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VEPSY Project

Vepsy Project: new method of psychological therapy

VEPSY is a European Union funded research project focusing on Telemedicine and Portable Virtual Environments for Clinical Psychology. Within the project, the European Consortium chose Virtools technology to develop various Virtual Environments dedicated to Clinical Psychology. Thanks to Virtools Dev and the powerful SDK, the French research laboratory GREYC-ENSICAEN was able to test the project on approximately thirty patients, to help them confront and master their social phobia (Evelyne KLINGER, Scientific Director of the French team).

VEPSY Project

Officially launched on January 1, 2001, VEPSY brought together partners from an international network of academic institutions and industrial companies, including several European partners, medical departments and technical research laboratories (www.vepsy.com). Each team was responsible for a specific area of research on psychological disorders: panic disorder, social phobia and agoraphobia; obesity, bulimia and binge-eating disorders; male impotence and premature ejaculation. The project has been completed on June 30, 2003.

The French Team was composed of researchers at the GREYC-ENSICAEN (Caen, France) on the technical side along with physicians from the Sainte-Anne Hospital in Paris as medical team members. The role of GREYC-ENSICAEN (www.greyc.unicaen.fr) as part of the Consortium was to offer both the technical expertise required for developing the Social Phobia module and the clinical expertise required for clinical testing of the module.

Challenge: Integrate the Benefits of Immersive 3D Environments in Interactive Clinical Psychology Projects

Virtual Environment applications for the health care field have generally been developed in the following areas: surgical procedures, preventive medicine, patient and medical education, as well as training and architectural design for health-care facilities. However, VR has recently been recognized as holding great potential for the clinical psychology field. The VEPSY project sought to make a major contribution by understanding and exploiting this potential.

Telemedicine is an exciting new technique for health care delivery. The main goal of the project was to prove the technical and clinical viability of using portable and shared Virtual Reality systems in clinical psychology. The project provided both innovative VR-based tools for patient treatment, clinical trials to test their viability and action plans for dissemination of the results.

The introduction of VR techniques in medical applications, particularly for psychiatric treatment, opens new doors in terms of the role technology can play in clinical psychology.

Solution: The Virtools Dev Authoring Platform's User-Friendly Graphical Interface to Create Powerful Immersive Applications

The accessibility of Virtools authoring tools simplifies the development of virtual applications such as the VESPY project. The whole team from GREYC-ENSICAEN was able to use the development environment within days and thus the production process was optimised and timelines were kept to a minimum.

The close relationship between the two departments and the use of Virtools’ powerful tools made it possible to create an application that perfectly meets project specifications for this type of environment. The effectiveness of the tests that were performed went hand in hand with exchanges between the two research teams, to better understand what was at stake for the project as well as constraints and production needs expressed by each team. Virtools enabled all those involved to produce precisely the application that team members hoped to obtain while maintaining active collaboration between team members at a distance.

“Virtools enabled us to successfully design four virtual worlds based on scenarios defi ned by the psychiatrists for the treatment of social phobia. The easy management of audio and the efficiency of the 3D Sprites helped us reach our goal: let patients come face to face with virtual situations, quickly learn to navigate in these virtual worlds, and react in keeping with behaviors influenced by their anxiety disorders. The efficiency and very easy use of 3D media production helped us focus on the objectives of our project and simplify programming chores,” commented Evelyne Klinger, GREYC Project Manager.

Key Benefits

• Accessible and intuitive graphical user interface
• Powerful render and behavioral engines
• Impressive immersive power
• Collaborative work environment
• New scope of application of the VR techniques: the clinical psychology

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