In “A Multitude of Realities,” FM contributor Michael Pinchera interviews Dr. Albert Rizzo about virtual reality technology and how it can enhance guest experiences. The following is some background on Dr. Rizzo and his work exploring technology and the brain.

Dr. Albert “Skip” Rizzo lost a lot of quarters and, ironically, brain cells playing Pong, Pac-Man and Galaga in bars. But while working at a brain injury-rehab center, around 1990, he was struck by the potential intersection of his interests.

“One day, I saw a patient bent over under a tree and I asked, ‘Hey Tim, are you OK? What have you got? What are you doing?’ He said, ‘The new thing, a Game Boy.’ And I watched him. I was seeing a 22-year-old frontal lobe injury patient that I couldn’t motivate to do traditional cognitive rehabilitation tasks for more than 10 minutes—and he was glued to this and had become a Tetris warlord! That’s when I first thought, ‘We need to gamify rehab tasks.’”

Shortly thereafter, Rizzo brought a Super Nintendo and the game Sim City to the rehab center, and the patients loved it—“They were going to town building cities!” That really got him fired up about the potential clinical uses for game technology.

“[Sim City] is the ultimate executive function-training thing,” says Rizzo, now a research professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Southern California (USC), director of medical virtual reality for the school’s Institute for Creative Technologies, and associate editor of CyberPsychology & Behavior and the International Journal of Virtual Reality. “Executive function is really the brain of the brain—the frontal lobe activities that orchestrate your other cognitive functions into a unified game plan for solving problems. Every normal healthy person has executive function where they’re planning their day and they’re plotting their strategies and organizing—some better than others. Well, Sim City does all that and in a very clear way.”

Although he had to force himself to step away from playing video games as entertainment—“I got a little bit too into it and lost a girlfriend over a game I got hooked on, Contra III: The Alien Wars. I loved that game, man.”—his research marched on.

In 1995, Rizzo set up a lab at USC to explore how virtual reality (VR) and gaming technologies could be used in brain-injury rehabilitation.

“By 1996 or so, we had our first application—that also coincided with the first nuclear winter on VR,” Rizzo says.

In the super highly technological 1990s that introduced most humans to the Internet, inspired modern existential philosophy, and pop science fiction dystopian fare such as The Lawnmower Man, Total Recall, and Strange Days, much of the interest in VR collapsed along with media hype.

“The vision of VR was sound, but the technology just wasn’t there to deliver on it after 1995 when the bottom fell out,” he says. “But a lot of people in mental health and rehabilitation stuck with VR because it was unique, fascinating, and pointed a way to the future. Now I’m happy to say I think the technology has caught up with the vision, so we can do things we only dreamed about back then.”

VR first got clinical traction around that time to treat patients with anxiety disorders and phobias through exposure therapy—confronting fears in the context of safe scenarios.

“That blossomed into the post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) work,” he says.

A virtual Vietnam scenario created in 1997 showed promise in treating veterans of that conflict suffering from PTSD. And at about the same time that researchers working with a World Trade Center/Sept. 11 VR environment published positive results (2002), Rizzo started building Iraq and Afghanistan PTSD treatment simulations. (He was subsequently recognized with the American Psychological Association’s 2010 Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Treatment of Trauma.)

He says analyses of several studies found that VR scenarios outperform traditional imagination-only exposure therapy and could be as effective as real-world exposure therapy.

“Mental health, generally, is a shining area where it makes sense to use VR, because we’re taking an already-known principle (exposure therapy), an already known evidence-based treatment, and delivering it more—or at least as—effectively, but with a little bit more excitement and draw for patients.”

Further emphasizing the technology’s impact on the human brain, Rizzo says dramatic results have been realized in its use for pain distraction.

“You put somebody in a VR headset and give them a game-like activity to distract them from the pain and you see dramatic differences, dramatic drop offs in the perception of pain, even to the [extent that] when tested in an FMRI system you see less activation of the pain centers in the brain.”

[photo credit: Sportsfile (Web Summit) via photopin (license)]

Attendees at the recent Performing Arts Managers Conference in San Francisco, California, were given a demonstration of the Constellation sound system at the Zellerbach Rehearsal Hall at the San Francisco War Memorial & Performing Arts Center. It was an ear-opening experience, in which sound moved in circles or surrounded the audience like a warm fleece.

We weren’t the only ones impressed with the system. Music critic Alex Ross was, too, and he wrote about it for The New Yorker.

“Its principal purpose is to enable flexibility, so that halls can adapt to the needs of different kinds of event. Cinema needs a dry, echo-free environment, so that words can be understood. Chamber music benefits from crisp sound with resonant warmth. Orchestras are at home in halls with a longer reverberation time—more than two seconds, at the Musikverein. And choruses thrive on the booming acoustic of a cathedral. Constellation replicates this range of reverb times, which vary with the size of the space. One can choose from among different settings: cinema or lecture hall (0.4 seconds); chamber (one second); theatre (1.4 seconds); concert hall (two seconds); and “sacred space” (2.8 seconds). Thus, the system can give bloom to a somewhat dry acoustic, as at Zellerbach Hall, in Berkeley, and it can supply a cleaner sound for amplified jazz and pop, as at Svetlanov Hall, in Moscow.”

Zellerbach Rehearsal Hall is also where the San Francisco Symphony holds its SoundBox events that make use of the Constellation system in an effort to attract a different (and sometimes younger) audience. It appears to be working, as each event has sold out.

Please read The New Yorker article, “Wizards of Sound,” for more about the Constellation sound system.

(h/t: Jennifer Norris. Image: San Francisco War Memorial & Performing Arts Center)

Now here’s a really cool light technology. It’s recreates how sunlight looks through a skylight, which means you can have sunlight 24 hours a day or deep in the recesses of your venue. An Italian company, CoeLux, developed the product, which won the Lux Awards 2014 Light Source Innovation of the Year.

“The scientists who invented the light figured out how to use a thin coating of nanoparticles to accurately simulate sunlight through Earth’s atmosphere and the effect known as Rayleigh scattering,” Michael Zhang reported for PetaPixel. “It’s not just the color temperature that’s the same—the quality of the light feels the same, as well.”

The company says the technology is ideal for all types of indoor spaces and that future improvements will allow changes to the position of the sun in the frame and the color temperature of the sunlight.

I could imagine, for example, this being implemented in convention centers, especially in meeting spaces. Place a few of these in the ceiling, and it’s like you’re having a meeting outdoors!

Please watch the following video for more information about this technology.

(Image: CoeLux)

Congratulations to the group of IAVM student members from Missouri State University who worked at the 2015 Super Bowl at the University of Phoenix Stadium.

“Throughout the weekend, students worked mainly in an area called Super Bowl Central,” Melissa Price reported. “They greeted guests as they entered and provided information and directions. They also had the chance to be involved with some of the free concerts and really enjoyed the performance of the Roots from The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon.”

Troy Parrott said they split up in pairs and went to different street corners.

“Some of us had to use clickers to keep track of people walking in and out of certain restaurants, because they filled up quickly,” Parrott said. “While the rest of us were handing out maps to fans and mainly directing them to the NFL Fan Experience, bathroom, convention center, etc.”

Working at the Super Bowl is an annual event for the school’s Entertainment Management Association, and Price said this year “the students worked with NFL Fan Experience, the National Football League’s official source for event experiences and hospitality, as well as the Arizona Host Committee.”

Please visit Price’s blog entry to learn more about the students’ experiences, and once again, congratulations on a job well done!

(Image: Missouri State University)

As iBeacons increase in popularity, venue managers may wonder what it’s like to install them. If so, let me point you in the direction of an informative article from the Brooklyn Museum, which is going through the process of installing 150 iBeacons in its 500,000-square-foot facility. While museums aren’t one of IAVM’s primary venue types, I believe many of you can relate and imagine your own venue when reading this article. For example, there’s the issue of different wall types:

“…we’ve had a lot of problems actually getting these to stay put on the walls. It’s no secret we have a tough production environment here; we use different types of paint (gloss, flat, semi) and our walls vary in surface (plaster, glass, sheetrock, cement). No matter what we do, we’ve found beacons are constantly falling off walls…constantly.”

Then there’s signal strength inside a building:

“Beacon signal, for instance, is disrupted by everything save air…walls, vitrines, objects, people, you name it. This problem is so bad, in fact, that I can be standing directly beside a beacon on the wall, and will find a stronger signal coming from one across the room.”

As I mentioned, “The Realities of Installing iBeacon to Scale” is an informative article and presents some first-hand experiences you should consider if you go down the iBeacon path.

(photo credit: Media Hack Days 2014 via photopin cc)