Virtual Reality for Pain Management to Tackle the Opioid Crisis

Extended-Reality Technologies: An Overview of Emerging Applications in Medical Education and Clinical Care.

The rapid development of virtual and augmented reality technologies is currently taking place in almost all spheres of activity. Elements of virtual and augmented reality are used in such areas as education, medicine, transport, gaming, tourism and others. The active spread of these technologies causes the emergence of special competencies in the IT labor market and, as a result, the formation of new professions.Many Russian universities are training students in IT training areas. Specialization in the development of computer games and virtual reality applications has begun recently. The provision of practical classes is accompanied by specific tasks, which gives students the opportunity to improve the use of software and technical devices.The relevance of the research is determined by the current demand for the use of the latest technologies by IT developers in the field of creating computer games. Today, technologies that provide a player’s immersion in virtual reality are becoming more and more popular. One of these technologies is a suit with wearable sensors that track a person’s position in space in real time. However, there are quite a few real described projects in the literature and on the Internet. This study examines the process of developing a task for creating a game application using virtual reality technology: a suit with wearable sensors for teaching students.Materials and methods of research. Timely identification of the needs of the IT market in personnel training allows educational organizations to form new training programs of different levels of training. This approach makes it possible to target the educational and methodological materials being developed to use the latest achievements in the development of the field under study.Using a systematic approach, the study characterizes virtual reality suits and sensors for monitoring the position in the user’s space. Thus, the goal of the task was to ensure the immersiveness and convenience of interaction between the player and the game environment.Based on materials on software, position sensors in space, the approach of pedagogical design was applied and the procedure was formed for a practical task, reflecting the relevant competencies.Results. The study was conducted on the basis in the framework of laboratory and practical work of students, as well as at a real enterprise. Training in the new profile of the direction of training “Applied informatics” is fully equipped with all the latest technologies in this field. As a result of the work, the content of the practical task was developed.Real development of virtual and augmented reality applications is conducted jointly with students. Almost all projects used a suit with body sensors.Conclusion. Our study examines in detail the process of developing an application using a suit with wearable sensors for further training of students. Based on the results, work can be carried out on real projects for any field. Based on the research materials, it is planned to issue a textbook for students with the profile of developing computer games and virtual / augmented reality applications.

Computational thinking (CT) skills are increasingly important in education to prepare students for the challenges of the digital age. Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) have been introduced as immersive technologies that have the potential to enhance CT skills through more interactive learning experiences. However, there is still a gap in understanding the effectiveness of these technologies in supporting the development of CT, particularly in different levels of education and disciplines. Although several studies have highlighted the benefits of AR and VR in education, no systematic review integrates these findings to identify advantages, challenges, and opportunities for further implementation. Therefore, this study conducted a systematic review based on the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines by analyzing 25 empirical studies (AR=17, VR=8) obtained from the Scopus database (2008-2024). The analysis addresses four key research questions: (1) the current state of AR/VR in CT development, (2) their advantages, (3) implementation challenges, and (4) future research directions. The results show that AR is more widespread than VR at various levels of education, with dominance in higher education followed by secondary and primary schools. Computer science is the main field of application of AR and VR, while AR is also widely applied in mathematics to increase interest and problem-solving. A total of 11 studies reported significant impacts of these technologies on CT, with AR being superior in increasing student motivation and engagement, as well as aiding in problem-solving and debugging. In contrast, VR provides a more immersive learning experience by strengthening concept understanding, especially in programming and recursion. However, several obstacles in the application of AR and VR, such as hardware limitations, costs, and user skills, affect the effectiveness of these technologies in the learning environment. This study also identified potential future research, including the exploration of VR in primary and kindergarten education, the application of VR in non-computer science fields, and the efficient use of these technologies in supporting the CT process. This study provides more precise insights into the optimal ways of utilizing AR and VR in developing CT skills. It is a reference for educators, policymakers, and researchers in supporting CT learning.

Purpose Virtual reality (VR) can be used as an alternative mean for viewing collections at home when it is not possible to visit museums due to COVID-19. This study took the development process of VR at Taiwan's National Palace Museum (NPM) as a case to discuss the characteristics of VR developed there in different periods and how NPM transforms the contents of its collections into VR. Design/methodology/approach This study used a case study to analyze the development process of VR at NPM from 2014 to 2019 and summarized the characteristics of the development and application of VR. Findings The authors find that the history of VR application in NPM is a process from exploring the technology to gradually getting familiar with the potential of its application. Its development can be divided into the exploration and experiment stage from 2014 to 2015, the single collection interpretation stage in 2016 and the multipurpose application stage from 2017 to 2019. It is suggested that museums should adopt a long-term strategy to introduce VR, make plans carefully and pay attention to the limitations of VR application. Research limitations/implications The results of this study are suitable for art and history museums. Originality/value Many research studies on the application of VR in museums mostly focused on the benefits and technologies of adopting VR in museums as well as specific museum VR projects. There is still scant literature on the development process of museum VR from the perspective of museum organizations.

Virtual reality (VR) applications are used in many areas of academic and industrial research areas including engineering, bio-medical & geo-sciences, among others. These applications generally focus on creating a VR environment to enhance user experience. One of the main challenges VR application developers face is to make objects within the environment move in a natural, realistic manner. Many commercial packages and programming libraries exist to help generate complex animations, including physics engines, game engines and modeling software such as Autodesk Maya. All of these tools are very useful, but have many disadvantages when applied to VR applications, as they were not designed for VR development. To address these issues, a VR application programming interface (API) was developed to help VR developers create and visualize natural, complex animations for VR-based systems utilizing OpenSceneGraph. This API, called the Animation Engine 2.0, was built in a manner animators and developers are already familiar with by integrating control points and keyframes for controlling animations. The system is time-based to scale to any size of VR system, which enabled the ability to support different time interpolations as well to incorporate acceleration into animations to create behavioral events such as a boing, bounce, or surge. In this paper, the Animation Engine API is presented along with its integration into a VR aircraft carrier application.

Virtual reality (VR) is a developing technology that has recently attracted the attention of healthcare practitioners. Recently, VR systems have been used to treat pain symptoms. The present study aims to evaluate the VR effectiveness on chronic pain management. A systematic literature search was performed following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines. Keywords were used to discover the potentially eligible studies. The primary focus of the present investigation was to evaluate the possible effect of VR-assisted treatments on chronic pain, especially in the commonly occurring low back and neck pain. Nine studies reporting randomized controlled trials were included in the present study. VR-mediated interventions demonstrated significant improvement for pain symptoms in patients experiencing chronic pain. In addition, VR-mediated therapy decreased pain intensity and disability in the case of chronic neck pain compared to control conditions. However, the VR interventions showed a statistically non-significant improvement in chronic low back pain when experimental groups were compared with controls. VR therapy positive effect on chronic pain did not differ from the one reported for other types of interventions for pain management, as physical exercise and laser therapy. Taken together, these findings showed that currently available lines of evidence on the effect of VR-mediated therapy in chronic pain management, despite pointing towards possible therapeutical benefits of the VR-based intervention, are overall inconclusive and that more research on VR-assisted therapy for chronic pain is needed.

Virtual Reality (VR) applications play an important role in HEP Outreach & Education. They enable the organization of virtual tours of the experimental infrastructure by allowing users to interact virtually with detector facilities and describe their purpose and functionalities. However, nowadays, VR applications require expensive hardware, like the Oculus headset or the MS HoloLens, and powerful computers. As a result, this reduces the reach of VR application implementation and makes their benefits questionable. An important improvement to VR development is thus to facilitate the usage of inexpensive hardware, like Google cardboard and phones with average computational power. Requirements to use inexpensive hardware and achieve quality and performance close to the advanced hardware bring challenges to VR application developers. One of these challenges concerns the geometry of the 3D VR scenes. Geometry defines the quality of the 3D scenes and at the same time, causes big loads on the GPU. Therefore, development methods of the geometry make it possible to find a good balance between the quality and performance of the VR applications. This paper describes methods for simplifying the “as-built” geometry of the ATLAS detector, ways to reduce the number of facets to meet GPU performance limitations, and ensure smooth movement in VR scenes.

Technological developments have significantly impacted various aspects of life, most notably healthcare and education. A nursing education shift was required to prepare digital generation. Consequently, nurse educators must adopt innovative approaches to teaching and learning, like incorporating immersive virtual reality (VR) into human anatomy courses to improve students' learning. To examine the influence of immersive VR applications (human anatomy) on self-directed learning (SDL) competencies among undergraduate nursing students. A cross-sectional design was conducted in the health profession's faculty at Al-Quds University among the first year of the nursing program, who were enrolled in an anatomy course (N = 137). The Self-Directed Learning Instrument was used, and independent sample t-tests were conducted to compare the level of SDL among students who utilized the VR application (Human Anatomy VR). The results showed that 93.9% of the total were approximately 20 years old, and 85.4% were females. 90.5% of participants expressed satisfaction with using the VR application and that it would be beneficial in nursing courses. The average score of SDL for the whole group was 72.03 ± 13.07, and there is a positive significant relationship between SDL and students utilizing VR (p < 0.001), between SDL competencies and technological skills (p = 0.009), and type of digital tools (p = 0.049). The highest coefficient of correlation was related to planning and self-monitoring (r = 0.918), and the lowest was related to interpersonal communications (r = 0.865). VR is an additional tool for enhancing learning, and nursing students perceive immersive VR technologies positively and prefer using three-dimensional images in their anatomy courses. SDL assists students in identifying learning objectives, barriers, and outcomes through using VR technologies as teaching strategies.

Virtual Reality (VR) technology has gained substantial traction and has the potential to transform a number of industries, including education, entertainment, and professional sectors. Nevertheless, concerns have arisen about the security and privacy implications of VR applications and the impact that they might have on users. In this paper, we investigate the following overarching research question: can VR applications and VR user activities in the context of such applications (e.g., manipulating virtual objects, walking, talking, flying) be identified based on the (potentially encrypted) network traffic that is generated by VR headsets during the operation of VR applications? To answer this question, we collect network traffic data from 25 VR applications running on the Meta Quest Pro headset and identify characteristics of the generated network traffic, which we subsequently use to train off-the-shelf Machine Learning (ML) models. Our results indicate that through the use of ML models, we can identify the VR applications being used with an accuracy of 92.4% and the VR user activities performed with an accuracy of 91%. Furthermore, our results demonstrate that an attacker does not need to collect large amounts of network traffic data for each VR application to carry out such an attack. Specifically, an attacker only needs to collect less than 10 minutes of network traffic data for each VR application in order to identify applications with an accuracy higher than 90% and VR user activities with an accuracy higher than 88%.

Older adults are especially susceptible to chronic musculoskeletal (MSK) pain. Pharmacological treatment often provides inadequate relief and overuse can lead to adverse events. Preliminary research has demonstrated the effectiveness of virtual reality (VR) distraction therapy for chronic pain. Understanding attitudes of older adults towards VR distraction therapy will help develop and optimize this therapy for this population. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to explore the attitudes and treatment acceptability towards the use of immersive VR distraction therapy of older adults suffering from chronic MSK pain. This descriptive, exploratory study used mixed methods. Data collection consisted of a consent process, eligibility screening, survey completion, 2 VR simulations (passive and active) lasting 10-minutes each, and either a focus group or interview. Survey data was used to measure: pain intensity and interference, pain catastrophizing, treatment acceptability, usability, and side effects. A total of 21 older adults completed the study. Treatment acceptability was high with an average score of 32.5 out of 40. However, average usability scores (62.9 out of 100) indicated a need for system improvements. Few participants (14%) experienced moderate to severe side effects. The following themes were identified: 1) VR is an enjoyable distraction; 2) Perceived effectiveness depends on chronic pain experience; 3) VR simulation experiences should be individualized; 4) Design considerations to improve usability in older adults; 5) Recommendations for future directions. The findings from this study can inform intervention design considerations and future directions for the use of VR technology for chronic pain management in older adults.

Stereoscopic Liquid Crystal Displays (LCDs) in a tiled setup, so-called display walls, are rising as a replacement for the classic projection-based systems for Virtual Reality (VR) applications. They have numerous benefits over projectors, the only drawback being their maximum size, which is why VR applications usually resort to using tiled display walls. Problems of display walls are the obvious bezels between single displays making up the wall and, most importantly, the complicated pipeline to display synchronized content across all participating screens. This becomes especially crucial when we are dealing with active-stereo content, where precisely timed display of the left and right stereo channels across the entire display area is essential. Usually, these scenarios require a variety of expensive, specialized hardware, which makes it difficult for such wall setups to spread more widely. In this paper, we present our service-oriented architecture Display as a Service (DaaS), which uses a virtualization approach to shift the problem of pixel distribution from specialized hardware to a generic software. DaaS provides network-transparent virtual framebuffers (VFBs) for pixel-producing applications to write into and virtual displays (VDs), which potentially span multiple physical displays making up a display wall, to present generated pixels on. Our architecture assumes network-enabled displays with integrated processing capabilities, such that all communication for pixel transport and synchronization between VFBs and VDs can happen entirely over IP networking using standard video streaming and Internet protocols. We show the feasibility of our approach in a heterogeneous use case scenario, evaluate latency and synchronization accuracy, and give an outlook for more potential applications in the field of VR.

This systematic review aims to explore virtual reality (VR) applications for rehabilitation purposes among people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD), identify their effects on rehabilitation outcomes, explore themes to consider in VR intervention design, and provide guidance for designers and researchers in creating therapeutic environments using VR technology. VR has gained increasing attention in healthcare settings to assist in achieving rehabilitation goals for people with IDD. VR is particularly advantageous since it simulates the real world while providing controllable, safe, and versatile environments. It is necessary to expand the current body of knowledge on VR intervention's outcomes by synthesizing further information on VR application characteristics as well as identifying design considerations regarding feasibility, usability, safety, and other aspects that will benefit future VR intervention design and research. The Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) framed the current review. Multiple databases were searched to identify studies published between 2001 and 2023. The review qualitatively organized VR environment design considerations according to three themes: feasibility, usability, and safety. This review included 27 articles and included 868 participants. The overall findings indicated that VR interventions are promising in enhancing rehabilitation outcomes among people with IDD, such as physical, cognitive, emotional, and functional independence domains. This review provides design recommendations to create effective, usable, and safe VR interventions for individuals with IDD. The suggested design implications should be applied with the awareness that VR is a relatively emerging technology with rapidly evolving features.

SummarySoftware testing is regarded as an important method for fault revealing. Despite this advantage, it has been poorly used within the scope of virtual reality (VR) applications because they are highly complex and have peculiar features. Most testing performed of this VR applications are usability, which is conducted manually and only at final of the development process. Although some works try to propose criteria for this domain, there are no approaches that automatize the generation of test data from requirements specification in the VR domain. This paper proposes an approach called virtual reality—requirements specification and testing (VR‐ReST) to assist the requirements specification through a semiformal language and uses structural test criteria to generate test requirements and test data automatically for VR applications using scene graph concepts. The paper also examines the empirical results concerning the cost‐effectiveness of the approach for three different VR applications through two experiments. Mutation testing was used to evaluate effectiveness. We found that the approach achieved a high mutation score outperforming random testing, by 20%, on average. Our results also demonstrate that the approach is promising since it assists in writing and validating the requirements, as well as in reducing the risks of requirement specification by adopting a semiformal language.

Virtual reality (VR) is an interactive simulation environment based on computer technology that enables users to immerse themselves in a virtual world. With the continuous advancement of technology, VR has shown great potential in various fields. This article aims to review the application of VR in different fields and its impact on society. First, this paper introduces VR's basic principles and technical characteristics. VR systems are usually composed of head-mounted display devices, trackers, joysticks, etc., enabling users to experience immersive virtual environments by simulating real-world perception and interaction. Secondly, this paper discusses the application of VR in the field of education. VR technology can provide an immersive learning experience, enabling students to personally participate in the course content, greatly enhancing the effect of learning. At the same time, VR can also simulate experimental scenes, train operational skills, etc., to provide students with more abundant and practical learning resources. Then, this paper introduces the application of VR in the medical field. VR can be used for rehabilitation training of patients, psychological treatment, and other aspects, effectively improving the quality and effect of medical services. In addition, this paper also discusses the application of VR in entertainment, tourism, and other fields. VR technology can bring users immersive gaming experience, virtual tourism, etc., and inject new vitality into the entertainment industry. In tourism, VR can provide tourists with an immersive sightseeing experience, so they can feel the distant scenery at home.

ESRA19-0696 Non-pharmacological methods for comfort and pain management (virtual reality, musicotherapy, hypnosis,……)