While mass market adoption of VR is still an open question, Immerse Medical is one of the more impressive practical use cases of virtual reality, simulating real world hospital scenarios in a multi-user VR environment -- both for training, and marketing. A spinoff of the social VR platform Immerse Creator from longtime metaverse developer Jon Brouchoud and his team at Arch Virtual, it was developed with the help of GE Healthcare and several top medical institutions.
“[W]e work with professional medical subject matter experts to test and develop these applications,” Jon tells me. “[W]e’re developing a variety of hands-on training scenarios, where learners are able to interact within the virtual medical environment, but also with an instructor who can join them remotely using our Immerse Collaborative multi-user feature. For medical product visualization, we're creating highly detailed and accurate representations of medical equipment and products that are used for sales and marketing, where potential buyers are able to interact with the product virtually."
The plaform's first application was built for Envision to help high school students understand medicine as a career choice, from a first hand perspective: "It enabled them to feel some of the responsibility of that profession - hearing the sounds, and feeling immersed in an operating room," as Jon puts it to me. "We have since started development on new projects for med students that will be quite a bit more comprehensive, but we're not able to disclose details of those projects yet."
While Immerse Medical is a multi-user environment, Jon isn't sure if something like this would be ideal for a social VR world like High Fidelity or Sansar:
"There's definitely no reason why these kinds of simulations couldn't be built with Sansar or HiFi," he tells me. "However, those platforms are certainly more geared toward public / social opportunities of VR, whereas these applications are smaller scale and private spaces, with fairly advanced back-end customization and programming requirements."
More about Immerse Medical on Arch Virtual.
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