Daily Archives: February 10, 2020

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GREENSBORO, North Carolina The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports nearly 50-million Americans live with chronic pain.

And many take opioids to deal with it.

Now a new weapon in the fight against pain has some reaching for a virtual reality headset instead of the pill bottle.

Mia Hrabec is doing amazingly well just four months out of spine surgery.

"I had what is called a meningioma which is a benign tumor on my spinal cord," she said.

She underwent a five hour surgery to remove the tumor. But Mia was determined not to rely on opioids for pain.

"Pain medication was a concern for me because I have seen the effects on family members and loved ones."

"It became the quick fix, give someone a pill, and then they'll be able to do more," said physical therapist Jeff Hathaway of BreakThrough Therapy.

Hathway says we were taught the body tells the brain how to perceive pain when the opposite is true.

"The brain decides whether the signal it's getting is important and whether you should feel pain or not."

He says the key is giving patients the tools to desensitize their central nervous system and lower their sensitivity to pain.

He's using virtual reality technology combined with physical therapy to help patients manage pain without pills.

Patients are asked to rate their pain level and concentrate on mindful meditation.

Mia did the VR sessions pre and post surgery.

She only took three of the oxycodones she was prescribed.

"This is a game changer," said Hathaway.

"We can see a complete elimination or at least a reduction."

And Mia knows it.

"You can manage your pain without pain medication."

Mia is feeling stronger every day and says if she can do it anyone can.

Breakthrough Therapy tracked post-surgical patients in the program for one year and found that the cost of care was reduced by 45% which meant fewer pain medications and fewer ER visits.

If this story has impacted your life or prompted you or someone you know to seek or change treatments, please let us know by contacting Jim Mertens at jim.mertens@wqad.com or Marjorie Bekaert Thomas at mthomas@ivanhoe.com.

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YOUR HEALTH: Virtual reality could be a better pain reliever than dangerous pills - WQAD Moline

Todays talent can be sourced worldwide. Digital connectivity has melted away geographic barriers, opening a borderless talent marketplace. Cultural fluency is a must for a successful workforce and the bedrock of that fluent workplace is emotionally intelligent workers. Well-honed interpersonal skills increase cooperation and collaboration, building an organizations safety, resilience, wellness, and ultimately its productivity. In learning and development, an estimated $60 billion is spent on such soft skills training.

Whether co-located or dispersed, employee teams require emotional intelligence education to be good corporate citizens. Emotionally intelligent leaders cultivate a sense of belonging through higher levels of trust, cooperation, and flexibility. Teammates benefit as all three of these attributes strengthen cooperation and collaboration resulting in a positive psychologically safe environment. A growth mindset requires a flexible, open-minded learning context where learners can stretch themselves and explore their capability to bend and bounce back in multiple situations. This can be accomplished both in-person and through digital methods contextualizing the workers environmentexpanding beyond geographic barriers.

The challenge to any organizational culture educational strategy is the investment of time. This resistance to investment is driven by the reduction in productivity occurring during the educational events. How do we minimize off-task time, be it from the bedside or production floor, while maximizing the educational impact? By bringing the classroom to the learners.

The very nature of virtual reality ensures a standardized delivery coupled with a personalized experience where knowledge acquisition can be easily measured. Each immersive event is invaluable for helping learners feel emotions, work through complex situations, and literally walk a mile in someone elses shoes. A blended learning approach is an effective organizational culture strategy. It shifts emotional intelligence development from theoretical to practical application. As learners actively engage in training, key concepts are internalized increasing the learners capacity and comfort level to apply them in their specific situations.

Consider a self-directed, self-paced combination of:

Affordable equipment and software options have opened the possibility for more organizations to use this powerful instructional methodology. Examples of virtual reality application to improve emotional intelligence and enhance cultural norms:

Improving connection and communication. In healthcare, there are virtual reality programs simulating what it is like to be an elderly patient. Doctors who gain a better understanding of patients pain and frustration through VR can be more empathetic and understanding.

Increase cultural competence. The Department of Defense (DoD) employs virtual reality to enable military teams and those who support them in culturally complex environments learn about specific cultures simulating challenging experiences.

Reduce unconscious bias. Corporate giant Procter & Gamble utilizes virtual reality to reinforce an inclusive and empathetic culture by providing immersive firsthand learning experiences of discrimination.

This is only the beginning. Innovative approaches to help learners acquire and refine empathy, compassion, and understanding are making solid progress. Through an emotional intelligence skill set, improved appreciation for each other in the workplace fosters empathy and compassion which has the ability to positively impact organizational culture affecting recruitment, retainment, resilience, and revenue.

Want to learn more? VR has been called the ultimate empathy machine by Chris Milk in his TEDx talk.

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Improve Organizational Culture With Virtual Reality - ATD

Virtual reality is enabling major companies to train workers and connect teams from around the world, from automotive design to financial and professional services.

Companies like Hyundai, Fidelity, and Accenture are investing in VR technology and seeing returns in terms of increased productivity and reduced risk.

Chris Chapman, Hyundai's North American designer, told Business Insider that VR allows his team to be flexible with its designs and work together on projects, even when geographically apart.

"VR has enhanced our creativity," Chapman said. "Anytime you can say that, it's a huge success."

VR simulations help Hyundai designers create more streamlined work, and see how the car would look in different settings, like on the street, in daylight, or at night.

It's important that Chapman's team gets things right for consumers, whose very lives depend on the safety of Hyundai's designs.

A platform like virtual reality allows remote workers to contribute more effectively in these high-stakes work environments.

Hyundai's Vision T concept car at the LA Auto Show. Reuters

High-stakes situations don't apply exclusively to engineering and design. Some of the most complicated challenges companies face are interpersonal interactions.

"There is a better way of communicating where you're getting your point across more and you're able to better interact with people," said Adam Schouela, who leads the emerging technology group within the Fidelity Center for Applied Technology.

Fidelity hasn't yet applied VR specifically for remote workers, but Schouela says the communication functionalities VR offers would make it a better way for those teams to carry out their responsibilities.

Schouela prefers that new tools displace technologies that are already used in the workplace. Rather than create a new niche, these technologies should ideally add business value in existing areas.

"We've probably built 30, 40 different virtual-reality experiences in order to understand all of this stuff and, really, truly see where we can apply these technologies internally within Fidelity and have it make a difference," Schouela said.

"The idea is not just to do this because it's cool," he added.

An Accenture Igloo. Accenture

For many companies' first foray into virtual reality, the typical hardware choice is Facebook's Oculus line of ski-goggle-like screens.

However, when Accenture sought a VR solution to connect its 500,000 employees around the world, the estimated costs were staggering.

Instead, the company developed office-sized pods it calls Igloos that take the audio and visuals from VR glasses and make them big enough for an audience to collectively experience.

Mary Hamilton, a managing director and the head of Accenture Labs in the Americas, told Business Insider that the Igloos are presently only in Accenture's Atlanta and San Francisco innovation hubs.

But soon, teams across states or continents could pop into a room and interact with each other as though they were together in person.

"It's easy to see how this could fundamentally affect how our company does business," Hamilton said.

Excerpt from:

How top companies are using VR to connect and train remote teams - Business Insider - Business Insider

Virtual Reality (VR) is not just for video games. Researchers use it in studies of brains from all kinds of animals: bees, fish, rats and, of course, humans. Sadly, this does not mean that the bees have a tiny VR headset. Instead, the setup often consists of either normal computer screens surrounding the subject, or a special cylindrical screen. Thishas become a powerful tool in neuroscience, because it has many advantages for researchers that allow them to answer new questions about the brain.

For one, the subject does not have to physically move for the world around them to change. This makes it easier to study the brain. Techniques such as functionalmagnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) can only be used on stationary subjects. With VR, researchers can ask people to navigate through a virtual world by pressing keys, while their head remains in the same place, which allows the researchers to image their brain.

VR has become a powerful tool in neuroscience.

FDA

The researchers can also control a virtual environment much more precisely than they can control the real world. They can put objects in the exact places they want, and they can even manipulate the environment during an experiment. For example, neuroscientists from HarvardUniversitywere able to change the effortthe zebrafish had to put in to swim to travel the same distance in VR, which causes zebrafish to change how strongly they move their tails. Using this experiment, researchers determined which parts of the zebrafish brain are responsible for controlling their swimming behavior. They could have never performed such a manipulation in the real world.

If you've ever experienced VR, you know that it is still quite far from the real world. And this has consequences for how your brain responds to it.

One of the issues with VR is the limited number of senses it works on. Often the environment is only projected on a screen, giving visual input, without the subject getting any other inputs, such as touch or smell. For example,mice rely heavily on their whiskers when exploring an environment. In VR, their whiskers won't give them any input, because they won't be able to feel when they approach a wall or an object.

VR cannot replicate how mice rely on their whiskers to navigate.

Adapted from Pixabay by Dori Grijseels

Another issue is the lack of proprioception, the feedback you get from your body about the position of your limbs. Pressing a button to walk forward is not the same as actually moving your legs and walking around. Similarly, subjects won't have any input from their vestibular system, which is responsible for balance and spatial orientation. This is also the reason some people get motion sickness when they are wearing VR headsets.

When VR is used for animal studies, the animals are often "headfixed," meaning they cannot turn their head. This is needed to be able to use a microscope to look at the cells in their brain.However, it poses a problem, specifically for navigation, as animals use a special type of cell, called a "head direction cell," in navigation tasks. These cells track the orientation of the head of an animal. And whenthe mouse can't move its head, the head direction cells can't do their job.

This is especially the case for the cells in the hippocampus. That is the part of your brain that is responsible for navigation, and so, relies heavily on inputs that give you information about your location and your direction.

Neurons talk to each other through electrical signals called action potentials, or spikes. The number of spikes per second, called the "firing frequency," is an important measure of how much information is being sent between neurons.A 2015 study found that, in VR, the firing frequency of neurons in a mouse is reduced by over two thirds, meaning thatthe cells don't send as much information.

The same study also showed that the cells are less reliable. They specifically looked at place cells, cells that respond to a particular location in the environment and are incredibly important for navigation. In the real world, these cells send spikes about 80% of the times thatthe animal is in a particular location. However, in VR, this is reduced to about 30%, so when an animal visits a location ten times, the cells will send spikes during only three of those visits. This means the animals are not as sure about their exact location.

Another important feature of brain activity are brainwaves, or neural oscillations. These represent the overall activity of all the neurons in your brain, which goes up and down at a regular interval. Theta oscillations, brainwaves at a frequency of 4-7 Hz, play an important part in navigation. Interestingly, scientists found that rats have a lower frequency of their theta oscillations in VR compared to the real world. This effect on oscillations is not limited to navigation tasks, but was also found for humans who played golf in the real world and in VR. It is most likely caused by the lack of vestibular input, but scientists are still unsure of the consequences of suchchanges in frequency.

We know that we should be critical when interpreting results from neuroscience studies that use VR. Although VR is a great tool, it is far from perfect, and it affects the way our brain acts. We should not readily accept conclusions from VR studies, without first considering how the use of VR in that study may have affected those conclusions. Hopefully, as our methods get more sophisticated, the differences in brain activity between VR and the real world will also become smaller.

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Your brain isn't the same in virtual reality as it is in the real world - Massive Science

Clatskanie parents who want to have their teens take driver education now have a new virtual reality option.

Columbia River Driver Education, a St. Helens based company, now has two fully immersive virtual reality simulators to aid in its training.

Learning how to drive just got a little more exciting at Columbia River Driver Education, a St. Helens based company.

The company has received two fully immersive virtual reality simulators to aid in its training. At the beginning of this year, the company received authorization from the Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) to use VR training in Drivers Education, and, according to Greene, the company is the only drivers education provider in the state authorized to do so.

According to the company owner Rich Greene, the training allows a drivers education student to sit in a chair in a classroom, and strap on a head set complete with a vision field and headphones. With the set-up comes a realistic steering wheel, which vibrates according to what is happening in the virtual reality stimulator.

The entire set up is hooked up with wires to the teachers computer, which is in charge of controlling the simulation. The student will then be subjected to all sorts of scenarios that they could face in real life.

Greene said numerous advantages set the system apart from regular driving in a real car, which is also part of Columbia River Driver Education. One is the freedom to make mistakes in a safe environment. Also, the entire session is recorded, so students can go back and see their mistakes. A third benefit is that students can more easily access all types of driving situations.

We realized that its difficult for us to put the students we have out here in Columbia County on every road configuration that they may experience as theyre driving," Greene said. "And so this allows us to expose them to those kinds of situations."

One of those situations is driving on the freeway. In order for a St. Helens resident to reach a freeway, such as U.S. 26, it requires a drive of about 45 minutes, impossible to do during a standard 90-minute drivers education lesson. With the virtual reality simulator, doing so is simple: It requires strapping on a headset and loading the program from the computer.

There are two main courses that a drivers education student will face in the virtual reality simulator. One is called highway solo, and the other is car control.

The first is designed to test how well a student handles different situations on the freeway, which the instructor can choose to make increasingly difficult as the student progresses. At first, the student will drive on an empty freeway, with the goal to simply obey the speed limit and keep control of the car as they enter and exit via on- and off-ramps. Then, the instructor can amp up the difficulty, adding traffic, and then making the student pass at least three cars before the session is over, Greene said.

Car control works differently, and tests students on how well they can quickly maneuver a vehicle around various obstructions, as well as how quickly they can come to a complete stop.

The control simulator is also capable of simulating various motor vehicles, not just the traditional four-door sedan, which Greene said is useful, seeing as how commonplace large pickup trucks are for Columbia County residents. On top of that, the simulator can alter different aspects of the tests, like making the weather cloudy or sunny, or increasing traffic. Occasionally, Greene or his wife will also do a Stroop Color and Word Test (SCWT) which tests students for distraction.

The SCWT works like this: During a driving simulation, an instructor will flash a word in a certain color on the screen, which will appear in a four-second burst. They will then have the student repeat the color of the word to the instructor. Among their more experienced drivers especially, Greene said the students will report how distracting the SCWT was.

Showing them the recording of their test afterward will doubly enforce this concept.

The reaction well have from those experienced drivers is, oh, I weaved out of my lane when I was looking at that, or I missed a stop sign when I was looking at that, Greene said, And well tell them, thats the same kind of thing that happens when youre driving, if you decide to pick up your cell phone and look at it.

While the company received full authorization for the VR system earlier this year, Columbia River Driver Education has been using the system since December. Theyve used the system in Rainier, but the class in St. Helens is the first class where the system has been fully integrated since the beginning.

The St. Helens model is what Greene and his wife will pattern the rest of their classes on. It includes 40 hours of classroom training, and then two to three weeks of driving training afterward, which the virtual reality simulator is part of.

County-wide, Greene said his company will do two to three classes a year in North Columbia County, five to six classes per year in St. Helens, and then hopefully expand to Vernonia, where they will do one to two classes per year.

For teens, class packages start at $400, and for adults, class packages start at $610, and include 30 hours of classroom training and six hours of behind-the-wheel training.

Link:

Driver Training: Virtual reality behind the wheel | News - The Chief News

The third annual event includes tours of UNDs aerospace school and hands-on projects for attendees to learn more about aviation and the atmosphere.

Doors open at 10 a.m. Saturday, Feb. 8, at the campus Aerospace building and at UNDs flight operations at the Grand Forks International Airport. The event, which is free and open to all, goes until 3 p.m.

More than 3,000 people attended the event in 2019, according to UND. At the entrances, attendees will check in and pick up an Aerospace Passport. Free transportation will be provided to UND Flight Operations at the airport from Clifford Hall throughout the day.

Courtney Olson, an event organizer, said the aerospace school often gets requests for tours and learning sessions, but it doesn't always have the manpower to conduct them.

Theyre coming to Community Day, which is nice, so people can come in and see what we do here, she said.

New to this years event is the recently unveiled Virtual Reality Lab in Odegard Hall, which features immersive flight stations.

The new VR simulator has been in the works for about two years, Kyle Weller, a sophomore majoring in commercial aviation, said. It was officially opened earlier this semester.

Its fully immersive VR flight (simulations), Weller said. This allows you to look fully behind you and all the way around.

The simulator is available for students to use for free and simulates the planes UND already uses. The technology can be set for any kind of weather, location or problem that may occur during a flight.

Event attendees will have an opportunity to sit down and use the simulator on Saturday.

Another VR experience hosted in space studies will take participants to the stars, according to a UND press release. Attendees will have the opportunity to hold lunar rocks, on loan from NASA, brought to Earth by Apollo astronauts.

Also new this year will be the Doppler on wheels, which is on loan to the university from the Center for Severe Weather Research in Colorado. The DOW is being used for research conducted at UND. The mobile radar station, sought after nationwide, will be at the airport.

Beth Bjerke, associate dean of UND Aerospace, said she thinks of the day as a pop-up air and space museum that shows the community all thats happening at UND.

This has proven to be a great way for us to open our doors and invite the public to learn about whats happening at UND, all while giving them hands-on aerospace experiences, she said.

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Virtual reality flight simulator to be on display at UND's Aerospace Community Day - INFORUM

Widespread deployment of 5G mobile networks could accelerate the adoption of augmented and augmented reality, albeit more extensive availability isnt the main prerequisite for VR and AR to thrive with 5G, convincing use cases are additionally required to make these technologies viable, despite the fact that the option of 5G gives developers a bigger canvas to plan design experiences.

5G mobile networks are relied upon to help applications with high-bandwidth and ultra-low latency requirements. Augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) are among the most appealing use cases. Obviously, processing and communication of the huge amount of the four-dimensional (4D) information introduce challenging prerequisites to the network design. To meet these necessities a novel structure that enhances together different goals is required.

The augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) revolution is still in its initial stage. These innovations can possibly reform numerous businesses throughout the next five to ten years. They will change the manner in which we interact with the surrounding scene, open new experiences and increase productivity. However, the real-time intelligence of the extended reality (AR/VR) applications requires high bandwidth and ultra-low latency supported by the 5G networks.

Without a doubt, the size of obtained information in real-time activity is growing rapidly, making communication and processing a difficult task. To meet these necessities a multi-target system for the network design is required. In particular, objectives from various layers of the network stack ought to be streamlined together. In that capacity, reconstruction quality, transmission efficiency, energy efficiency of the mobile device and communication bandwidth are some characteristic objectives.

5G guarantees new abilities compared to existing network architectures, including higher bandwidth, lower latencies and new functions such as slices, virtualization and edge computing. Immersive media and extended realities frequently are seen as one of the key experiences that are empowered by 5G, considering the necessities as far as bit rates, latency and ubiquitous availability of such services. Immersive media and 5G is viewed as a blend that will empower new services and opportunities within the mobile ecosystem, both in the entertainment and gaming environments, yet in addition for new verticals, for example, industrial services, public safety and automotive.

To structure the work on 5G and XR, 3GPP has launched a feasibility study to recognize use cases, advancements, and potential gaps that need particulars for interoperable services. Extended Reality alludes to all real-and-virtual combined environments and human-machine interactions created by computer innovation and wearables. It incorporates agent structures, for example, Augmented Reality, Mixed Reality (MR) and Virtual Reality and the areas within the continuum among them. The levels of virtuality range from partially sensory inputs to fully immersive VR.

A definitive goal for immersive media is the experience of Presence giving the sentiment of being truly and spatially located in the virtual condition. The feeling of presence gives noteworthy minimum performance requirement to various innovations, for example, tracking, latency, persistency, resolution and optics. Such experiences might be devoured on cell phones, HeadMounted Displays (HMDs), AR glasses, heads-up displays or new rising form factors devices.

Deployment of 5G mobile networks is right now in its early stages and faces noteworthy snags to useful use in cell phone settings, whereupon AR and VR applications add complexity. Initially, not all 5G networks are equal. While organizations in Asia depend on sub-6 GHz radio frequencies, most 5G networks in the US are millimeter-wave (mmWave) networks.

mmWave radio frequencies give faster data speeds, however, are inalienably line-of-sight, making it likely that users will lose access if they experience obstacles, for example, large buildings, when moving. This can confine the practicality of AR applications in urban environments.

5G would take into consideration higher flexibility in use cases. AR is generally utilized on cell phones or tablets in museums to display additional content for shows, or for interior design, allowing shoppers to virtually place furniture in a space to perceive how it matches. With 5G, the ability to utilize AR in live, outdoor environments away from reliable wi-fi signals can impact the kinds of interactions and integrations that developers can build.

One vital processing step for increasing the quality of experience with extended reality applications is 4D models enhancement. The procured 4D models are represented by a sequence of time and unstructured point clouds. This information is normally undermined by several forms of imperfections, like scanning noise, outliers and missing parts of surfaces.

Thus, improvement strategies are a basic pre-handling step before rendering the models to AR and VR headsets. The exploitation of the spatial and temporal coherence of the produced time varying point-clouds (TVPC) may give low-unpredictability procedures to real-time activity. For example, in current mathematical optimization tools (matrix completion theory) have been utilized for improvement and reconstruction of the 4D information from a decreased number of points.

Regarding integrating XR into networks, various perspectives should be considered. Among others are the (cumulative) applications data download size (e.g., Fortnite has a few GBs in download) or streaming immersive scenes at up to 100 Mbps. In cutting edge frameworks, the XR pose isnt just processed in the gadget, however, it is sent to the network so as to adapt to the current viewport or to a predicted viewport. So as to keep up the vivid experience, the pose should be prepared in a matter of barely any milliseconds (normally 20ms). If the processing is delegated to the network, it either requires low processing and communication latencies, or a smart separation of network-based pre-rendering and local rendering (also referred to as split rendering).

Except if [mobile network operators] are offering a genuinely unlimited service at a conventional cost, at that point all 5G will be a faster method to arrive at your data cap on mobile. If typical mobile contracts are not made increasingly tolerant to take into account more data consumption, VR and AR fill in as a quicker method to pile on overage charges or max your information plan. It isnt helping the VR and AR industry for wider adoption. If anything, it will trash it as a costly toy for rich children, the specific inverse of what the business needs or needs.

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The Integration of 5G with Augmented and Virtual Reality - Analytics Insight

Grounding Inc. is excited to announce that the long-awaited new entry into the Space Channel 5 franchise is releasing on February 25th, 2020 in North America, Central, and South America, and February 26th in Japan, Europe, and Oceania. Space Channel 5 VR: Kinda Funky News Flash! will be available as a PlayStation VR (PSVR) downloadable software at launch on the PlayStationStore for $39.99 USD (3980). This is the first standalone game from Segas music and dance-themed masterpiece franchise to be released in 18 years, which also celebrated its 20 year anniversary on December 16, 2019.

Members of the original development team have returned to usher Space Channel 5 into a new decade. Space Channel 5 VR: Kinda Funky News Flash! is set in Space Channel 5, the premiere space TV station of the 25th Century. For the first time, the player will physically join senior reporter Ulala as a rookie, by dancing, posing, and grooving while holding PlayStationMove motion controllers. Returning cast members join brand new characters in new stages and music for a groovin good time.

The English voice cast includes Cherami Leigh taking over the lead role as Ulala, and Tom Clarke-Hill returning to reprise his role as Jaguar. Other cast members include Cassandra Lee Morris as newcomer Kell and Greg Chun as the being terrorizing the galaxy, Glitter.

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Dance to Save the Galaxy -- in Virtual Reality! - GamingLyfe Network