Essentially mirror box therapy done with Virtual Reality.  Custom built games and a web browser provide a greater sense of agency over phantom limbs and a more compelling illusion while engaging the patient.

We are using an eye-tracking VR headset with the Leap Motion to examine how subjects with Hemispatial Neglect explore their environments when presented with various arrangements of objects in peripersonal and extrapersonal space.

Subjects play taxi driver in a VR city, then play again on a regular screen while having their brain scanned.

An intervention for Broca’s Aphasia that sets subjects in front of a mirror in VR.  As they speak, they will see an avatar that looks exactly like them correctly mouth their words.

Explores the psychological effects of varying certain architectural features by letting subjects compare and explore rooms in VR.

Explores the impact of a vibrotactile compass on navigation in a setting without any visual cues.  Subjects strap on a compass that indicates north by activating buzzers, follow a short path that disappears, and then indicate their origin.

An intervention for people with Hemiparesis in which symmetrical movements are preformed with hands manipulated with novel control schemes enabled by Leap Motion.

Explore racial empathy by embodying different races in VR and experiencing interactions affected by prejudice.

An engaging intervention for Retinitis Pigmentosa in which a subject’s peripheral vision is precisely stimulated by meteors that hover in place before moving towards targets in a game akin to Missile Command.

An application for the Microsoft Hololens that renders 3D echocardiograms.  We’re also exploring CT scan overlay for surgeons.

Explores effects of subtle geometric changes on memory with a series of trials in which subject must collect and then replace various objects.

Explores sensory effects of magnifying or shrinking one of the subject’s hands.

Dr. Jeffrey R. Vadala is the lab’s director and lead Unreal Engine and Unity programmer. His research broadly explores human perception of landscapes and architectural spaces and how they shape both cognitive and cultural processes in contemporary and archaeological contexts. Utilizing both virtual reality and augmented reality tools, his doctoral research historically traced the historical processes associated with the development of human perception at ancient Maya sites in the Yucatan and Belize. As the director of the Penn Neurology VR Laboratory, he currently works as a collaborator and software developer with the goal of bringing virtual and augmented reality approaches and experimental methods to neuroscience, psychology, anthropology, and medical researchers. He obtained his Ph.D. in anthropological archaeology from the University of Florida in 2016.