VR has been an efficient solution for training in many industries. The virtually realistic natural in VR can also benefit in medical professions with the risk-free training approach. Diing cooperates with the medical centres in Taiwan and HTC and conducted several interactive prototypes to explore the training use cases in dental and pharmacy professions.
Dental Practices
The dental students enter the app in the beautiful replicated clinic room and choose a practice to start the training. In the clinic room, the patient closes her eyes when the user moves near, and the practices menu shows up on the tray in the dental chair.
There is yet no perfect input devices in VR. The Vive controllers are still too big for accurate procedures in dental practice. We decided to make a detour and made the mouth bigger during the exercises.
In the practice scene, students shall follow the guide to complete each step of the procedure. The system counts incorrect operations and displays the score sheet at the end of the training session.
I made the mock-up in Marquette and used the figures as the “wireframe” in VR flow document. The approach saves time to avoid making 3D figures in the 2D tool, and I can also test the interaction concept with those mock-ups.
Pharmacy
The pharmacy training program includes medicine collection practice. New pharmacists can improve their speed and accuracy with the program.
Full replica of every medicine can be an extremely resource-consuming workforce. We decided to make each medicine as a card with the photo. The approach also offers the opportunity to expand the drug database efficiently and replicate to other pharmacies. In face, We later made a sibling application for Chinese medicine with solely the drug database switch.
I roughly made the interaction set-ups in Unity before the R&D team start working on the project. I got used to SteamVR toolkit, and it gives me another useful skill to create and test new ideas quickly in 3D and VR applications.
