Instructors can deliver hands-on training to multiple students at once via multi-user classrooms.
When it comes to training for a specific profession, nothing beats good old-fashioned hands-on experience. This is especially true for those in the medical field, where performing actual medical tasks under the watchful eyes of a physician with years of experience is a crucial part of the training process.
Now, with COVID-19 forcing a rethink in in-person training procedures, medical education platform FundamentalVR is pioneering a new way for students to get that hands-on learning through VR, where they’re able to fail forward without the risk of any real-world consequences.
Their Fundamental Surgery platform, which also uses HaptX technology to provide realistic haptic feedback during a VR simulation, lets you have that important “hands-on” training that looks and feels real, almost as if you were standing in the operating room. The experience also replicates the feeling of holding surgical tools and cutting into human tissue that is accurate within sub millimeters.
Education experts also recognize the importance of being in a classroom environment with other students. But with the COVID-19 pandemic making that difficult for all learning environments, FundamentalVR needed to come up with a way to bridge that training gap.
What they came up with was Teaching Space, an unlimited multi-user virtual classroom designed to help medical schools around the world who’ve been impacted by the pandemic; a virtual space where they’re able to get that crucial hands-on training while working other students in a collaborative virtual environment.
COVID-19 has presented big challenges in the medical field when it comes to surgical training. In many cases, it has completely disrupted traditional training programs, which have always relied on actual face-to-face classroom environments. Zoom and Skype conferencing do provide alternative learning environments, but they’re limited. 2D platforms can’t fully replace the teaching and learning opportunities offered by in-class training.
This new VR learning space provides a safe environment for instructors to meet with trainees, no matter where they are located.
The virtual classroom environment includes a virtual whiteboard that instructors can use to present additional notes as they discuss procedures with their class. From there you can hop on over to Fundamental Surgery’s virtual operating room where you can run demos of surgeries and get even more hands-on experience.
In an official press release, Peter Rainger, Chief Learning Officer at FundamentalVR said, “Our new Teaching Space, which provides a collaborative environment for surgical education in VR, allows residents and KOLs from across the globe to come together for teaching sessions, to review cases and share their knowledge and skills,” adding, “In our new Teaching Space, I can simply pick up a pen and draw out concepts on a whiteboard and allow trainees to annotate and write comments, all in real-time,whilst talking as if we were in the same room. The possibilities for this new flexible teaching space in the future are endless!”
Think of FundamentalVR’s medical training system as a ‘flight simulator’ for both medical students and their instructors. If you’re going to make a mistake, this is the environment to do it. Because the experience is fully immersive—using realistic audio, video, and haptic feedback—the emotions that you experience are real.
This is the type of experience you need to become a better surgeon. Through this new update, medical students around the globe will be able to continue their education without having to worry about the ongoing pandemic.
Teaching Space is available now to current Fundamental Surgery customers at no additional cost.
You can learn more about FundamentalVR’s work here.
Image Credit: FundamentalVR
