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For decades, the US Air Force has effectively used Virtual Reality (VR) simulations for training and orienting cadets to combat and operational flight activities.
VR Flight Simulation applications provide a cost-effective educational experience for new and experienced military pilots to learn, train, practice and demonstrate their ground and in-flight emergency management skills and capabilities.
In the General Aviation world, Microsoft's Flight Simulator application provides realistic immersive flight training experiences that deliver many of the same benefits associated with military and commercial flight virtual reality training, at a significantly reduced cost with wider availability.
As a former Firefighter, Emergency Medical Technician (EMT), Emergency Medical Services (EMS) Instructor and VR enthusiast, I was excited to learn about the VRpatientsTM application developed by Virtual Education Systems.
The VRpatients Web application is a cost-effective, no-coding-required, virtual and web-based educational training platform.
The VRpatients application empowers EMS educational content creators with tools to create and deploy patient care scenarios that can be used by Pre-hospital care providers to train, practice and demonstrate their proficiency in a realistic safe virtual environment.
VRpatients is an innovative physiologically based clinical training platform that immerses a healthcare provider or first responder into actual case scenarios, allowing them to interview, assess, diagnose, and treat patients in real-time.
Available through a web-based platform or an immersive clinical simulation experience complete with virtual reality goggles, VRpatients allows first responders and practitioners to test and expand their clinical skills and reduce the likelihood of clinical performance failure.
The web application enables users to interact with lifelike simulated patients in a variety of medical scenarios, providing an immersive learning environment that offers an unparalleled level of realism.
Providing highly realistic animations, the application gives users an interactive platform to explore the principles of patient assessment, triage, and management of trauma, medical, and environmental conditions.
Emergency Medical Technicians (EMTs), First Responders, and other Pre-hospital Care professionals can use the application to practice their skills in a safe and controlled environment, free from the risks associated with real-world scenarios.
Simulating real-world emergency medical care scenarios using a Virtual Reality application can be a fun and effective means of transferring valuable skills to prehospital care professionals.
The Quest 2 VR headset has a large presence in the consumer VR market space, with many users that use the headset for professional applications and education, training, and orientation use cases.
Gamifying the VRpatients Quest 2 application can be a fun, efficient and effective way to educate and train current EMS and pre-hospital care providers. Future generations of young adults dreaming of serving as emergency healthcare providers can also use a VRpatients Quest 2 to explore and learn about emergency medicine and first response management.
The Developer Mode on the Quest 2 store allows you to access and test pre-release versions of applications before they are officially released on the store. This feature is designed for developers and application test and evaluators to support testing pre-release applications before they are available for public release.
To make the pre-release version of the VRpatients application accessible in your Quest 2Meta Store application, you'll need to enable Developer Mode:
1. Download and install the Oculus app on your computer.
2. Open the Oculus app, and then click on "Settings" in the left-hand menu.
3. Click on the "General" tab, and then click on "Unknown Sources" to enable it.
4. Put on your Quest 2 headset and turn it on.
5. In the headset applications section, go to "Settings" and then "Device."
6. Scroll down to "Developer" and toggle on "Developer mode."
Once Developer Mode is enabled, the VRpatients application should display in the Meta store display. Click on the application to install it as you would install any other Quest 2 application.
I recently had an opportunity to experience a developer release of the VRpatients VR application for the Meta Quest 2 platform. Next up, I'll share my first impressions and tell you about some of the features and capabilities of the Quest 2 VRpatients application, in an upcoming column.
