Barrett, The Honors College Thesis/Creative Project Collection

For my thesis project, I chose to create a film about a group of revolutionary technologies that utilize transcranial and transcutaneous electrostimulation to stimulate mental and physical wellbeing. The transcranial technology is called TESA-HB, and the transcutaneous technology is called MindVybe. Despite its relative novelty as a medical device, this technology has already been used for a number of different treatment purposes with a wide range of positive results, ranging from bringing light back into the life of a suicidal teenage boy to allowing an RSD stricken woman to live her lifelong dream of dancing down the aisle at her wedding. It’s an incredible innovation developed by incredible people who are driven by a healing-first philosophy that always puts patient before profit, even when the odds seem stacked against them. Knowing that such brilliant, genuine people have invested so much time, money, knowledge, and dedication into a device that has helped so many people, and can help many more moving forward, made this an easy choice as the subject for my creative project.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the passing of Title IX, a piece of legislation which aims for dismantling gender discrimination. Even with such actions females, especially Black females are not proportionally represented in the world of sports. Due to this phenomenon, a study was funded by the Global Sport Institute to look at barriers for Black Women and Girls sport participation. Focus groups and interviews were used to gather data. They utilized a semi-structured approach using open-ended questions, and were recorded and later transcribed. After a secondary data analysis was performed on the focus group and interview transcripts it was found that community views and resources play an important role in the sports participation for Black girls and women. The topics of legislation history, schools, resources, finances, access, and media views were further researched in order to understand their impact on Black girls and women. A public service announcement (PSA) video was created in order to communicate these findings in a more accessible and modern way. The goal of the PSA video is to not only educate the public about this problem concerning Black girls and women but to also empower and encourage communities to fix it.

There are numerous possibilities for virtual reality (VR) to improve upon the dissemination of information in several professional fields. Virtual reality has the capacity to be a useful tool in the judicial system related to its use in the presentation of evidence to juries and other persons. Crime scenes are a crucial part of an investigation but are difficult to present to a jury. This experiment proposes an investigation to study the difference in the emotional impact of showing jurors an immersive virtual reality representation of a crime scene compared to traditional crime scene photos and the subsequent impact that the VR crime scene tour has on juror decision making. Participants will be randomly assigned to either a 3D VR recreation of a crime scene or be presented with crime scene photos. User responses will then be collected. The following study proposes a prototype for the recreation of a crime scene in VR using the real-world children of Darlie Routier murder case study.