Immersive Learning

With Immersive Learning, students can also physically hold and touch and talk to virtual humans as if they were physically in the same room. This ability to interact with medical learning content in a more meaningful and intuitive way empowers medical students to learn better and faster than traditional methods of representation.

Visit our Immersive Learning Space

Definitions and Uses

Immersive Learning refers to the use of Immersive techniques and/or technologies to facilitate learning. Techniques include the use of natural body movements such as physically walking around the real environment, using your real hands to manipulate virtual objects and using your voice to converse with real/virtual entities. Technologies range from gesture and touch-sensitive devices, to Mixed, Augmented and Virtual Reality headsets, to tracking devices such as motion-capture cameras and inertial sensing systems, to advanced graphical, sonic and Artificial Intelligence (A.I) software.

Immersive Learning is most useful for situations when and where tradition forms of instruction (such as words, pictures, videos, sounds) are ill-suited to represent the information to be learned. For example, a “push” or “pull” may traditionally be described using words, or depicted in a video with animations and sounds, but such content may be best learned by actually experiencing the physical forces of pushing and pulling. This is where Immersive Learning excels, by providing learners with not just the ability to see and hear the content, but also to touch, smell and taste it as well.

Project 1

Mixed Reality for Clinical Procedural Skills

Training in clinical procedures is a fundamental component of medical curricula and can range from simple tasks, such as taking vital signs, to complex tasks, such as the insertion of an endotracheal tube for intubation. While some of these procedures are observational, others are more performative. There is strong scientific evidence to suggest that physically performative topics are best learned by performing tasks physically.

Besides demonstrating competency in clinical procedural skills students must use these skills in-tandem with patient communication. In the classroom, students can practice patient communication with Simulated Patients (actors trained to portray patients), and their performances can be supervised by an instructor. However, classroom time may be limited and students may want to practice outside of the classroom at their own time.

This project aims to create a Mixed Reality system that can provide students with guided instruction and timely supervision in clinical procedural skills, with A.I. simulated patients, anytime, anywhere.

Project 2

Anatomy Learning in Virtual Reality

Embodied and Enactive Learning is a collection of learning theories that explore the role of bodily movement and enaction (or “acting out”) as learning aids. In the same that our brains use information collected from our five senses (seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching), Embodied and Enactive Learning posits that our brains can also learn from lesser studied sensory modalities such as body balance and action, as well as muscle movement and location. Such concepts are particularly valuable in the learning of human anatomy, which is the study of the structure of the human body. Most printed textbooks depict the body in 2D representations, even though the body is a 3D structure in our 3D world. While modern touch-screen devices have provided students with more intuitive ways of navigating through anatomical content, viewing and interacting with anatomical content on a flat screen still does not take advantage of our ability to learn from 3D interactions with the world because flat screens are still 2D interfaces.

Virtual Reality (VR) is a technology that enables students to interact with virtual anatomical structures using 3D interfaces. Instead of pressing a flat surface to move a virtual anatomical model, why not hold it with your hands the same way you would in the real world? Hence, this project seeks to explore the use of VR technology to help improve anatomy learning.

Immersive Learning

Immersive Learning

Definitions and Uses

Project 1

Mixed Reality for Clinical Procedural Skills

Project 2

Anatomy Learning in Virtual Reality

Browser not supported

Modern websites need modern browsers