreen deployments at a flagship and several regionally and nationally distributed satellite locations (all driven by a single computer cluster) to be physically reconfigured in minutes and even seconds. These configurations include wall(s), nooks, architectural mockups, and room partitioning into multiple independent subareas, to support diverse scientific domains and use contexts. The prioritized, layered VM approach supports both local and distributed use, both of collaborative and independent nature.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.