Two OPAIC Graduate Diploma in Information Technology students, Konstantin Emanov and Andrej Hlasnik, are working on a Virtual Reality for Mental Health project.

Nilufar Baghaei from the IT team and Management Head of Department Lehan Stemmet are supervising the project.

The team have published the initial idea in prestigious IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality conference (ISMAR 2019, http://www.ismar19.org/) and the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2020, https://chi2020.acm.org/), both ranked A*. 

The project is in collaboration with the University of Auckland, MidCentral DHB, Unitec Institute of Technology and Media Design School.

The ultimate goal is to develop a VR app that can be used by mental health professionals across the country to increase self-compassion in young people with depression.