Blue dome

LOS ANGELES--As has been well-established since the start of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, service members returning home after being in combat are struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) at levels never seen in the American military before.

This manifests in many different ways, from violence to poor behavior to alcoholism to domestic abuse and even suicide. The military has been trying to figure out how to address the issue, but to date hasn't made enough progress.

At the University of Southern California's Institute for Creative Technologies, however, researchers have been developing a variety of systems designed to attack service members' PTSD. In large part, the institute has been working with various forms of virtual reality and virtual humans to help these combat veterans deal with what's happening to them and those around them.

As part of Road Trip 2012, CNET reporter Daniel Terdiman stopped in at the Institute for Creative Technologies to see some of the projects being worked on there.

This dome, known as Light Stage X, employs dozens of special cameras and hundreds of LEDs to scan people's faces in order to create extremely realistic virtual or animated human faces. The result is good enough for Hollywood -- and films like "Avatar" have adopted the technology. But it is also being put to use to help develop technology that the military can use in therapy for its troubled service members.