Posts with tag rehabilitation

From Hollywood celebrities to the guy next door, millions of people have made World of Warcraft a part of their lives. How do you play WoW? We're giving each approach its own 15 Minutes of Fame.

The boss is enraging at 7% health and you're locked on target, hunched over your keyboard in a white-knuckled frenzy to squeeze every last drop of DPS from your avatar. Finally, the beast succumbs to your assault, and you sit back, exquisitely aware of the tension crumpling your neck and shoulders and radiating into your fingertips. As you pull in a deep, shuddering breath of relief, you wonder if perhaps it might be more natural to simply stand in front of your screen and show the computer, using gestures similar to those of your character, what to do.

Now, you can.

Dr. Skip Rizzo, associate director at the University of Southern California's Institute for Creative Technologies, is head of a research project that's applying the same kind of technology used in the Xbox Kinect to the World of Warcraft. The aim of the project, however, is not so much to turn games like WoW into virtual tarantellas of movement and gesture but to make games more accessible to disabled players and to open new avenues for rehabilitation, therapy and even education. The project's Flexible Action and Articulated Skeleton Toolkit (FAAST) middleware integrates full-body control with games and virtual reality applications, using tools like PrimeSensor and the Kinect on the OpenNI framework.

This Breakfast Topic has been brought to you by Seed, the Aol guest writer program that brings your words to WoW.com.

When my fiancée and I first met, we exchanged stories, talked about our career choices and what we've gone through over the years. After some time, WoW came up in our discussion. I explained to her how I first got started in WoW and how it has actually helped me quite a bit over the years. When I first started playing, I was recovering from a major surgery and was mostly confined to my house. You can only watch the same movies and read the same books so many times before you're bored with nothing to do. Enter WoW -- and everything changed.

All of a sudden, I had a connection to the outside world. Not only was I talking to people from all over the country, but I was also making myself think. Every move I made had a consequence to some degree, and much like everyone else, I learned early on that murlocs are not your friend. Fast-forward nine months and I was cleared for work and school. I went back to work and started my fall quarter refreshed and eager to learn. People were asking if I had really had surgery, because they couldn't tell a difference.

Unfortunately, I fell ill a year ago and was off work yet again. WoW was my saving grace (next to my fiancée, of course), and it helped me keep my head above water. I had a connection to the outside world, was able to talk to friends that lived hours away and wasn't sitting around the house bored out of my mind.