Augmented reality application for cockroach phobia therapy using everyday objects as marker substitute

Augmented reality (AR) technology is useful for treating several psychological problems, including phobias such as fear of flying, agoraphobia, claustrophobia, and phobia to insects and small animals. However, the currently existing applications for therapy of cockroach phobia that uses AR technology are still very dependent towards the presence of markers, which might lessen the feeling of being in an actual scenario from everyday lives. In this paper, we created a system that is able to use everyday objects as a replacement for markers. There are five main processes: getting the live streaming feed from camera, preprocessing in which adaptive threshold was used as the image processing method, extracting the center point of the objects, tracking the objects, and lastly, instantiating cockroaches randomly underneath the objects. The evaluation in this paper includes eight participants that are carefully selected based on their Fear of Spiders Questionnaire (FSQ) score that is translated into Indonesian and modified to accommodate cockroaches instead of spiders. The system is able to induce a small to medium level of anxiety on participants that are measured using Standard Unit of Discomfort scale (SUDs). Meanwhile, this application has a high score for the presence and reality judgment that are measured using Slater-Usoh-Steed Questionnaire (SUS).