VR Museum — Healthcare

A Virtual Reality (Virtual Reality) tour in a digital museum about VR in healthcare. Built as a part of Udacity VR development course.

Google Drive: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/174JLk05kT-JtUDJ_78JLPVP6_VYzPwdu
Old versions in GitHub: https://github.com/bethirahul/The-museum

Built using:
‘Unity’ game engine (v2017.2.1f1) on Windows 10 machine
C# scripting language
‘Google Virtual Reality’ (GVR) SDK package for Unity (v1.110.0)
- with ‘Resonance Audio’
An android (v6.0.1) OS device with Google VR glasses
Unity Asset Store for some free objects (furniture)
Autodesk 3DS Max for curved screens
iTween Unity package (v2.0.8)

Introduction

VR is being used in many fields. Out of all ,the most important is the healthcare. VR is widely used in many aspects of this field. Top 5 uses of VR is described in this project using the help of videos (YouTube) and photos.

Screen Capture from Unity Editor

How is it built?

Planning and research were the most important steps in building this project. How and what content should go into the project was also a task. How-ever, based on peer-reviews and iterations at each step helped it shape better.

Persona (Target audience)

An anesthesiologist named Ravi.

Ravi is a 50 year old. He is a doctor with specialization in anesthesiology. His role is vital in patients initial diagnosis to recovery in a surgery. He is a very busy man with schedules in many hospitals during a week. Even in his busy schedule he likes to use technology to his advantage to make his things easier and better.

Goals

Three major goals

1. To help understand how VR is being used in fields related to the persona.
2. Moderate animations and good color to make the topic interesting
3. Comfortable mode in VR.

Sketches (Museum plan)

Conceptual sketches were created as a foundation for designing the game.

Museum plan

From the above sketch, an approximate plan was created in Unity with the help of assets from Asset Store and building some using Autodesk 3DS Max and exporting into Unity.

Here are some of the screenshots in the process of building the game.

Constructed beams, columns, floor and roof (hidden due to opposite normals)

Outer wall glasses and plants were added

Internal walls, furniture and lights were added

Stations were added

A station about Mental Health with a curved video screen including controls and images related to that station

User Testing

Many user tests were performed in this process to make things right.

1. After constructing the Pillars, columns and Floors to check the overall size of the Museum room. Adjustments were made accordingly. It was way smaller than expected. But was increased to optimal level.
2. Next was after constructing the Glass and Walls (stations). Adjustments were made to the station positions accordingly.
3. Added movement and background audio. Adjustments were made to the speed, lighting of the room and audio volume. Other objects like the plants and furniture were added and adjusted accordingly.
4. UI was added with instructions and controls for video player at the stations. Adjustments were made to the size of the video player and controls.

Content

Content is divided into 5 topics as planned.

1. Mental Health
2. Training
3. Surgery patients
4. Physical Health
5. Diagnosis

Mental Health covers a video how VR is being used to treat common fears and phobia we have on some things like looking down a tall building, etc. It may have not been possible in reality, but in VR, you can walk in your room and feel like walking on a rope between two mountains.

Training covers how VR is used to train other doctors in treating patients and in making a surgery. How one can look at the details of what he is doing as well as how other doctors can equally watch in VR and learn from that experience.

Surgery patients topic covers how VR helps the patients get an experience of a surgery. It helps some patients to see what it feels and looks like to be on the surgery bed and reduce their phobia and anxiety, which indirectly help stable the patient durin a surgery. This is very vital for an anesthesiologist, our persona.

Physical Health topic covers how VR helps people to get trained physically, like some people might not walk properly as a habit and have problems in their lives in the future. Some people who cannot go to places can also practice in VR to help their limbs recover soon. This is all covered in a TedTalk video.

Diagnosis — this is more related to the computers and VR. here a doctor can see all the 3D reports of patient in VR. The video demonstrates how we can see 3D reports in VR. It is best explained visually. Modern 3D scanners have enabled us to build better 3D images of our body. This is used in VR even during surgery.

User Testing is also done here to get feedback on the topic and images appropriate to each station. Topic were rearranged to have a better experience as not all videos collected were equally interesting and informative.

Major Hurdle

“Videos I collected needed to be imported into Unity with VP8 codec settings to show up on android device”

Videos which were imprted normally by copy paste were only working on my PC, but not in the android device. I had to manually override import setting for android and set the codec to VP8. H264 codec was also not working on my device. Moreover, audio was also not working on the device, but was working on my pc. This happened because the google resonance audio was included in Google VR SDK and we need not import it again as separate package. The Resonance Audio Source script was little different from that of the one which came with GVR. Removing all packages and re-importing one by one helped solve this issue.

Uploading to GitHub didn’t work for the few commits as the file size was more than 100MB for videos. So, I moved it to google drive.

Conclusion

It was good experience in researching about VR. I could understand how VR is so influential in many fields. Apart from it, implementing Videos was also interesting. Building the Museum was also a good experience. I got a good response from all the reviews. The game was comfortable and pleasant with interesting content.

Next Steps

Add more room at the back and make the videos more interesting by selecting different videos and also adding a slider to go back in the video. Implementing 360 videos with interaction. Playing videos from websites.

Additional Links

Google Drive: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/174JLk05kT-JtUDJ_78JLPVP6_VYzPwdu
Old versions in GitHub: https://github.com/bethirahul/The-museum
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rahulbethi