Versatile mixed reality medical educational spaces; requirement analysis from expert users

Education has tapped into gaming to increase engagement and facilitate knowledge retention through experiential modalities. There have been several high technological intensity digital laboratories where learners are engaged with the subject matter through various activities. There are also several low intensity web-based solutions that familiarize learners with curriculum material but in less experientially intensive manners. A ubiquitous approach to highly impactful, low cost, high reusability gamified educational approach is a versatile mixed reality educational environment. Using prolific technologies such as inexpensive augmented reality (AR) headsets and a versatile low maintenance database (DB) back-ends, a real-world environment can be transformed with 3D graphics and audio to various educational spaces of highly impactful content. Such a simple implementation is presented here for virtual patients in medicine. A simple DB back-end supports a presentation front-end developed in Unity, utilizing the “vuforia”-mixed reality platform. Based on this implementation, future directions are explored.

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