Published: 2008.03.07

You walk into an apartment scattered with crack pipes, empty bottles and cigarette butts. The walls are smoke-stained, the shades are closed and it’s dark. But it’s not so dark that you can’t see a couple of glaze-eyed folks shooting-up in the corner. One of them approaches you and asks, “Want a hit?”

Take a breath. Think about how you feel being asked this question. Consider the bottles and pipes and the people getting high. Think about how inclined you are to reply “yes” or “no.” Now, step away from the screen, write down your response and resume life in the real world, because the situation wasn’t real.  It was a virtual world in “Second Life.”

Chris Culbertson, an Interdepartmental Program Neuroscience graduate student, is using that virtual world to try to find the most effective treatments for people addicted to methamphetamines. The project — being done at the Jane & Terry Semel Institute for Neuroscience & Behavior — is under the mentorship of Dr. Thomas Newton and Richard De La Garza. Other partners on the innovative project are Neuroscience, Psychiatry, Academic Technology Services and the Experiential Technologies Centers. Itay Zaharovits of the ETC has been a main contributor in creating the virtual environment that features in Second Life.

The goal of the project is to create an interactive platform that provides a safe way to explore addiction in a controlled, yet realistic environment. The project is one of the first experiments to merge an online social platform with medical research. By incorporating a popular mechanism with pioneering scholarly study, the team may transform the future of medical testing for addiction.

Beginning as a social networking tool that can be imagined as a mix of MySpace and the Sims (a popular strategic life-simulation computer game where the player controls the daily activities of a virtual person), Second Life has become more than a platform for online socializing. The activities of everyday life are mirrored in Second Life, a simulated community that is growing in size and socioeconomic promise. Members are called “residents” and choose a cyber-person to represent themselves. These cyber-persons are known as avatars.

Each avatar is personally designed and can look however the resident chooses. Once in the virtual world, residents move freely between different locales, socialize with fellow residents, go shopping and buy land to build their homes.

For the project, the team created two physically distinct environments in Second Life. One is a neutral — or clean — apartment that acts as the control environment. The other is a methamphetamine user’s apartment. Although the layouts of both apartments are the same, they look different because of what’s in each room. The neutral apartment is a modern, clean and empty space. In contrast, the user apartment is dirty, dark and full of visual cues meant to stimulate the subject’s cravings for methamphetamines.

Each user who goes into the Second Life environment experiences the scene from a first-person point of view and controls his avatar’s actions like in a video game. A mobile, physical kiosk with a 32-inch monitor, video game controller and surround sound audio system was constructed to house the program for trial in clinical tests.

The early studies will examine and compare how non-drug users react to the different settings.

During testing, the participants encounter multiple characters engaged in different forms of drug use as well as visual cues. Using cues to measure drug cravings that are stimulated from inanimate objects, such as a glass pipe and lighter, as well as animate scenes — avatars smoking methamphetamine — the test subject’s first response will be monitored for physiological and subjective changes.

Subjects will respond to questions during and after each exposure through a survey that evaluates the responses on a scale of 0-10. Differences between conditions will be closely analyzed for insight into the habits of methamphetamine users, with the hope of using that information in future treatment methods.

Visit the Experiental Technologies Center site for more information.