Eating disorders affect an estimated 9% of Americans — nearly 30 million people — and can impact a person’s eating behaviors and perceptions about food and their bodies. The UofL prototype technology, dubbed Awaken Emerse, helps users virtually face and overcome their associated fears, such as the fear of gaining weight.

“Research shows exposure treatment can be really effective in taking back control over these devastating and life-altering fears,” said Christina Ralph-Nearman, a assistant research professor, researcher and co-inventor of the technology. “Our virtual simulation allows people to do that in a safe way.”��

In a pilot study, Awaken Emerse — invented by Ralph-Nearman and researcher Cheri Levinson — was shown to be effective in helping participants face their fears of gaining weight. The new grant, $125,000 through the NEDA’s Feeding Hope Fund, will support work by the inventors, along with Andrew Karem of the J.B. Speed School of Engineering, to expand the platform to be more inclusive of all body types and sizes, ethnicities, races and gender identities and to further test outcomes in a clinical setting.����

“Eating disorders don’t just affect one type of person — there are a multitude of factors that can influence them,” said Levinson, associate professor and director of the Eating Anxiety Treatment (EAT) Lab. “Treatment and prevention options should reflect that full range of experience.”

The NEDA grant comes on the heels of some $11.5 million in funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to support Levinson’s work to better understand and address some of the most devastating effects of eating disorders. That research will investigate how eating disorders may develop in childhood and adolescence, their contribution to suicidal behaviors and how innovative personalized treatments, like VR simulation, may offer hope.

“Despite the high prevalence of eating disorders, there still aren’t many options for treatment and prevention,” she said. “This work will not only create new options by leveraging technology, but open previously unopened doors for treating people on a personal, individual level.”

Work to develop the VR technology has also been supported by the UofL Office of Research and Innovation’s intellectual property and new ventures teams. This includes patenting, coaching by entrepreneur-in-residence Alice Shade, and training and financial support through two innovation development programs: KYNETIC, focused on furthering biomedical technologies, and PRePARE, focused on technologies that address a health or societal problem resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I thought that if I could show the students exactly what I was trying to describe using 3D models, the students would have a better understanding from the start,” said Danielle Franco, associate professor in the Department of Chemistry. Franco was one of the first instructors to trial the technology with her class in fall 2022.����

The Delphi Center has capabilities to support extended reality (XR), which is the umbrella term for virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and mixed reality (MR). They currently support VR for interested instructors and hope to evolve into supporting AR and MR, too. With the Delphi Center’s XR headsets, instructors can create immersive environments that enable learners to explore and interact with content in an engaging way, such as virtually manipulating life-size molecules. In a post-session survey, the majority of students said XR helped them learn about chemistry and they felt more engaged in the XR session than they do in chemistry class when they do not use XR.��

XR technology is more than a buzzword. When implemented in sound pedagogical strategies, it is an exceptional tool for instruction used to engage and retain students, as well as assist in meeting learning outcomes. This technology can support learners to develop problem solving and critical thinking skills while facilitating a more engaging and enjoyable learning experience. XR also provides learners the opportunity to prepare for real-world experiences in a safe and controlled environment, allowing them to gain experience and confidence while simultaneously limiting distractions, such as cell phones, during the session.����

Jordan Gabbard and Lucian Rothe, professors of German in the Department of Classical and Modern Languages, used XR technology to create an experiential learning session for their students to interact as if they were walking the streets of a German city. This activity also provided equitable access to all students, removing barriers for students that may not be able to study abroad for financial reasons, family responsibilities or other factors.��

“VR/XR gives us the opportunity to create interactive and fully immersive environments for our students, and to allow our students to experience and be immersed in the sights and sounds of authentic, German-speaking locations,”��Gabbard and Rothe said. “These types of activities can’t be fully recreated in the traditional classroom, so access to XR technology really does give us new and unique learning tools to use with our students.”

The German students’ post-session survey results echoed the sentiments shared in Franco’s Chemistry class, agreeing that they felt it was a tool that assisted their learning and that they would like to use the XR equipment again in the future.����

This year, these instructors plan to continue utilizing XR activities in the Teaching Innovation Learning Lab (TILL). The Delphi Center is currently working with additional faculty who are looking to include innovative XR content in their different fields of study and welcome more instructors to use this tool.��

All UofL instructors who are interested in XR technologies, no matter their level of XR experience, are welcome to connect with the Delphi Center in pursuing XR teaching opportunities. The Delphi Center team offers one-on-one assistance with each instructor to provide resources and collaborate on effective XR activities that align with the instructor’s content. The Delphi Center continues to explore more opportunities with instructors such as XR content creation, workshops and possibly a Faculty Learning Community.��

The XR headsets are available for instructors to use in the TILL on the third floor of Ekstrom Library. Learn more about teaching with XR in the TILL and other opportunities within XR through the Delphi Center .����

For more information on XR and how it is impacting the way students learn, look for the summer 2023 issue of UofL Magazine out later this year.��

By Brooke Whitaker, Delphi Center

The program provides training and $50,000 to develop new, technology-backed startups. The UofL team, led by School of Medicine research scientist Matthew Neal, completed an intensive, two-month boot camp learning about commercialization, engaging with industry and talking to more than 100 potential customers.

Neal and his collaborators — co-technical leads Pavel Zahorik and Shae Morgan, both in the audiology department — are developing a virtual reality-based technology to help patients test different models and program their hearing aids, without leaving the comfort of the clinical setting.��

With this tool, audiologists could use a VR headset or a wide screen display to demonstrate how specific hearing aid models and settings would perform in different, realistic environments, such as a school, noisy restaurant, grocery store or church. The idea, Neal said, is to help patients find the right fit.

“It’s kind of like test-driving a new car and seeing how it performs in real-world conditions,” Neal said. “We want to help people choose the hearing aid and get it programmed specifically for the specific environments where they have trouble, and with virtual reality technologies, you can do that without leaving your audiologist’s office.”

According to the National Institutes of Health, one in eight Americans over the age of 12 have some degree of hearing loss and about 28.8 million adults could benefit from using hearing aids.

Following the I-Corps national program, the researchers now are developing a working prototype and considering various funding routes to continue research efforts and pursue commercialization of the technology. Their product development efforts are supported by business mentor Tendai Charasika, an Entrepreneur-in-Residence in the UofL Office of Research and Innovation.

The team is also in a research partnership with both the��Heuser��Hearing Institute, a not-for-profit hearing healthcare organization serving Kentuckiana, and Sonova, a hearing aid manufacturer.

“We are proud that our decades-long partnership with the University of Louisville to further the field of audiology with cutting-edge hearing healthcare technology has led to this recognition,” said House CEO Brett Bachmann.��“Congratulations��to Matthew Neal, Pavel Zahorik and Shae Morgan.

Teams must be nominated for the national I-Corps Teams bootcamp, and must first complete UofL’s regional I-Corps site program and , UofL’s product innovation bootcamp. UofL and partners recently received $15 million from the National Science Foundation to launch a new regional��NSF Mid-South��Innovation Corps��(I-Corps) Hub, one of only 10 across the U.S.

Neal’s team also received funding and coaching through UofL’s Pandemic-Related Product Acceleration & Responsive Entrepreneurship Program, or PRePARE, which partners UofL researchers with companies and members of the community to scale up innovative ideas addressing health, economic and societal issues caused by pandemics. The PRePARE program fostered the additional collaboration between UofL and Heuser Hearing Institute.��

“These programs support commercialization of the work being done by our researchers here at UofL,” said Jessica Sharon, UofL’s director of innovation programs. “We’re proud of Matthew and the team at the Heuser Hearing Institute, and their work to accelerate product development of this innovation that addresses unmet needs in the�� market and could help many people.”��

It had never been done before at that scale.

Nevertheless, out of that challenge arose quite a bit of ingenuity. Consider John T. Finch’s class in the College of ����ֱ�� and Human Development, for example. That class went beyond a 2D conference call experience when things went remote, and instead dove into the world of virtual reality.

Finch’s 18 pre-professional students who took the “Introduction to Reading and Language Arts: Writing Methods” course in the spring met via a combination of virtual reality technology not yet available to the public and Blackboard Collaborate Ultra.

What this means, exactly, is that students in Finch’s class joined via a Vive Focus Plus standalone virtual reality headset. Then, through that VR technology, students residing throughout Jefferson County and other adjacent counties could learn together in the same VR classroom. The classroom was designed specifically for this class by Vive.

The idea to go to a VR educational model came from Shannon Putnam, a PhD candidate and graduate assistant in the CEHD, who has been working with VR for over six years. Putnam was responsible for setting up the first VR elementary classroom back in 2017 at Cochran Elementary. That effort has since expanded to Portland Elementary and talks to implement the technology at another JCPS high school. In fact, her dissertation is concentrated on the use of virtual and mixed reality in education – perhaps a fortuitous focus area in a remote-only world incited by a pandemic with an uncertain end.

“Because of all the closures, multiple UofL students were not able to get that real-life experience of teaching a lesson with students. So, this VR opportunity was a fantastic way for them to be able to teach the lesson, get feedback and gain valuable experience that they would have otherwise been denied,” Putnam said. “This is an incredible boon for UofL and JCPS. Together we are leading the nation in innovation.”

Putnam said the technology they use is facilitated through a headset. Users simply put their headsets on, log in and join the class. There are no extra components besides the controllers, and it doesn’t have to be connected through a computer or via a mobile phone.

“It is basically like a mini computer on your head. When you put the headset on, the virtual environment is 360 degrees around you and you are now in what is called an ‘immersive virtual environment.’ You can use the controllers to actually interact with your virtual environment conducting different activities such as throwing footballs, waving to friends, playing carnival games, even performing medical procedures,” Putnam said.

Using the Sync platform, instructors have the option to choose from different locations, like clouds or the Golden Gate Bridge. For Finch’s class, Vive created a UofL-specific room.

Because of the speed at which UofL shifted to remote learning, this project had to be implemented quickly, including Finch himself having to learn how teach in a virtual environment. The technology required a minimal learning curve, however.

“Dr. Finch is now ‘a believer,’ as I like to say, and decided he would hold more classes in VR,” Putnam said.

As for his class, it included two different components. The first half, was Finch teaching like he normally would.

“Then the second half of the class was one of his students, Morgan Rhule, teaching a lesson just like she would have taught it in her third grade classroom,” Putnam explained.

Putnam said one of the most unique features of VR is that it allows users to do things they can’t do in the “real world.” Rhule’s lesson, for example, focused on five senses while reading a story about a lion. Whenever that lion roared in the book, a 3D, life-like lion appeared in the virtual space.

“For obvious reasons, you could never have a lion cub in a 3^rd grade classroom. You could show a picture or video, but it wouldn’t feel real. When Morgan was reading from the story in VR, a correctly-scaled, 3D lion appeared in the room, complete with animations and movements so students could physically see, feel and experience the lion,” Putnam said. “This helps to create a memory and connection to the material, which we know is critical for sustained learning.”

Putnam believes VR is a trend that will stick around long after the pandemic subsides. In fact, it’s been around since the 1970s, but is now starting to reach critical mass because costs have come down and because more companies, like UPS and Walmart, are using VR for�� things like employee training. COVID-19 has accelerated this trend as well, particularly in the medical field.

Putnam believes it’s a “game changer” and hopes to continue a career researching where and how VR can provide the greatest impact.��

“Technology has changed our world, in some cases for the positive, and in other cases for the negative,” Putnam said. “But if we as educators do not realize the power technology has, we are failing. Instead of trying to change the way our kids learn, we need to change the way we teach, and VR (whether people like it or even believe it) needs to be a critical component of that change.”

For those ready to take that step, a March 31 event at the Gheens Science Hall and Rauch Planetarium might be exactly what they are looking for.

A free, public event from 2-3 p.m. at the planetarium will feature two virtual-reality clips shown on the planetarium’s 55-foot, immersive dome:

• “” gives viewers a chance to experience a day in the life of a Kenyan girl as she copes with extreme poverty. The video shows the young girl as she travels vast distances to fetch water, gather wood and, after dark, walk to a nearby town so she will have lights to complete her school work.

• “” shows the exuberance of gay pride parades from around the world. The clip was first shown during a 2016 LGBTQ event in Louisville and was so popular attendees rated it as the best session of the conference.��

After the clips are shown, there will be a discussion about how to harness of the power of virtual reality film-making in the Louisville community.

The conversation will be facilitated by Aukram Burton, executive director of Kentucky Center for African American Heritage; Dean Otto, curator of film for the Speed Art Museum; Leo Osborne, founder of a video and digital communications firm; and Nathaniel Spencer, who runs a video services company and is a Louisville Film Commission advisory board member.