Business & Games: The Blog

Press release excerpts:

SANTA CLARA, CA—DECEMBER 20, 2006—NVIDIA Corporation (Nasdaq: NVDA), the worldwide leader in programmable graphics processor technologies, today announced that it has teamed up with the University of Washington's Harborview Burn Center and Seattle, Wash.-based Imprint Interactive on technology related to a pioneering virtual reality system known as "SnowWorld," which mitigates pain for burn victims.

The immersive experience, which was developed with NVIDIA graphics, has been selected by the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum to be part of a display titled "Design Life Now: National Design Triennial 2006." Inaugurated in 2000, the Triennial seeks out and presents the most innovative American designs from the prior three years in a variety of fields, including product design, architecture, furniture, film, graphics, new technologies, animation, science, medicine, and fashion. The exhibit will run through July 29, 2007.

Delivering an engaging interactive experience during a wound care procedure, SnowWorld offers an interactive journey through an icy 3D canyon. The environment is populated with snowball wielding snowmen, flocks of squawking penguins, woolly mammoths, and other surprises. Patients are drawn into the action in SnowWorld, pelting anything they see with their own snowballs as they fly through the snow.

Selected for Design Life Now, virtual pain management, the brainchild of Hunter Hoffman and David Patterson, has been around since about 1996 apparently. The latest project is SnowWorld 3. Here's a bit about how it works, in the creators' own words:

SnowWorld, developed at the University of Washington HITLab in collaboration with Harborview Burn Center, was the first immersive virtual world designed for reducing pain.  SnowWorld was specifically designed to help burn patients.  Patients often report re-living their original burn experience during wound care, SnowWorld was designed to help put out the fire.  Our logic for why VR will reduce pain is as follows. Pain perception has a strong psychological component. The same incoming pain signal can be interpreted as painful or not, depending on what the patient is thinking. Pain requires conscious attention. The essence of VR is the illusion users have of going inside the computer-generated environment. Being drawn into another world drains a lot of attentional resources, leaving less attention available to process pain signals. Conscious attention is like a spotlight. Usually it is focussed on the pain and woundcare. We are luring that spotlight into the virtual world. Rather than having pain as the focus of their attention, for many patients in VR, the wound care becomes more of an annoyance, distracting them from their primary goal of exploring the virtual world.

One could jokingly theorise that addictive MMOs serve the same pain reducing function, only on a social level, as opposed to physical. All jokes aside though, this must be the most wonderful way to take advantage of the way virtual manages to distract you from real yet.

On a side note, while going through all SnowWorld related sites, I couldn't help but notice the scarce mentioning of the NVidia brand. Then again, it is rather late and my sick self might have simply missed it.

Links summary:
NVidia Press Release
Imprint Interactive Technology
VR Pain
Design Life