© Lucas Wozniak 2024
{{sect1}}
Over the course of two semesters, my team and I were awarded NYU's Prototyping Fund twice and created two VR attention-training games, described and shown below.
Full blog post here
{{sect2}}
Globally, conditions of impaired cognition, such as ADHD, are on the rise. For both adults and kids, first-stop solutions often consist of prescribed medications, which often cause side effects, can be overprescribed, and don't treat the underlying internal causes, such as difficulty in controlling attention to focus on desired stimuli.
{{sect3}}
While more holistic treatments such as meditation have increasingly been shown to increase one's ability to control attention, many struggle to learn meditation or sustain a meditative practice. VR offers offer an unprecedented opportunity to design engaging, immersive environments and focus users' attention, or gamify their focusing of it, in a compelling, user-friendly way.
{{sect4}}
In developing our prototypes, we were driven by a curiosity around how biosensors (EEG and eye-tracking) can be incorporated into VR experiences to drive attention-training gameplay.
{{sect5}}
The gameplay consists of aiming energy balls and shooting them into glowing rings, triggered by the EEG's detection of participants' mental commands (energy balls fire out of their hand whenever they imagine this happening).
Tech: Emotiv Insight EEG + Meta Quest 2
Attention-training mechanic: Gamified Mental Commands
{{sect6}}
{{sect7}}
{{sect8}}
The gameplay consists of progressing through sentences of a written story without falling prey to distracting elements. The VR headset tracks what the participant is looking at, and they are set back in the text if they look away at the surrounding dancing aliens.
Tech: Vive Pro Eye
Attention-training mechanic: Gamified Eye-tracking
Demo:
{{sect1}}
Over the course of two semesters, my team and I were awarded NYU's Prototyping Fund twice and created two VR attention-training games, described and shown below.
Full blog post here
{{sect2}}
Globally, conditions of impaired cognition, such as ADHD, are on the rise. For both adults and kids, first-stop solutions often consist of prescribed medications, which often cause side effects, can be overprescribed, and don't treat the underlying internal causes, such as difficulty in controlling attention to focus on desired stimuli.
{{sect3}}
While more holistic treatments such as meditation have increasingly been shown to increase one's ability to control attention, many struggle to learn meditation or sustain a meditative practice. VR offers offer an unprecedented opportunity to design engaging, immersive environments and focus users' attention, or gamify their focusing of it, in a compelling, user-friendly way.
{{sect4}}
In developing our prototypes, we were driven by a curiosity around how biosensors (EEG and eye-tracking) can be incorporated into VR experiences to drive attention-training gameplay.
{{sect5}}
The gameplay consists of aiming energy balls and shooting them into glowing rings, triggered by the EEG's detection of participants' mental commands (energy balls fire out of their hand whenever they imagine this happening).
Tech: Emotiv Insight EEG + Meta Quest 2
Attention-training mechanic: Gamified Mental Commands
{{sect6}}
{{sect7}}
{{sect8}}
The gameplay consists of progressing through sentences of a written story without falling prey to distracting elements. The VR headset tracks what the participant is looking at, and they are set back in the text if they look away at the surrounding dancing aliens.
Tech: Vive Pro Eye
Attention-training mechanic: Gamified Eye-tracking
Demo:
