Pick your price and donate what you want to the Humble ‘Spring into VR’ Bundle and get 8 PC VR games including Borderlands 2 VR and Sairento if you commit at least $15. The deal is available for two weeks, until March 21.
Humble Bundle: Spring into VR
Humble Bundle is a charity-based bundle website in which you choose to donate however much you want. If you donate at least $1 then you get Detached, pay at least $14.67 to also get Star Trek: Bridge Crew, Surgeon Simulator: Experience Reality, Swords of Gurrah, and Espire 1: VR Operative, and if you pay at least $15 you also get Job Simulator, Sairento VR, and Borderlands 2 VR. That’s over $160 worth of PC VR games.
This is only the second PC VR-focused Humble Bundle and it’s a really solid collection of classics that all headset users should consider having in their library. The $15 price tag is a great deal for any one of the top tier games on offer here, so getting all eight really is a good bargain.
Just like all of the bundles, you get to choose where your money goes by splitting it up between the game publishers, the Stop AAPI Hate charity (or a different one of your choosing), and Humble itself as a company. You can divide your contribution up however you see fit, including all of it to just one source if you want.
When you buy a Humble Bundle you’re given a Steam key for each of the included games. If you get a key for a game you already have, you could give it away or give it over to a friend.
Find out more about this Bundle on the official page.
Regular VRFocus readers will be aware of our interest not just in the use of virtual reality (VR) as a means to entertain but also as a tool to educate and help the human condition. To that end we have as part of our features section “Your Virtual Health” which covers an array of topics relating to healthcare and the medical technology (medtech) industry as a whole. We’ve had discussions on how VR is being used to benefit mental health, how and why it affects the brain in series VR & The Mind and I even discussed my own thoughts on an unspoken issue of VR technology, namely how it is just not suitable for those suffering from more general sickness.
Our most regular series dealing with VR’s healthcare possibilities however is The VR Doctor, written by Dr. Raphael Olaiya. An NHS doctor and Director of Medigage Ltd, Dr. Olaiya with the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) on VR immersive training programmes for doctors and nurses.
Back in April Dr. Olaiya and Economics PHD fellow Nandor F Kiraly discussed the possibilities of how VR may influence healthcare and we’re able to bring you that discussion today, as well as a portion of Kiraly’s Creative Economies video essay which the interview takes place.
You can read Dr. Olaiya opinions and see the video clip below.
How do you think Virtual Reality will influence clinical skills simulation training for healthcare?
VR runs along a continuum, and further along that continuum involves haptics, motion sensing and even involving smells – all of these are senses that brings us to a deeper level of immersion and realism and currently lots of these technologies that are available to connect into the virtual reality experience – it’s just not connecting to the right markets, the tipping point hasnt been reached so to speak!
Right now we are talking about healthcare, so, coming back to the main question that you asked; number one I think VR in heathcare will be very useful. The main disadvantage of mannequin based simulation is that it’s not really as customizable as it needs to be, it’s variables which are very important to make the trainee adaptive, are often very fixed so, if we want to structure VR clinical skills simulation training to be as effective as possible then customisation of each very healthcare scenario he trainee is put in must be atleast slightly different otherwise it will seem artificial like a dejavu and another big factor is touch.
A program we have at the minute is basic life support, and as soon as people put on the headset and are in a hospital having to perform basic life support, the first thing they do is put their hands in front of them, to see if their hands are actually involved in the program; and in the first version we developed at Medigage there is no hand motion sensing, however it was still an effective learning tool when used alone or when supplementing physical manikin based training. Particularly through: 1) Increasing the accuracy and detail of how much the trainee retained of how to do the procedure itself. 2) Simulating the environmental emotional pressure or stress of having to carry out a medical procedure alone when new to the skill.
Haptics have different levels of realism, which make the VR experience more realistic. In standard non-VR manikin simulation based training you can touch a mannequin but it doesn’t feel at all real; a tool that most medical students in the western world have used for training, is the Advanced life support high fidelity manikin there are several companies that manufacture this and it costs between £40,000 – £100,000, which increases the realism and customisation of the simulation.
As haptics in VR become more sophisticated, adaptive and realistic, we do strongly believe it will bridge the gap needed to converting even the staunchest of VR sceptics and in healthcare there is a lot of them.
Social aspects – Working in a team an aspect of healthcare, which is crucially important and cannot be overlooked. A common misconception of course is that VR is a isolating, lonely and a solitary experience. VR infact allows us to be more connected than ever before imagine collaborative surgery where the operating room has a multidisciplinary team who are all working together simultaneously in a vr space from different countries or even continents.
These are all important factors that make the VR experience more effective as a learning tool.
Currently where is the technology right now?
It’s there, it just needs to be directed, and the right expertise is needed to develop it. It comes down to managing it and allowing it to be used – to make it so that is as effective as possible.
Would you agree with the following statement: “With the dropping prices of electronics and technologies, the training of practitioners via the use of VR will be better than current methods – such as doing the same training on carcases – from a cost effective standpoint?”
In the future I firmly100% beleive this. Its realizing how soon that is and when we should be investing more capital and finance in to it to speed up the process, because before we invest more finance into it, we have to be on the right track; currently there are a lots of different talented people and development companies going off in different directions, but there is no standard set guidelines (of the best way to do it). Before we start pushing things to replace what is already there -cadavers as you said – we need to come up with a gold standard. Medical education itself is a speciality itself, which is hundreds of years old, some of the great scientists had their take on it, and we are still developing it right now, so adding VR into the mix cannot be looked upon lightly.
First, we need to find the best way, and secondly push it in the right direction. Every step of the way we will need to conduct research to confirm that what we are on the right track, and only then can we start financing the transition towards a more VR based education system.
To answer your question – in terms of actual objective finances – a cutting edge advanced life support high fidelity mannequin room is around £100,000 for the full set, which normally is equipped with a two-way mirror, so that the clinical skills tutor can observe what the team are doing, and then you also need to calculate for the clinical skills tutor; their training, the effectiveness of their teaching methods, and their salary. With this simple example, we can already see that the costs are mounting up… But how do we replace that with virtual reality? First of all, virtual reality comes down to customizability, and implementing a level of artificial intelligence that would allow the virtual reality system to know factors such as what level of training the participant is at, and adapting the course to their needs. Then there is the actual hardware itself; anything that can be done with mannequins now can be adapted for virtual reality.
Financially, using virtual reality will allow the most elaborate simulations to be affordable by substituting the most expensive manikin based simulation hardware and other important elements for virtual assets instead. The most expensive part of VR development for VR sim training in healthcare will the touch feedback/haptics; of course manual dexterity and muscle memory development is a crutial part of simulation training and integration of this is the current factor that steeply increases the cost of VR sim training. Different medical skills require different amounts of emphasis on manual dexterity and muscle memory development for the trainee. The most expensive part of VR sim training is the touch feedback/haptics and how accurate it needs to be and this is the current decider of whether VR sim training will be more cost effective than high fidelity manikin training.
There is an interesting point you made Raphael, as with training of pilots, no amount of simulation is comparable to doing the real thing, as simulation do not factor in the human elements. In regards to medical studies, VR training would have to go hand in hand with hands on training, as well as work based training, though would you say that VR could prepare students for the real thing?
Yes, the individualism of the human experience and the nature of human beings is that nothing can really replace dealing with a human being, but of course we are comparing virtual reality to the golden standards( manikin based sim training) of clinical training without actually dealing with a patient – because when you are dealing with a patient you risk doing harm to said patient; for example when you are practicing taking blood from a patient – the first time you do it, the success rate is going to be much lower compared to the tenth time you do it, but in those ten times you may have failed numerous time, and you may have harmed the patients. Of course that is just a simple example, but take chest-drains; you can seriously injure a couple of people if you complete that wrong. You can practice on the mannequins, but what if we can increase the efficiency on that, as there is still that cross-over period. We have a motto in Medigage; “We are bridging the gap between clinical skills, classroom based training and real life Grade A clinical performance on human beings”. It’s about making that gap seamless as possible, so when a person moves on from all these technologically advanced training techniques onto a real human being, they should be as prepared as possible and the chance of failure is minimized. The human factor is a constant element which we can’t replace, but it’s all about bridging the gap through training.
Would you say the field of Medical VR can be considered a Creative Economy at its current state, as there is no golden standard? Everyone is trying to tackle the issue of creating something that will ultimately benefit the students, or very specific to specialisms like surgery or anaesthesia, and do you believe there will be a turning point once said golden standard is achieved where the creative process will be more boxed in and standardised?
One of the exciting things is that there is huge potential for the creative community and creatives themselves to be involved in designing the different methods of teaching through virtual reality for medical education and other domains as well. There is going to be a big input from the creative economy and we really need to capitalise on that, and to see all the different options, and eventually there will be some design techniques, user journey profiles, and ways of developing programs that are more effective for most people which will set the precedent, but at the same time since VR is so dynamic it will allow for other design fundamentals and techniques to always have a place, as opposed to structuring medical education lectures which has a lot less scope to be different.
In a lecture, you have the lecturer themselves and a important variable is how dynamically can they connect with the audience of learners and then there is the lecture content itself, and the use of multimedia and applied interactivity. Let’s go back 200 years where the lecture was blackboard, very one-dimensional, and the structure was very rigid. As a learner you really had to have the learning style to benefit and the people whose personal style of learning was such were in a great position to learn, but the people who it didn’t, most likely fell off the academic ladder. Coming back to the question you asked, there will be a huge opportunity for the creative industry to get involved, and in my opinion that should be pushed and encouraged, and the medical education sector should allow that to happen, invest financial resources and really be open minded. And whilst some of the most effective ways will be more successful, become popular, and take off, there still will be opportunities for other innovative ways to be the optimal learning style for some students who learn differently. It’s going to be like nothing before because virtual reality is so dynamic.
I have an HTC Vive set up in my living room, and it was quite hilarious watching an actual surgeon (my father) play Surgeon Simulator, this made me think can’t we have an approved first aider training program that is like that game, but which would teach lifesaving skills for the public? From what I understand, first aid training costs precious resources like time and money, couldn’t that be conveyed through a video game at the fraction of the cost?
What your talking about is turning medical simulation training into a game, essentially gamification; it’s a wonderful technique that has been capitalized upon the business and management sectors to take advantage of our inclination as humans to want to track progress through whatever we are doing, to have rewards, and have feedback, and know how far we are to finish what we are on. These are just some factors of gamification and applying that to VR for medical education – for example first aid as you mentioned – is a fantastic opportunity, and that’s been one of the main aspects we wanted to involve in our programs at Medigage. Let’s talk about specifics and a example; the emergency first aid at work is a three-day course, each day takes six hours, so 18 hours with an assessment at the end. There is extra studying at home involved so let’s count 25 hours in all to be really competent in being first aider at work. That does not involve advanced life support. So that course itself can be very expensive, over a thousand pounds, it involves a qualified trainer, and the people who do the course have to stop what they are doing in their own professional lives, there is a lot of cost involved, and the people who are doing the course and their employers often do it reluctantly like a choir as it’s not really an enjoyable thing – often seen as just ticking a box. So if there was a way to make it more engaging, to gamify it, make it enjoyable, I think virtual reality has a massive opportunity there. And gamification is really the word we are looking for here; ways of gamification are very creative and there are ways to do it that haven’t even been exposed yet, as such gamification can never be forgotten when it comes to using virtual reality for medical education. And with Medigage our first product at medigage.co.uk is basic life support, its gamified.
What would you say are the risks in training medical professionals in virtual reality – if any?
100% there are risks with everything, and first risk is that what we have already talked about, which is going down the wrong track and spending lots of resources and finance in developing something that is not as effective as it could be. With virtual reality a lot of people who invest and develop see the financial incentive to commercialize VR, and of course that is a great massive opportunity, but at the same time you have to be cautious, methodical, systematic, and you can’t jump with both feet into the first idea that comes to mind, because it could jeopardise the wider perspective on VR for medical education.
Second risk is how technology is still developing, and relatively, compared to what we have now and what we had 20 years ago it looks advanced, but if you understand VR and how advanced it can be, you’ll see how we have relatively primitive technology in terms of where we could go; primitive as in its not adapted to our biology as humans. For example, there are our eyes, or how we process information; whether it will be healthy for our brains, we are not sure what health risks there are in the long term effects from multiple hours of looking at a screen which is literally centimetres away from your eye. Currently the research available on the negative health effects of VR – concentrating on the eyes – are quite positive in the sense that your eyes become used to how far the screen is from your eyes, and only people with pre-existing eye conditions would they be adversely affected; there is no real evidence to suggest that currently, but it needs to be further researched.
Social aspect is another risk that needs to be mentioned; how is VR medical education going to change the social aspect of medicine and healthcare? Healthcare itself relies a lot on teamwork, and it helps when people like each other, and are active team members. With VR we need to work as a team to ensure the social element, and putting emphasis on us working with each other for better patient care from the very beginning. There is no real technological limit stopping VR from becoming a social experience; there is a scope for multiple VR users to be in the same environment and for it to be as social as sitting in the same room together. But the risk is, that this is not focused on, so it needs to be given priority from the start, to make it a social experience as opposed to an isolating experience – like the image of a gamer in their parent’s basement whose life is all about that video game – and we don’t want that.
Let’s hypothetically say that VR medical training replaces the 5 years of university studies, and all your training comes from VR, is there a risk of desensitization?
There is a risk, a bonus, and an opportunity. All doctors have a risk to be desensitized to the original reason and motivation as to why they chose their profession. Every day they risk being subjected to very sad emotive situations, such as breaking sad news like cancer. And after a while we see that people who have to deal with that a lot sometimes develop an emotional struggle to really express their emotions and empathy that is needed to give for patient care whether it is to their family or the patient themselves. This has been an issue since the start of medicine and patient care. In virtual reality if someone completes training – for 5 years through a VR course – then what risk does that have in terms of desensitizing them? It takes decades to desensitize a doctor to the level where they are no longer sympathetic or empathic – so I don’t think that is a risk that comes to basic medical training. The opportunity of using VR is that because it’s still different from real life and anyone can see that difference and understand that it is for training purposes – it’s not the real thing, but they are bridging that gap. They can take the advantages of the training and limiting the disadvantages by recognizing that it is not real, their empathy can be preserved. We don’t know, this is just my experience talking as a health care professional, a doctor and as a virtual reality developer. You mentioned virtual reality courses replacing the primary medical degree, the 5-year degree, and I don’t think VR could ever replace the degree, from the way I am looking at it, there needs to be a balance between technology assisted learning and real life experience; all those elements which you can’t simulate in a virtual environment. But the fidelity and realism in virtual reality is a spectrum, and there are dynamic properties of this technology that we haven’t realised yet, due to it seeming impossible at this point in time. And such element could be a degree of realism which would allow for a complete replacement of the 5-year degree via virtual reality.
In one of your publications you stated that one of the biggest hurdles when it comes to virtual reality and medicine is lack of a robust artificial intelligence. Could you explain a bit more?
Artificial intelligence is a spectrum; it is a broad wide spectrum with a longitudinal quality. What I mean by that is AI can be as simple as a calculator if we look at its basic fundamentals. And at its sophisticated level it’s something which understands a situation – which is abstract – and can come up with an answer; like a human, or even completely unlike a human. It will have to come up with an answer though, which it can then use to learn more information, and it can learn by itself from its environment, and allow itself to adapt. Thus, allowing unlimited potential. This is still in a fairly primitive stage of development, especially its adaptiveness; the current most powerful artificial intelligent machine – from my understanding – is IBM Watson, very powerful and incredible machine being used for really fantastic feats in particularly the healthcare field, and the business field, and in big data. With healthcare particularly, a specific project in the US is to do with oncology ( study and treatment of cancer) looking at big data patterns with gene coding, and understanding what sort of genes give rise to cancer, and trying to detect that, deal with it, and treat it most effectively. Despite how amazing the AI is here, it is very specialised and not adaptive at all: It’s a AI has a super narrow and specific range.
My opinion is that artificial intelligence being used in VR simulation training will allow every clinical training environment to be different and adapt and respond and react to the trainee in a natural way best for learning effectiveness. It will allow for the trainee to vethinking on their feet and not have the disadvantages which we currently face with mannequins; if we are taking a blood sample from a mannequin you know exactly where the vein is, because you have done it a hundred times, and you can see the puncture sites that you and your colleagues have done. It’s not customizable; VR with artificial intelligence could present a different patient, with a different voice, a different sized arm, different coloured arm allowing randomisation. And that’s just customisation of visuals, pushing that further one could have branching levels of customisation, where by selecting a set of options the artificial intelligence will then customize and adapt to your learning situation making it as challenging – in order to make it as effective towards your development. That is a lot more complex.
For that level of complexity, you would need an enormous collection of data on patients. Wouldn’t that incur a level of risk regarding patient confidentiality, and making the AI a possible target for hacking?
In order to cover all variables, a lot of memory is needed, and this should be fine because the rate of digital memory(available) expansion is skyrocketing. I don’t think there is an issue with memory. What underpins this all is big data, masses and masses of petabytes is needed to assist artificial intelligence and virtual reality to keep on developing. At the core of it, what is needed is communication between what’s actually happening in the real life, such as a real life clinical statistics on what actually happens with patients and the AI engine of the simulation, this would allow the AI to learn live as more and more data is collected.
Regarding the security aspect of patient confidentiality being breached, it is a fundamental concept within the medical education domain to use patient data – very confidential information about patients– and use it for teaching purposes. As long as everyone understands that this data needs to be kept within the domain of medical education, and that only particular people who are learning to become better clinicians have access to them and patient identification information is completely anonymised, the security risk is a minimal risk.
The VR Doctor will return again soon to VRFocus with another discussion. Interested in Healthcare? Why not check out some of the other articles in the series.
My wife is an operating room nurse in her actual real life career. She spends her days wearing scrubs helping doctors deliver babies and perform often complex operation surgeries on all parts of the human body. Blood, guts, and tears sprinkle her floor and clothes while lives literally hang in the balance in her day-to-day occupation. I on the other hand wear goofy VR headsets and bash patients’ heads in with a hammer because it makes me laugh. We lead very different lives.
Surgeon Simulator: Experience Reality from Bossa Studios is a VR-based adaptation of the original Surgeon Simulator 2013, first released for flat monitor displays in 2013. A big part of its charm came from the wonky controls, silly premise, and absolutely ridiculous shenanigans that resulted from pairing an extremely serious occupation, such as being a surgeon, with the whimsical nature and dark humor of imprecise video game controls. It was hilarious and garnered a huge fanbase.
Naturally, once VR headsets hit the market, people wanted to experience it all over again, but this time from the immersive view of a VR headset. When the Vive launched, we got Surgeon Simulator VR: Meet the Medic, which was a short demo showing off the basic mechanics. Now, Surgeon Simulator: Experience Reality, is essentially the original 2013 game adapted to fit the controls and premise of the Meet the Medic demo. Depending on your sense of humor and expectations, it mostly works.
The entire game is played by picking up and using objects. The very first operation has you cutting into Bob, who lay opened up on the table, ready for business. He needs a heart transplant and the tools of destruction are spread out before you. You can pick up the saw and carve his ribs away one by one, or bash them in with a hammer to reach his insides more quickly. Grab a scalpel and cut away his organs to get deeper, or carefully maneuver the electric saw to remove those pesky arteries.
Make no doubt about it though: Surgeon Simulator: Experience Reality is an inherently flawed and conflicted game that struggles with core fundamentals that a VR game released at the end of 2016 probably shouldn’t struggle with. For starters, the tracking feels finicky on all three versions of the game (HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, and PS VR) and controls are imprecise and cumbersome pretty much across the board.
On the HTC Vive for example, you have to constantly press the side grip button and track pad together to properly grab things. It feels awkward and uncomfortable. On the PS VR, the camera loses tracking often and until recently the way it translated your hand movements with the Move controllers was essentially broken. Luckily, it’s since been updated to alleviate the main issues on Sony’s VR device.
Oddly, you don’t even need the Move controllers if you’re playing on the PS VR because the game also supports the Dualshock 4 gamepad since it can be tracked by the camera as well. Simply pick either left or right handed and you move the controller around just as you would the Move controller and use the triggers to open and close your hand. Unfortunately this limits you to only a single hand represented in the game. It doesn’t really feel appropriate or useful, but it’s better than not being able to play the game at all I suppose.
But a huge part of what makes Surgeon Simulator so appealing in the fist place is just how precise of a profession actually operating on people in real life should be. The juxtaposition of the gore and gratuitous blood with the completely shifty and unreliable nature of the controls will force even the most stone faced gamer to smile. That is, until you scream internally from frustration. I reach out to grab the saw, then drop it inside of Bob’s chest cavity because my fingers cramped and let go of the Vive wand’s grip button. I try to pick it up and accidentally sever his heart and rip out a lung on PS VR because the tracking skipped out. Blood spews everywhere, but the music keeps on clicking away in the background and Bob is completely unphased by it all. It’s funny, but tends to get old.
If you were a fan of Job Simulator, then you might be expecting something similar here given the title and premise, but it’s quite different. In Job Simulator, there are multiple occupations — Surgeon Simulator is obviously just one. Also in Owlchemy’s title, you are tasked with multiple small tasks throughout the course of each job, keeping you engaged and interacting with NPCs that offer witty commentary and humorous insights. In the case of Surgeon Simulator, you spend a few minutes performing each operation, but then you’re sent back to the desk to pick your next patient. That’s about it.
Final Score: 5/10 – Mediocre
The underlying premise behind Surgeon Simulator in virtual reality is likely enough to get people interested and there is certainly plenty of charm and silliness to keep people entertained for at least a little while. At the very least, it’s a hilarious way to show off the technology to someone with a good sense of humor. But ultimately there are too many debilitating blemishes, such as the poor controls, and lack of content to really make this an experience that stands out above the rest.
Read our Game Review Guidelines for more information on how we arrived at this score. You can purchase Surgeon Simulator: Experience Reality on Steam for Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, motion controllers required, for $19.99, or on the PSN Store for PlayStation VR also for $19.99.
Welcome back to another edition of VR vs. Your weekly feature from yours truly, in which I take on a subject, usually to do with something going on in the virtual reality (VR) industry or a topic that is presently under discussion (for whatever reason). Andd, through an array of words – sometimes even known to include a workable joke – I give you my personal take on things as an observer. Be that laying out some truths of the ‘hard’ or ‘home’ variety or just give you something to go think about you maybe have not previously.
However, something I introduced last month was a detour into the realm of ‘other news’. That’s stories we’ve just not covered here on VRFocus for one reason or another. Be they small minor updates, or stories that fell by the wayside due to time or other things coming along of a more urgent need to inform you. This quickfire barrage of news was, I was pleasantly surprised to note, actually quite popular with people as they learnt a lot of things in a short space of time and got to see how VR is changing things across quite a wide spectrum of industry.
Soooo, let’s make this a semi-regular thing shall we? As with last time these are things we’ve not covered for whatever reason, if you’ve seen the story on another new outlet or in a forum, great. But that’s not the point of the list.
We get things underway with a report on market growth. Now, we love these. There doesn’t seem to be a week goes by without us getting a couple of them. The latest from Technavio however focuses not on VR head-mounted displays (HMDs) but instead on VR gloves. The market for which is, according to the report set to expand with a CAGR (that’s a compound annual growth rate) of a pretty significant 82% over the course of this year through to 2020.Whilst the American and European markets are expected to be strong, the Asia-Pacific market is set to become the fastest growing section of the market by 2020, taking nearly 24.5% by 2020. With a CAGR of 126% and sales expected to reach $12.31 million (USD).
Speaking of the market: VR was listed as one of the top eighteen technologies set to shape the future of healthcare by analysts Frost & Sullivan in a new report that looks into just what the year 2025 will bring in terms of technological growth and application. Other technologies include things such as digital avatars, medical tricorders (yes, exactly like Star Trek) and advances in artificial intelligence (A.I). You can order a copy of Vision 2025 – Future of Healthcare here.
Over to the world of jobs in the industry itself, as we know from Sunday’s weekly visit to The VR Job Hub the merry-go-round of roles never stops. But, it’s always interesting when one company starts taking an interest in a specific group of staff at another company. Such is the case with Tesla, who recently acquired the services of Andrew Kim, a Senior Designer on Microsoft’s Hololens team and former member of the XBox One S design team who is now working as Lead Designer at Tesla. This in itself would not be strange however Tesla also acquired a member of the Hololens team last year in computer vision expert Yekeun Jeong. Will there be any more hires for Tesla with Hololens experience and what does it all mean? We’ll be keeping an eye on Tesla’s activities, certainly.
The PlayStation Experience 2016 livestream featured a number of livecast segments after the main event, one of which showcased EVE: Valkyrie courtesy of CCP Games’ Andrew Willans and Teddy Keefe. You can see the session in full below.
Then there was the one for Gran Turismo Sport, with PlayStation.Blog interviewing Kazunori Yamauchi.
If you wanted to see the ‘sizzle trailer’ produced for the event you can also see it here.
Did you know VLC can now handle 360 degree video clips and images? It’s true. At least in a new technical preview courtesy of the developers VideoLAN which utilises the technical skill of Giroptic to show off 360 content in a variety of ways. You can get it from here.
Virtalis have had a busy few months, with a number of different announcements. Their latest sees them enter into an agreement with Lockheed Martin to provide two new VR simulators to help with training helicopter pilots. Based on the company’s existing Helicopter Crew Reality System (HCR), which has been used as part of Virtalis’ historic dealings with VR training. If you think VR training is new, Virtalis has been working with the UK’s Royal Air Force (RAF) for almost two decades on VR helicopter training. That’s quite something.
Want to pet a cheetah? You can. At of all places Canberra Airport in Australia thanks to some augmented reality (AR) trickery introduced by APositive. As you might expect at an airport there’s a tourism connection here, with the installation promoting a visit to the National Zoo & Aquarium. Indeed the screen itself was partially funded by the government tot he tune of just under $250,000 (AUS). It all comes hot on the heels of a Star Wars: Rogue One takeover of Gatwick Airport in London that included a new 360 degree experience called Rogue One: Recon.
Speaking of AR, research from the University of Central Florida has shown that the technology employed in Google Glass, and, one presumes by extension similar wearables may not be better than natural vision in all ways. With the brain having to take in multiple things – the true vision and the vision being seen on top of that – the resultant multitasking needed can see a downgrade in your reaction time. Depending on what you’re doing that could have some potentially serious issues.”The idea here is to explore to what extent displayed secondary information might interfere with the primary task at hand, such as driving,” Mark Neider, of UCF explains. “What our data suggests is secondary information presented on a heads-up display is likely to interfere, and if that happens while driving, it may be distracting and dangerous.”
From Australia, to America and now on to China! Deepoon have revealed a new partnership which will see them bring their VR HMD, software and associated infrastructure to the Shanghai Oriental Pearl Tower. A building which is truly marvelous in its design.
Back to PlayStation Experience once more where we never got to see the trailer for Bossa Studios’ PlayStation VR title Surgeon Simulator ER. Will Nigel Burke hold to his oath to do no harm?Well… no. I mean have you seen Surgeon Simulator before?
And lastly, we covered the announcement of StarBlood Arena but the trailer itself was revealed a while afterwards. You can find more PlayStation VR action below.
That’s all for this time around. I’ll be back next week with the final VR vs. prior to Christmas and after that we’ve still got to look back over the course of the year and to what awaits us in 2017 ahead.
Operation is a classic board game where you use little tweezers to remove parts of the anatomy from a character as carefully as you can. It’s a simple game that can create incredibly tense moments that will be shattered by the loud buzz of a failed attempt. Virtual reality is paving the way for equally tense experiences where the stakes are raised a bit within the more realistic virtual spaces, and that’s what Surgeon Simulator: Experience Reality is doing. Bossa Studios isn’t making you wait very long to sterilize and start operating, either.
The PlayStation Experience saw the release of a handful of games during the first keynote and PS VR was not left out. Surgeon Simulator: ER is available right now for VR players to put on their gloves and start working on their patients. While Surgeon Simulator is more realistic than Operation, the game throws you into ridiculous, unsanitary dark humor. The game itself is essentially a physics sandbox and destruction simulator where you’re the surgeon destroying your workspace and the body before you, even in outer space and on an alien’s body.
You’re given a wealth of tools to pull teeth, cut out eyeballs, smash ribs, and more along with different modes to change the experience like trying to work in the dark or with no gravity. While this is a more humorous take, it wouldn’t be surprising to see a more serious use of a similar digital space to train students. YOU VR is a VR tool worth taking a look at to get an idea of an academic application of virtual reality as well.
Surgeon Simulator: ER is available right now on the PlayStation Network for $19.99 and will be coming to HTC Vive on December 5th.
Back in April Dr. Olaiya and Economics PHD fellow Nandor F Kiraly discussed the possibilities of how VR may influence healthcare and we’re able to bring you that discussion today, as well as a portion of Kiraly’s Creative Economies video essay which the interview takes place.
As haptics in VR become more sophisticated, adaptive and realistic, we do strongly believe it will bridge the gap needed to converting even the staunchest of VR sceptics and in healthcare there is a lot of them.
One of the exciting things is that there is huge potential for the creative community and creatives themselves to be involved in designing the different methods of teaching through virtual reality for medical education and other domains as well. There is going to be a big input from the creative economy and we really need to capitalise on that, and to see all the different options, and eventually there will be some design techniques, user journey profiles, and ways of developing programs that are more effective for most people which will set the precedent, but at the same time since VR is so dynamic it will allow for other design fundamentals and techniques to always have a place, as opposed to structuring medical education lectures which has a lot less scope to be different.
What your talking about is turning medical simulation training into a game, essentially gamification; it’s a wonderful technique that has been capitalized upon the business and management sectors to take advantage of our inclination as humans to want to track progress through whatever we are doing, to have rewards, and have feedback, and know how far we are to finish what we are on. These are just some factors of gamification and applying that to VR for medical education – for example first aid as you mentioned – is a fantastic opportunity, and that’s been one of the main aspects we wanted to involve in our programs at Medigage. Let’s talk about specifics and a example; the emergency first aid at work is a three-day course, each day takes six hours, so 18 hours with an assessment at the end. There is extra studying at home involved so let’s count 25 hours in all to be really competent in being first aider at work. That does not involve advanced life support. So that course itself can be very expensive, over a thousand pounds, it involves a qualified trainer, and the people who do the course have to stop what they are doing in their own professional lives, there is a lot of cost involved, and the people who are doing the course and their employers often do it reluctantly like a choir as it’s not really an enjoyable thing – often seen as just ticking a box. So if there was a way to make it more engaging, to gamify it, make it enjoyable, I think virtual reality has a massive opportunity there. And gamification is really the word we are looking for here; ways of gamification are very creative and there are ways to do it that haven’t even been exposed yet, as such gamification can never be forgotten when it comes to using virtual reality for medical education. And with Medigage our first product at 
Social aspect is another risk that needs to be mentioned; how is VR medical education going to change the social aspect of medicine and healthcare? Healthcare itself relies a lot on teamwork, and it helps when people like each other, and are active team members. With VR we need to work as a team to ensure the social element, and putting emphasis on us working with each other for better patient care from the very beginning. There is no real technological limit stopping VR from becoming a social experience; there is a scope for multiple VR users to be in the same environment and for it to be as social as sitting in the same room together. But the risk is, that this is not focused on, so it needs to be given priority from the start, to make it a social experience as opposed to an isolating experience – like the image of a gamer in their parent’s basement whose life is all about that video game – and we don’t want that.
My opinion is that artificial intelligence being used in VR simulation training will allow every clinical training environment to be different and adapt and respond and react to the trainee in a natural way best for learning effectiveness. It will allow for the trainee to vethinking on their feet and not have the disadvantages which we currently face with mannequins; if we are taking a blood sample from a mannequin you know exactly where the vein is, because you have done it a hundred times, and you can see the puncture sites that you and your colleagues have done. It’s not customizable; VR with artificial intelligence could present a different patient, with a different voice, a different sized arm, different coloured arm allowing randomisation. And that’s just customisation of visuals, pushing that further one could have branching levels of customisation, where by selecting a set of options the artificial intelligence will then customize and adapt to your learning situation making it as challenging – in order to make it as effective towards your development. That is a lot more complex.
