Meetings and Education

VRMI's affiliate, the Interactive Media Institute, sponsors national and international workshops, meetings, and continuing education courses. IMI is approved by the American Psychological Association to offer continuing education for psychologists. IMI maintains responsibility for the program.

The Annual CyberTherapy Conference is organized by the Interactive Media Institute (IMI), a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization headquartered in San Diego, California. For the first seven years (1997 – 2002), CyberTherapy was a specialized symposium at the Medicine Meets Virtual Reality (MMVR) Conference featuring presentations that dealt primarily with conceptual matters and future possibilities. Over the years, the symposium continued to grow in both size and scientific evidence. In 2003, the symposium spun off into a separate three-day conference.

The 12th Annual CyberTherapy Conference, held in June 2007, highlighted the largest program ever presented on controlled clinical trials using VR and other cutting-edge technologies in the areas of mental health, rehabilitation, disabilities, training, and education. The next conference will further strengthen and advance efforts to improve health care through technology and take advantage of the remarkable transformation that is occurring in healthcare today.

For more information please check www.interactivemediainstitute.com

VRMI received funding from NATO to organize a three-day Advanced Research Workshop (ARW) entitled “Wounds of War:  Lowering Suicide Risk in Returning Troops”.  The workshop is scheduled for 14-17 October 2007 at the Hotel Amerika-Holzer, Klopeiner See, Südkärnten, Austria and will allow experts from across Europe and North America to meet and discuss the impact of war-related stress, particularly when it increases risk of suicide, on participants in current and past conflicts.

Our hope is that through this workshop, we can come to understand what programs are already in place for detection, assessment, prevention, and treatment.  We can then learn from these existing plans and begin to formulate a more common set of best practices and guidelines which can be implemented throughout organizations in all our countries; having as our common goal to always seek to serve our service members more effectively.

For more information please check www.interactivemediainstitute.com

The 2004 Adaptive Displays Conference, funded by the Army Research Office, was held immediately preceding the August 8-12, 2004 Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques (ACM SIGGRAPH 2004), one of the world’s largest conferences on computer graphics and displays. ACM is an international scientific and educational organization dedicated to advancing the arts, sciences, and applications of information technology.

It successfully brought together 60 physiologists, cognitive psychologists, and display engineers to develop a common frame of reference for determining the research issues that must be solved before one can intelligently evaluate the costs and benefits of display tuning.

For more information please check www.interactivemediainstitute.com

The 2003 Spatial Disorientation Workshop was funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Defense Sciences Office and Naval Research Laboratory and held in conjunction with CyberTherapy 2003.

The introduction to the proceedings provides a succinct summary: “Over the past decade, virtual reality has fast become a popular technology for delivering training quickly and effectively, at a reduced cost. Typically, these technologies are developed with the intent of duplicating/replacing specific real-world tasks, such as landing an aircraft, conning a ship, or shooting at targets. A less appreciated application for VR is as a tool for rehabilitation. This panel will explore how VR technology can be used to reduce the negative effects of spatial disorientation (SD).

Topics to be discussed include: the etiology of SD, techniques for measuring SD, VR-based methodologies for reducing SD, and an exploration into some of the more common—and not so common—practical issues attendant with using this emerging technology.”

For more information please check www.interactivemediainstitute.com

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