Background
Albury Wodonga Health is the largest regional health service between Sydney and Melbourne, serving communities across north-east Victoria and southern New South Wales from campuses in the twin border cities of Albury and Wodonga.
The deployment
In March 2020 the health service ran a week of virtual reality education sessions for its nursing staff. 32 nurses took part, working through three-dimensional human anatomy in VR — including moving inside a model of the heart — rather than studying it from textbooks and flat diagrams. The sessions were facilitated on site by nursing educator Brad Chesham of Bundle of Rays, an Australian healthcare education business that delivers immersive learning to nurses and nursing students.
Hardware and software
Photography from the sessions shows a nurse wearing a tethered HTC Vive Pro headset and holding a pair of motion controllers, driving a PC-rendered real-time 3D anatomy application. A projector mirrored the headset view onto a screen so the rest of the group could follow along; the application presents body systems as a selectable menu, with the nervous system and brain on screen in the photograph alongside the cardiac content described in the coverage.
The provider
Bundle of Rays was founded by Chesham, a critical care registered nurse who has worked in hospitals in Australia and the United Kingdom and served as a battlefield nurse in Afghanistan and Iraq. The business uses virtual and augmented reality platforms to deliver clinical skills and anatomy education to healthcare staff.
