A VR Scene Modeling Platform for PTSD Treatment

Post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD, is a disorder that develops in some people who have experienced any natural disaster, sudden deaths of loved one, mass shootings, etc. There are many therapies for treating PTSD, but virtual reality exposure therapy (VRET) has recently been proved to be a more e...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: URELLA, NIKILESH
Other Authors: Li, Xin
Format: Others
Language:en
Published: LSU 2017
Subjects:
Online Access:http://etd.lsu.edu/docs/available/etd-07092017-165635/
Description
Summary:Post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD, is a disorder that develops in some people who have experienced any natural disaster, sudden deaths of loved one, mass shootings, etc. There are many therapies for treating PTSD, but virtual reality exposure therapy (VRET) has recently been proved to be a more efficient alternative to the traditional approaches. Because inside a virtual environment, a patient may more effectively arouse the fear structures through emotional engagement. To perform effective VRET, the immersive scene should look like the environment in which the patient has developed the PTSD. Although many virtual reality scene modeling techniques have been studied in existing computer graphics literature, less are being explored to link 3D VR scene modeling with environment reconstruction. In this thesis, we develop a 3D modeling platform for VR scene modeling for PTSD treatment. Our current system takes photos of street views (buildings, cars, objects, etc.) and front face pictures of human characters to construct a realistic environment. We focus on developing techniques to utilize available 3D model templates during the street modeling and human character modeling. Toward effective street modeling, building geometry is constructed either directly using a 3D template model or manually by the user, then mapped to available photos to produce the texture map. For human modeling, the geometry and base skin texture are constructed using templates. Then by transferring from a portrait, we generate a blended skin texture and produce a textured human 3D model. Compared with many existing VR modeling platforms in the literature of PTSD treatment, rather than only utilizing image-based scene construction, because we reconstruct both the 3D geometry and texture of the real environment, our scenes could make the patients experience more realistic which may help the patient in emotional engagement.