Virginia Tech® home

Senior uses personal experience to develop virtual look into sleep paralysis

Loading player for
Category: research Video duration: Senior uses personal experience to develop virtual look into sleep paralysis
Hokie Tariq Harrison woke from his sleep unable to move. His experience with sleep paralysis inspired the Creative Technologies major to help others understand the condition through virtual reality using University Libraries' Virtual Environments Studio.
[00:00:00] >> My name is Tariq Harrison. I'm a senior in the Creative Technologies major. I was trying to go to sleep and I eventually did sleep but the next thing I knew I was like opening my eyes again and I just felt like I couldn't move and there was something in my room with me that I couldn't run away from. [00:00:22] It happened, I'd probably say maybe like once a month for like a good six ro eight months. The project is basically just to get people to see sleep paralysis: What am I focused on, what am I hearing, what I'm staring at, what my focal point is. And I just decided to kind of recreate exactly like what I'm seeing which led to the name of the project which is, "What I see." When you explain it to people, they understand that it's scary but they don't really see it. [00:00:47] Like it's not something they can imagine unless they've experienced it themselves. As I learn more about it, I like, stopped fearing it as much and then it slowed down and I haven't had it for probably a good like six months or so. Exploring it to this degree, I'd never like use virtual reality besides playing a video game and so I figured if I can do this I might be able to like take either further and see where I can go from here.