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Three virtual reality companies have started to develop an online world for amputees with funding from the Army's Telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Center.
The Amputee Virtual Environment Support Space (AVESS) project will research the needs of soldiers who suffered wounds that resulted in amputation and establish protocols and prototypes for addressing those needs in a virtual environment.
Since 2001, more than a thousand troops have lost a limb in combat operations in Afghanistan or Iraq, and the new virtual environment will give them a place to practice skills that will help with their rehabilitation.
Unlike the open world of Second Life, which anyone can access, the amputee virtual world will be a closed community. But it will use virtual world technology developed by Second Life operator Linden Labs. ADL Co., which develops virtual worlds for health care providers, and Virtual Ability Inc., which helps disabled people use Second Life, also are AVESS partners.
Beth Haller, Ph.D., is Co-Director of the Global Alliance for Disability in Media and Entertainment (www.gadim.org). A former print journalist, she is a member of the Advisory Board for the National Center on Disability and Journalism (https://ncdj.org/). Haller is Professor Emerita in the Department of Mass Communication at Towson University in Maryland, USA. Haller is co-editor of the 2020 "Routledge Companion to Disability and Media" (with Gerard Goggin of University of Sydney & Katie Ellis of Curtin University, Australia). She is author of "Representing Disability in an Ableist World: Essays on Mass Media" (Advocado Press, 2010) and the author/editor of Byline of Hope: Collected Newspaper and Magazine Writing of Helen Keller (Advocado Press, 2015). She has been researching disability representation in mass media for 30+ years. She is adjunct faculty in the Disability Studies programs at the City University of New York (CUNY) and the University of Texas-Arlington.
From NextGov.com:
