Papers by Willem-Paul Brinkman
Rehabilitation
Preliminary version of: Brinkman, W.P., Veling, W., Dorrestijn, E., Sandino, G., Vakili, V., and ... more Preliminary version of: Brinkman, W.P., Veling, W., Dorrestijn, E., Sandino, G., Vakili, V., and van der Gaag, M. (2011). Using virtual reality to study paranoia in individuals with and without psychosis. Abstract. A virtual reality environment was created to study psychotic symptoms of patients that experience psychosis. In the environment people could navigate through a bar with a gamepad while wearing a head mounted display. Their task was to find five virtual characters that have a small label number on their chest. The density and ethnic appearance of the virtual characters in the bar was controlled. To study the effect of these two factors a 2 by 2 experiment was conducted with a group of 24 non-patients, and two patients. For the non-patient group results showed a significant main effect for density on participant's physiological response, their behaviour, reported level of discomfort, and their ability to remember place and location of the numbered avatars. The avatar ethnicity had significant effect on non-patients' physiological responses. Comparison between the two patients and non-patient group shows difference in physiological responses, behaviour and reported level of discomfort.
Three studies were conducted to examine the effect of audio on people's experience in a virtual w... more Three studies were conducted to examine the effect of audio on people's experience in a virtual world. The first study showed that people could distinguish between mono, stereo, Dolby surround and 3D audio of a wasp. The second study found significant effects for audio techniques on people's self-reported anxiety, presence, and spatial perception. The third study found that adding sound to a visual virtual world had a significant effect on people's experience (including heart rate), while it found no difference in experience between stereo and 3D audio.
Expressive virtual audiences are used in scientific research, psychotherapy, and training. To cre... more Expressive virtual audiences are used in scientific research, psychotherapy, and training. To create an expressive virtual audience, developers need to know how specific audience behaviors are associated with certain characteristics of an audience, such as attitude, and how well people can recognize these characteristics. To examine this, four studies were conducted on a virtual audience and its behavioral models: (I) a perception study of a virtual audience showed that people (n = 24) could perceive changes in some of the mood, personality, and attitude parameters of the virtual audience; (II) a design experiment whereby individuals (n = 24) constructed 23 different audience scenarios indicated that the understanding of audience styles was consistent across individuals, and the clustering of similar settings of the virtual audience parameters revealed five distinct generic audience styles; (III) a perception validation study of these five audience styles showed that people (n = 100) could differentiate between some of the styles, and the audience's attentiveness was the most dominating audience characteristic that people perceived; (IV) the examination of the behavioral model of the virtual audience identified several typical audience behaviors for each style. We anticipate that future developers can use these findings to create distinct virtual audiences with recognizable behaviors.
This randomized controlled trial investigated the efficacy of a stand-alone virtual reality expos... more This randomized controlled trial investigated the efficacy of a stand-alone virtual reality exposure intervention comprising verbal interaction with virtual humans to target heterogeneous social fears in participants with social anxiety disorder. Sixty participants (Mage = 36.9 years; 63.3% women) diagnosed with social anxiety disorder were randomly assigned to individual virtual reality exposure therapy (VRET), individual in vivo exposure therapy (iVET), or waiting-list. Multilevel regression analyses revealed that both treatment groups improved from pre-to postassessment on social anxiety symptoms, speech duration, perceived stress, and avoidant personality disorder related beliefs when compared to the waiting-list. Participants receiving iVET, but not VRET, improved on fear of negative evaluation, speech performance, general anxiety, depression, and quality of life relative to those on waiting-list. The iVET condition was further superior to the VRET condition regarding decreases in social anxiety symptoms at post- and follow-up assessments, and avoidant personality disorder related beliefs at follow-up. At follow-up, all improvements were significant for iVET. For VRET, only the effect for perceived stress was significant. VRET containing extensive verbal interaction without any cognitive components can effectively reduce complaints of generalized social anxiety disorder. Future technological and psychological improvements of virtual social interactions might further enhance the efficacy of VRET for social anxiety disorder.
Abstract. Current practice in Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy (VRET) is that therapists ask pati... more Abstract. Current practice in Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy (VRET) is that therapists ask patients about their anxiety level by means of the Subjective Unit of Discomfort (SUD) scale. With an aim of developing a home-based VRET system, this measurement ideally should be done using speech technology. In a VRET system for social phobia with scripted avatar-patient dialogues, the timing of asking patients to give their SUD score becomes relevant. This study examined three timing mechanisms:(1) dialogue dependent (ie naturally in the ...
Ling Y, Nefs HT, Morina N, Heynderickx I, Brinkman W-P (2014) A Meta-Analysis on the Relationship between Self-Reported Presence and Anxiety in Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy for Anxiety Disorders. PLoS ONE 9(5): e96144. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0096144
In virtual reality exposure therapy (VRET) for anxiety disorders, sense of presence in the virtua... more In virtual reality exposure therapy (VRET) for anxiety disorders, sense of presence in the virtual environment is considered the principal mechanism that enables anxiety to be felt. Existing studies on the relation between sense of presence and level of anxiety, however, have yielded mixed results on the correlation between the two. In this meta-analysis, we reviewed publications on VRET for anxiety that included self-reported presence and anxiety. The comprehensive search of the literature identified 33 publications with a total of 1196 participants. The correlation between self-reported sense of presence and anxiety was extracted and meta-analyzed. Potential moderators such as technology characteristics, sample characteristics including age, gender and clinical status, disorder characteristics and study design characteristics such as measurements were also examined. The random effects analysis showed a medium effect size for the correlation between sense of presence and anxiety (r = .28; 95% CI: 0.18–0.38). Moderation analyses revealed that the effect size of the correlation differed across different anxiety disorders, with a large effect size for fear of animals (r = .50; 95% CI: 0.30–0.66) and a no to small effect size for social anxiety disorder (r = .001; 95% CI: −0.19–0.19). Further, the correlation between anxiety and presence was stronger in studies with participants who met criteria for an anxiety disorder than in studies with a non-clinical population. Trackers with six degrees of freedom and displays with a larger field of view resulted in higher effect sizes, compared to trackers with three degrees of freedom and displays with a smaller field of view. In addition, no difference in effect size was found for the type of presence measurement and the type of anxiety measurement. This meta-analysis confirms the positive relation between sense of presence and anxiety and demonstrates that this relation can be affected by various moderating factors.
Virtual reality exposure therapy (VRET) has been shown to be effective in treatment of anxiety di... more Virtual reality exposure therapy (VRET) has been shown to be effective in treatment of anxiety disorders. Yet, there is lack of research on the extent to which interaction between the individual and virtual humans can be successfully implanted to increase levels of anxiety for therapeutic purposes. This proof-of-concept pilot study aimed at examining levels of the sense of presence and anxiety during exposure to virtual environments involving social interaction with virtual humans and using different virtual reality displays. A non-clinical sample of 38 participants was randomly assigned to either a head-mounted display (HMD) with motion tracker and sterescopic view condition or a one-screen projection-based virtual reality display condition. Participants in both conditions engaged in free speech dialogues with virtual humans controlled by research assistants. It was hypothesized that exposure to virtual social interactions will elicit moderate levels of sense of presence and anxiety in both groups. Further it was expected that participants in the HMD condition will report higher scores of sense of presence and anxiety than participants in the one-screen projection-based display condition. Results revealed that in both conditions virtual social interactions were associated with moderate levels of sense of presence and anxiety. Additionally, participants in the HMD condition reported significantly higher levels of presence than those in the one-screen projection-based display condition (p = .001). However, contrary to the expectations neither the average level of anxiety nor the highest level of anxiety during exposure to social virtual environments differed between the groups (p = .97 and p = .75, respectively). The findings suggest that virtual social interactions can be successfully applied in VRET to enhance sense of presence and anxiety. Furthermore, our results indicate that one-screen projection-based displays can successfully activate levels of anxiety in social virtual environments. The outcome can prove helpful in using low-cost projection-based virtual reality environments for treating individuals with social phobia.
Virtual reality exposure therapy has been proposed as a viable alternative in the treatment of an... more Virtual reality exposure therapy has been proposed as a viable alternative in the treatment of anxiety disorders, including social anxiety disorder. Therapists could benefit from extensive control of anxiety eliciting stimuli during virtual exposure. Two stimuli controls are studied in this study: the social dialogue situation, and the dialogue feedback responses (negative or positive) between a human and a virtual character. In the first study, 16 participants were exposed in three virtual reality scenarios: a neutral virtual world, blind date scenario, and job interview scenario. Results showed a significant difference between the three virtual scenarios in the level of self-reported anxiety and heart rate. In the second study, 24 participants were exposed to a job interview scenario in a virtual environment where the ratio between negative and positive dialogue feedback responses of a virtual character was systematically varied on-the-fly. Results yielded that within a dialogue the more positive dialogue feedback resulted in less self-reported anxiety, lower heart rate, and longer answers, while more negative dialogue feedback of the virtual character resulted in the opposite. The correlations between on the one hand the dialogue stressor ratio and on the other hand the means of SUD score, heart rate and audio length in the eight dialogue conditions showed a strong relationship: r(6) = 0.91, p = 0.002; r(6) = 0.76, p = 0.028 and r(6) = −0.94, p = 0.001 respectively. Furthermore, more anticipatory anxiety reported before exposure was found to coincide with more self-reported anxiety, and shorter answers during the virtual exposure. These results demonstrate that social dialogues in a virtual environment can be effectively manipulated for therapeutic purposes.
To test whether synthetic emotions expressed by a virtual human elicit positive or negative emoti... more To test whether synthetic emotions expressed by a virtual human elicit positive or negative emotions in a human conversation partner and affect satisfaction towards the conversation, an experiment was conducted where the emotions of a virtual human were manipulated during both the listening and speaking phase of the dialogue. Twenty-four participants were recruited and were asked to have a real conversation with the virtual human on six different topics. For each topic the virtual human’s emotions in the listening and speaking phase were different, including positive, neutral and negative emotions. The results support our hypotheses that (1) negative compared to positive synthetic emotions expressed by a virtual human can elicit a more negative emotional state in a human conversation partner, (2) synthetic emotions expressed in the speaking phase have more impact on a human conversation partner than emotions expressed in the listening phase, (3) humans with less speaking confidence also experience a conversation with a virtual human as less positive, and (4) random positive or negative emotions of a virtual human have a negative effect on the satisfaction with the conversation. These findings have practical implications for the treatment of social anxiety as they allow therapists to control the anxiety evoking stimuli, i.e., the expressed emotion of a virtual human in a virtual reality exposure environment of a simulated conversation. In addition, these findings may be useful to other virtual applications that include conversations with a virtual human.
The purpose of this exploratory research was to study the relationship between the mood of comput... more The purpose of this exploratory research was to study the relationship between the mood of computer users and their use of keyboard and mouse to examine the possibility of creating a generic or individualized mood measure. To examine this, a field study (n = 26) and a controlled study (n = 16) were conducted. In the field study, interaction data and self-reported mood measurements were collected during normal PC use over several days. In the controlled study, participants worked on a programming task while listening to high or low arousing background music. Besides subjective mood measurement, galvanic skin response (GSR) data was also collected. Results found no generic relationship between the interaction data and the mood data. However, the results of the studies found significant average correlations between mood measurement and personalized regression models based on keyboard and mouse interaction data. Together the results suggest that individualized mood prediction is possible from interaction behaviour with keyboard and mouse.
Currently, expressive virtual humans are used in psychological research, training, and psychother... more Currently, expressive virtual humans are used in psychological research, training, and psychotherapy. However, the behavior of these virtual humans is usually scripted and therefore cannot be modified freely at run time. To address this, we created a virtual audience with parameterized behavioral styles. This paper presents a parameterized audience model based on probabilistic models abstracted from the observation of real human audiences (n = 16). The audience's behavioral style is controlled by model parameters that define virtual humans' moods, attitudes, and personalities. Employing these parameters as predictors, the audience model significantly predicts audience behavior. To investigate if people can recognize the designed behavioral styles generated by this model, 12 audience styles were evaluated by two groups of participants. One group (n = 22) was asked to describe the virtual audience freely, and the other group (n = 22) was asked to rate the audiences on eight dimensions. The results indicated that people could recognize different audience attitudes and even perceive the different degrees of certain audience attitudes. In conclusion, the audience model can generate expressive behavior to show different attitudes by modulating model parameters.
In this paper we report two experiments in which the effect of perspective projection on presence... more In this paper we report two experiments in which the effect of perspective projection on presence and space perception was investigated. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to score a presence questionnaire when looking at a virtual classroom. We manipulated the vantage point, the viewing mode (binocular versus monocular viewing), the display device/screen size (projector versus TV) and the center of projection. At the end of each session of Experiment 1, participants were asked to set their preferred center of projection such that the image seemed most natural to them. In Experiment 2, participants were asked to draw a floor plan of the virtual classroom. The results show that field of view, viewing mode, the center of projection and display all significantly affect presence and the perceived layout of the virtual environment. We found a significant linear relationship between presence and perceived layout of the virtual classroom, and between the preferred center of projection and perceived layout. The results indicate that the way in which virtual worlds are presented is critical for the level of experienced presence. The results also suggest that people ignore veridicality and they experience a higher level of presence while viewing elongated virtual environments compared to viewing the original intended shape.
Qu, C., Brinkman, W. P., Wiggers, P., & Heynderickx, I. (2013). The effect of priming pictures and videos on a question-answer dialog scenario in a virtual environment. Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 22(2), 91-109., 2013
Having a free-speech conversation with avatars in a virtual environment can be desirable in virtu... more Having a free-speech conversation with avatars in a virtual environment can be desirable in virtual reality applications, such as virtual therapy and serious games. However, recognizing and processing free speech seems too ambitious to realize with the current technology. As an alternative, pre-scripted conversations with keyword detection can handle a number of goal-oriented situations, as well as some scenarios in which the conversation content is of secondary importance. This is, for example, the case in virtual exposure therapy for the treatment of people with social phobia, where conversation is for exposure and anxiety arousal only. A drawback of pre-scripted dialog is the limited scope of the user's answers. The system cannot handle a user's response that does not match the pre-defined content, other than by providing a default reply. A new method, which uses priming material to restrict the possibility of the user's response, is proposed in this paper to solve this problem. Two studies were conducted to investigate whether people can be guided to mention specific keywords with video and/or picture primings. Study 1 was a two-by-two experiment in which participants (n = 20) were asked to answer a number of open questions. Prior to the session, participants watched priming videos or unrelated videos. During the session, they could see priming pictures or unrelated pictures on a whiteboard behind the person who asked the questions. The results showed that participants tended to mention more keywords both with priming videos and pictures. Study 2 shared the same experimental setting but was carried out in virtual reality instead of in the real world. Participants (n = 20) were asked to answer questions of an avatar when they were exposed to priming material, before and/or during the conversation session. The same results were found: the surrounding media content had a guidance effect. Furthermore, when priming pictures appeared in the environment, people sometimes forgot to mention the content they typically would mention.
Virtual reality applications with virtual humans, such as virtual reality exposure therapy, healt... more Virtual reality applications with virtual humans, such as virtual reality exposure therapy, health coaches and negotiation simulators, are developed for different contexts and usually for users from different countries. The emphasis on a virtual human’s emotional expression depends on the application; some virtual reality applications need an emotional expression of the virtual human during the speaking phase, some during the listening phase and some during both speaking and listening phases. Although studies have investigated how humans perceive a virtual human’s emotion during each phase separately, few studies carried out a parallel comparison between the two phases. This study aims to fill this gap, and on top of that, includes an investigation of the cultural interpretation of the virtual human’s emotion, especially with respect to the emotion’s valence. The experiment was conducted with both Chinese and non-Chinese participants. These participants were asked to rate the valence of seven different emotional expressions (ranging from negative to neutral to positive during speaking and listening) of a Chinese virtual lady. The results showed that there was a high correlation in valence rating between both groups of participants, which indicated that the valence of the emotional expressions was as easily recognized by people from a different cultural background as the virtual human. In addition, participants tended to perceive the virtual human’s expressed valence as more intense in the speaking phase than in the listening phase. The additional vocal emotional expression in the speaking phase is put forward as a likely cause for this phenomenon.
Broekens, J., Brinkman, W.P. (2013). AffectButton: A method for reliable and valid affective self-report. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 71(6), 641-667., 2013
In this article we report on a new digital interactive self-report method for the measurement of ... more In this article we report on a new digital interactive self-report method for the measurement of human affect. The AffectButton (Broekens and Brinkman, 2009. ACII 2009: IEEE) is a button that enables users to provide affective feedback in terms of values on the well-known three affective dimensions of pleasure (valence), arousal and dominance. The AffectButton is an interface component that functions and looks like a medium-sized button. The button presents one dynamically changing iconic facial expression that changes based on the coordinates of the user's pointer in the button. To give affective feedback the user selects the most appropriate expression by clicking the button, effectively enabling 1-click affective self-report on 3 affective dimensions. Here we analyze 5 previously published studies, and 3 novel large-scale studies (n=325, n=202, n=128). Our results show the reliability, validity, and usability of the button for acquiring three types of affective feedback in various domains. The tested domains are holiday preferences, real-time music annotation, emotion words, and textual situation descriptions (ANET). The types of affective feedback tested are preferences, affect attribution to the previously mentioned stimuli, and self-reported mood. All of the subjects tested were Dutch and aged between 15 and 56 years. We end this article with a discussion of the limitations of the AffectButton and of its relevance to areas including recommender systems, preference elicitation, social computing, online surveys, coaching and tutoring, experimental psychology and psychometrics, content annotation, and game consoles.
Isnanda, R.G., Brinkman, W.P., Veling, W., van der Gaag, M. Neerincx, M.A., (2013). Priming to induce paranoid thought in a non clinical population. Studies in Health Technology and Informatics, 191, 95-99., 2013
Freeman et al. reported that a substantial minority of the general population has paranoid though... more Freeman et al. reported that a substantial minority of the general population has paranoid thoughts while exposed in a virtual environment. This suggested that in a development phase of a virtual reality exposure system for paranoid patients initially a non-clinical sample could be used to evaluate the system's ability to induce paranoid thoughts. To increase the efficiency of such an evaluation, this paper takes the position that when appropriately primed a larger group of a non-clinical sample will display paranoid thoughts. A 2-by-2 experiment was conducted with priming for unsafety and vigilance as a within-subject factor and prior-paranoid thoughts (low or high) as a between-subjects factor. Before exposure into the virtual world, participants (n = 24) were shown a video and read a text about violence or about mountain animals. While exposed, participants were asked to comment freely on their virtual environment. The results of the experiment confirmed that exposure in a virtual environment could induce paranoid thought. In addition, priming with an aim to create a feeling of unsafety and vigilance increased paranoid comments in the non-clinical group that otherwise would less often exhibit ideas of persecution.
Behaviour & Information …, Jan 1, 2009
Although software engineers extensively use a component-based software engineering (CBSE) approac... more Although software engineers extensively use a component-based software engineering (CBSE) approach and existing usability questionnaires only support a holistic evaluation approach and which focuses on the usability of the system as a whole. Therefore and this paper discusses a component-specific questionnaire for measuring the perceived ease-of-use of individual interaction components. A theoretical framework is presented for this compositional evaluation approach and which builds on Taylor's layered protocol theory. The application and validity of the component-specific measure is evaluated by re-examining the results of four experiments. Here and participants were asked to use the questionnaire to evaluate a total of nine interaction components used in a mobile phone and a room thermostat and a web-enabled TV set and a calculator. The applicability of the questionnaire is discussed in the setting of a new usability study of an MP3 player. The findings suggest that at least part of the perceived usability of a product can be evaluated on a component-based level.
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Research on Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy (VRET) to treat social phobia is not new. Still few ... more Research on Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy (VRET) to treat social phobia is not new. Still few studies focus on creating an elaborate conversation between the patient and characters in a virtual environment. This study focuses on techniques to run a semi-scripted conversation between virtual characters and a patient considering both manual and automatic speech response. Techniques evaluated are a speech detector and a speech recognizer. They were compared to a human control condition. We analyzed the flow and interaction individuals (N = 24) experienced and did a Turing like test. A case study with two phobic patients was also conducted. Both patients and therapist and their interaction with the system were observed. The study showed that the different automatic techniques had their (dis)advantages but often did not show any significant difference with the human control condition. A VRET system with semi-scripted conversations might therefore be suitable for the treatment of patients with social phobia. Using automatic speech response techniques might reduce the system workload demand placed upon therapists, allowing them to devote more attention towards monitoring the patient.
Interacting with …, Jan 1, 2010
The use of virtual reality (VR) technology to support the treatment of patients with phobia and s... more The use of virtual reality (VR) technology to support the treatment of patients with phobia and such as the fear of flying and is getting considerable research attention. Research mainly focuses on the patient experience and the effect of the treatment. In this paper and however and the focus is on the interaction therapists have with the system. Two studies are presented in which the therapist user interface is redesigned and evaluated. The first study was conducted in 2001 with the introduction of the system into the clinic. The original user interface design was compared with a redesign that was based on interviews with therapists. The results of a user study with five therapists and 11 students showed significant usability improvement. In 2008 a follow-up study was conducted on how therapists were now using the redesigned system. Using a direct observation approach six therapists were observed during a total of 14 sessions with patients. The analysis showed that: 93% of the exposures had similar patterns and therapists triggered 20 inappropriate sound recordings (e.g. the pilot giving height information while taking off) and and more complex airplane simulation functions (e.g. roll control to make turns with the airplane) were only used by a therapist who was also a pilot. This resulted in a second redesign of the user interface and which allowed therapists to select flight scenarios (e.g. a flight with extra long taxiing and a flight with multiple taking off and landing sessions) instead of controlling the simulation manually. This new design was again evaluated with seven therapists. Again and results showed significant usability improvements. These findings led to five design guidelines with the main tenet in favour of a treatment-focused user interface (i.e. specific flying scenario) instead of a simulation-focused user interface (i.e. specific airplane controls).
Several methods have been proposed to treat combat veterans with posttraumatic stress disorder (P... more Several methods have been proposed to treat combat veterans with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Still, a recent review reports on high drop-out and non response rates. This has motivated work into the design of a software application to support and to increase the appeal of traditional face-to-face trauma-focused psychotherapy. The research followed a situated cognitive engineering approach, which included a domain analysis, scenarios and claims analysis based on experts reviews (N=10), user evaluations, and a case study. This resulted in the identification of nine core application functions: (1) provide a flexible way of storytelling, (2) provide a structured way of storytelling, (3) prevent losing track of changed and added events, (4) ensure patient trust, (5) ensure usage for therapists with different backgrounds, (6) ensuring awareness of treatment, (7) provide a personal approach, (8) prevent unexpected exposure to emotional material, (9) and ensure appealing and motivating approach throughout the therapy. These functions formed the basis for the design of a military multi-modal memory restructuring (Military - 3MR) system, which focuses on restructuring and relearning of past events. The system allows patient and therapist to visualise past events using personal photos, narrative text, online geographical maps, webcam snapshots, and patient created 3D virtual worlds. Results of the usability evaluation (N=18) suggests key design features such as the time line, content manage, and the 3D world editor, of an acceptable perceived usability level. Results of a storytelling experiment (N=18) between telling an autobiographical story with or without Military-3MR system, found that with the system, time referencing and event description were more precise, and a smaller time period in the story was covered. In the case study, the veteran suffering from combat-related PTSD was pleased with the system and felt encouraged talking about his past events.
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Papers by Willem-Paul Brinkman
Willem-Paul Brinkman is a researcher and examines the interaction between man and machine. But Brinkman is more than just a researcher delivering intricate studies, which are only interesting for his peers. He leads the way by developing so-called VRET-systems and combating phobias using avatars and virtual reality.
Over one million of Dutch people suffer from an anxiety disorder. People having a phobia can experience extreme anxieties, which frequently result in depression, substance abuse, restricted socialisation, and poor employment and education performance. Brinkman does not take these numbers for granted. He is developing so-called VRET systems (Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy) which can be used to help people deal with their anxieties, such as fear of flying, fear of heights or social phobia.
One of the first products to emerge from the lab Brinkman is working in, was a vibrating aircraft seat; a system which enables people with a fear of flying to experience the sounds and feel of flying via a virtual reality helmet and a vibrating seat. Being extremely cost effective as it replaces real test flights, the system is now being used by Dutch mental health institutes such as PsyQ and the VALK foundation. But for Brinkman, coping with fear of flying was just not enough. He concentrated on programs that are designed to help people with other phobias and social disorders as well.
Asking your professor a question in a fully packed lecture-hall. Having a job interview or asking a girl out on a date. Social activities that can be at most thrilling or nerve-wrecking to some, but truly terrifying to others. As a result, socially anxious people frequently end up avoiding these social activities, having a seriously constrained demeanor. By reconstructing the social environment in a virtual world, having people enter and measuring deviations in heart rate pulse and perspiration, Brinkman might be able to help people with those kinds of social problems in the near future as well.
Brinkman is continually developing new virtual worlds to fight different anxieties. He still strongly believes virtual reality and avatars can lead the future. That’s why he is currently developing VRET systems, which could support mental health treatments as well. He wants to show you that everyone can make a change. Why not lead that change?"