Using Expressive and Talkative Virtual Characters in Social Anxiety Disorder Treatment

Ana Paula Cláudio, Maria Beatriz Carmo, Augusta Gaspar, Renato Teixeira

2015

Abstract

Social Anxiety affects a significant number of people, limiting their personal and social life. We describe an interactive Virtual Reality approach to the exposure therapy for social anxiety, resorting to virtual characters that exhibit combinations of facial and body expressions controllable in real-time by the therapist. The application described in this paper updates and significantly improves a former version: ameliorating the graphical quality of the virtual characters and providing them with the ability of articulating a set of sentences. The application executes in ordinary computers and it is easily used in counselling and research contexts. Although we have only resorted to free or very low cost 3D models of virtual humans, we adopted strategies to obtain an adequate final quality that we were able to validate with a significant number of observers. Moreover, a set of therapists tested the application and gave positive feedback about its potential effectiveness in Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Paula Cláudio A., Beatriz Carmo M., Gaspar A. and Teixeira R. (2015). Using Expressive and Talkative Virtual Characters in Social Anxiety Disorder Treatment . In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Computer Graphics Theory and Applications - Volume 1: GRAPP, (VISIGRAPP 2015) ISBN 978-989-758-087-1, pages 348-355. DOI: 10.5220/0005312203480355

in Bibtex Style

@conference{grapp15,
author={Ana Paula Cláudio and Maria Beatriz Carmo and Augusta Gaspar and Renato Teixeira},
title={Using Expressive and Talkative Virtual Characters in Social Anxiety Disorder Treatment},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Computer Graphics Theory and Applications - Volume 1: GRAPP, (VISIGRAPP 2015)},
year={2015},
pages={348-355},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0005312203480355},
isbn={978-989-758-087-1},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Computer Graphics Theory and Applications - Volume 1: GRAPP, (VISIGRAPP 2015)
TI - Using Expressive and Talkative Virtual Characters in Social Anxiety Disorder Treatment
SN - 978-989-758-087-1
AU - Paula Cláudio A.
AU - Beatriz Carmo M.
AU - Gaspar A.
AU - Teixeira R.
PY - 2015
SP - 348
EP - 355
DO - 10.5220/0005312203480355