Developed with SEDAPA funding from the National Institute on Drug Abuse

This web-based interactive 3D virtual experience will help students learn how smoking cigarettes changes the brain. Developed using virtual reality software that runs the Duke Immersive Virtual Environment (DiVE) , the program is completely interactive for use online by the general public, including high school students in biology, health education, or even neuroscience.

Travel into the avatar’s brain to the “reward pathway”. There, you will interact with nicotine molecules to learn how smoking changes receptors for nicotine on the neurons that provide pleasurable feelings. You’ll take a ride along the reward pathway..woo-hoo! It’s the next best thing to “being there”.

The interactive version of this program is no longer active due to the lack of a current 3DVIA plug-in.  Instead, a non-interactive can be accessed by watching a short movie from the perspective of a gamer already inside the DiVE (all interactivity has already been performed by a gamer inside the DiVE). The viewer sees the gamer’s actual interactions with objects.

The video: To see what a “gamer” is actually seeing and doing while using the program inside the DiVE, click here.