Reducing the Noise of Reality

Virtual Reality Technology as an Educational and Intervention Tool for Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder: Current Perspectives and Future Directions

The worldwide rising trend of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) calls for innovative and efficacious techniques for assessment and treatment. Virtual reality (VR) technology gains theoretical support from rehabilitation and pedagogical theories and offers a variety of capabilities in educational and interventional contexts with affordable products. VR is attracting increasing attention in the medical and healthcare industry, as it provides fully interactive three-dimensional simulations of real-world settings and social situations, which are particularly suitable for cognitive and performance training, including social and interaction skills. This review article offers a summary of current perspectives and evidence-based VR applications for children with ASD, with a primary focus on social communication, including social functioning, emotion recognition, and speech and language. Technology- and design-related limitations, as well as disputes over the application of VR to autism research and therapy, are discussed, and future directions of this emerging field are highlighted with regards to application expansion and improvement, technology enhancement, linguistic diversity, and the development of theoretical models and brain-based research.

Deep-Breathing Biofeedback Trainability in a Virtual-Reality Action Game: A Single-Case Design Study With Police Trainers

It is widely recognized that police performance may be hindered by psychophysiological state changes during acute stress. To address the need for awareness and control of these physiological changes, police academies in many countries have implemented Heart-Rate Variability (HRV) biofeedback training. Despite these trainings now being widely delivered in classroom setups, they typically lack the arousing action context needed for successful transfer to the operational field, where officers must apply learned skills, particularly when stress levels rise. The study presented here aimed to address this gap by training physiological control skills in an arousing decision-making context. We developed a Virtual-Reality (VR) breathing-based biofeedback training in which police officers perform deep and slow diaphragmatic breathing in an engaging game-like action context. This VR game consisted of a selective shoot/don’t shoot game designed to assess response inhibition, an impaired capacity in high arousal situations. Biofeedback was provided based on adherence to a slow breathing pace: the slower and deeper the breathing, the less constrained peripheral vision became, facilitating accurate responses to the in-game demands. A total of nine male police trainers completed 10 sessions over a 4-week period as part of a single-case experimental ABAB study-design (i.e., alternating sessions with and without biofeedback). Results showed that eight out of nine participants showed improved breathing control in action, with a positive effect on breathing-induced low frequency HRV, while also improving their in-game behavioral performance. Critically, the breathing-based skill learning transferred to subsequent sessions in which biofeedback was not presented. Importantly, all participants remained highly engaged throughout the training. Altogether, our study showed that our VR environment can be used to train breathing regulation in an arousing and active decision-making context.

Breathing Biofeedback for Police Officers in a Stressful Virtual Environment: Challenges and Opportunities

As part of the Dutch national science program “Professional Games for Professional Skills” we developed a stress-exposure biofeedback training in virtual reality (VR) for the Dutch police. We aim to reduce the acute negative impact of stress on performance, as well as long-term consequences for mental health by facilitating physiological stress regulation during a demanding decision task. Conventional biofeedback applications mainly train physiological regulation at rest. This might limit the transfer of the regulation skills to stressful situations. In contrast, we provide the user with the opportunity to practice breathing regulation while they carry out a complex task in VR. This setting poses challenges from a technical – (real-time processing of noisy biosignals) as well as from a user-experience perspective (multi-tasking). We illustrate how we approach these challenges in our training and hope to contribute a useful reference for researchers and developers in academia or industry who are interested in using biosignals to control elements in a dynamic virtual environment.

Guidelines for immersive virtual reality in psychological research

Virtual reality (VR) holds immense promise as a research tool to deliver results that are generalizable to the real world. However, the methodology used in different VR studies varies substantially. While many of these approaches claim to use 'immersive VR', the different hardware and software choices lead to issues regarding reliability and validity of psychological VR research. Questions arise about quantifying presence, the optimal level of graphical realism, the problem of being in dual realities and reproducibility of VR research. We discuss how VR research paradigms could be evaluated and offer a list of practical recommendations to have common guidelines for psychological VR research.