Artificial world ... an image from Alzheimer’s Australia Victoria prototype game Virtual Dementia. Source: Supplied
A TEAM at Alzheimer’s Australia is seeking crowdfunding for a virtual forest game designed to bring joy back into the lives of dementia sufferers.
A new application being developed by Alzheimer’s Australia Victoria could substantially change the way that dementia patients are able to interact and live their lives if a Pozible crowdfunding campaign is a success.
“Imagine having a disease that takes away your ability to communicate,” says Dr Tanya Petrovich of Alzheimer’s Australia Victoria.
“It takes away your ability to engage life. This is what dementia can do. Using game technology and sensory therapy we’re trying to give back to people with dementia their ability to engage more fully with life.”
The “Forest” application places players — in this case, dementia sufferers — inside a virtual forest world where gentle breezes blow, snow can fall and butterflies flitter past in a peaceful but interactive environment.
“What we’re aiming for is hyper-realism; more real than real. The technical term is ‘Disney snow’; even more comforting than real life,” says Opaque Multimedia’s James Bonner.
The Forest is designed to engage dementia sufferers, and in early trials the team has already seen some encouraging successes.
Dr Petrovich notes that while visiting an aged care facility to trial the application, one patient was notably engaged.
“It was just awesome to watch her. She’s normally non-verbal. She saw this virtual butterfly flying across the virtual forest, and she’s able to move her arms and create things, or make things happen. She just lit up. She started communicating, and that’s just priceless,” she said.
“The idea of this is not to replace people going outdoors. We encourage people to go outdoors. The whole idea of this notion is about interacting and having some control over their actions.”
The Pozible crowdfunding push is seeking $90,000 to continue developing the application, adding complexity including new environments and creatures within that environment.
The team developing the application for Alzheimer’s Australia Victoria, Opaque Multimedia, has previously developed a virtual dementia simulator used for training aged care workers in the reality of living with dementia.
“You can list all the symptoms of dementia, but when you give people the experience it changes the way they understand what they’re doing,” says Dr Petrovich.
Games are usually seen as trivial matters, but there’s a growing field of “serious” games; that is, games that serve a function or purpose.
James Bonner notes that a “serious game isn’t necessarily meant for fun. Whereas normal games have an end condition where there are challenges and failure conditions, the game that we’re developing doesn’t have those.”
To develop the application, the team at Opaque Multimedia used Epic’s Unreal Engine 4 technology.
“It’s a next-generation video game technology,” says Opaque’s Norman Wang.
“The support we’ve had from Epic has been exceptional”, he says.
The team from Opaque has travelled to the San Francisco Game Developer’s Conference (GDC) to formally announce the project as guests of Epic Games.
The Forest uses Microsoft’s Kinect sensors. In its prototype stage these are attached to Microsoft Xbox 360 units, but the plan is to bring it to the Xbox One console and its more precise Kinect 2 sensor.
That’s not just a matter of added precision, but also of the biometric tracking abilities it opens up, which then opens up the door to future research.
“What it presents us, when it comes to this kind of application, is that it becomes a very valuable research tool. Because it is a data collection method that previously didn’t exist. As an experimental psychologist, what you tend to have are survey instruments, intrusive measurement. The unobtrusive ones tend to be very indirect — observational notes and things like that — whereas the intrusive ones are the qualitative ones that you’re after, like EEGs, but obviously it’s very difficult or impossible to do that on people with dementia. So what the Kinect 2’s biometric sensor allows us to do is read that and collect that information passively,’’ Wang says.
“What we want to be able to do in the long term, is the ability to have tangible research outcomes, rather than just a video game.”
0 comments:
Post a Comment