By Mark Johnson - Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
MADISON, Wis. - The room rotates. You stand there, shelves, walls and furniture slowly circling before your eyes. A bed decorated with throw pillows passes. The kitchen approaches. A microwave juts out from a shelf close enough to touch, a refrigerator at your back.
A doorway inches closer until you pass through, and the frame recedes, and you are in another room, tempted to reach out and touch the ghostly furniture.
The whole thing triggers an uneasy sensation - that of moving, walking through rooms, up and down stairs, turning corners and following corridors, when all the while your arms and legs remain perfectly still.
“If we close the door and tell you to walk, you will lose track of where the door is almost instantaneously,” said Kevin Ponto, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Human Ecology.
When Ponto speaks, you remember you’re wearing something called “active stereo glasses” that allow you to see in 3-D. The room does not represent actual reality, but virtual reality. Although your eyes see in all directions, taking in the detailed image of a meticulously laid out house, you remember that the place you walked into a few minutes ago is nothing more than a white box: 9 ½ feet tall, by 9 ½ feet wide by 9 ½ feet long.
The room inside the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery is four walls, a ceiling and floor, onto which images have been projected to form a CAVE, or cave automatic virtual environment.
But the images on all sides are not of some idealized version of a home. They come from someone’s actual home, complete with clutter and dust on the shelves. The mind-blowing detail comes from 1 billion pieces of data compiled over several days by a special laser camera that scans every room in a house.
Why go to such trouble?
Research into home health care.
“It’s becoming more and more critical that people are able to take care of themselves at home,” said Gail Casper, senior scientist at the UW School of Nursing and director of what is known as the vizHOME project. “We, as healthcare providers, sometimes set people up to not be optimally successful because we don’t know what they encounter at home.”
Health care researchers are addressing this gap in knowledge by developing detailed models of the places we live.
Virtual homes are becoming a research tool for examining where people keep their medications and how they remind themselves to take them. Some people organize medications sequentially in a line of bottles. Others keep the pill bottles in a cluster in the middle of a table. In some homes, a calendar on the wall has made one room the hub for a family’s medical needs.
Casper said academic researchers aren’t the only people using virtual reality spaces. Users now include the military, the oil industry, high-end design firms and companies including Procter & Gamble, which is said to have created a virtual reality shopping market (Procter & Gamble declined to discuss its use of a virtual reality shopping space).
Since launching the virtual home project in 2013 with about $2.3 million in federal money from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, researchers at the Wisconsin Institutes of Discovery have scanned 20 homes across the state, from Kenosha to Janesville, Milwaukee to Cottage Grove. The researchers figured 20 homes would provide the study with the necessary diversity.
“It was cool, but also odd,” said Nancy Alar, a retired information technology worker who had her house in Cottage Grove scanned for the project. “They were so solicitous. We were treated like we were royalty. They were so careful to not be intrusive.”
Alar found out about the project because she’d organized a trip for a group of families with autistic children to Wisconsin Institutes of Discovery in December 2013. While there, she visited the virtual home and was fascinated. She spoke with Casper about the possibility of having her own home scanned.
Alar, a former computer programmer and information technology manager, enjoys science, as does her husband.
“Part of me wanted to say, ‘I’m a scientist, too,’ and roll up my sleeves and work with them on this project,” she said.
Researchers go to great lengths to protect the confidentiality of the people whose homes are scanned. They advise residents to move family photos, awards, certificates and other identifying materials, though their equipment also allows them to digitally erase such things after scanning.
Alar said the scanning was done with a camera like no camera she’d ever seen before. It sat in the middle of a room and rotated very slowly like the hand of a clock. Alar and her family had to be outside each room while it was being scanned. They also had to keep the family’s two dogs and one cat outside the room.
The work took place over the course of three days. Alar also sat for an interview related to medications and other aspects of home health care.
“They asked really detailed questions,” she said. “They wanted to know exactly how I put pills in my pill box and how I took them out.”
During her visit to the Wisconsin Institutes of Discovery, Alar found the vizHOME exhibit “absolutely fascinating.”
“It’s a 10-foot-by-10-foot plain box,” she said. “Then you put the goggles on and you weren’t in the box anymore, you were in this apartment.”
