I don’t know you spent your Sunday night, but I can bet you were not doing the same thing of mine: I was exploring a cadaver lab in virtual reality.
I had been invited by Steve Grubbs, the CEO of VictoryXR, who some days before contacted me asking if I was interested in visiting the new VR cadaver lab his company was developing for Fisk University. I thought it was a creepy and weird idea (I hope this is not the same kind of dates that Steve proposes to girls), that’s why I obviously accepted. I mean, who doesn’t want to observe some cadavers on a Sunday evening?
Why a cadaver lab in VR?
Jokes apart, the project was pretty interesting. Medicine students have to learn the characteristics of the body and train themselves to do surgery, and the best way to do it is on a real body. That’s why it is fundamental for them to touch, examine, and train themselves on real corpses… this way when they’ll have to operate on a living person, they already know how a real body is made and they can perform better.
But real bodies are very expensive to find, and they are also pretty complicated to maintain and bury in the end. Talking about this with Steve, he pointed me to this reference about how it is complicated for a University to deal with real cadavers
Besides the educational advantages, going cadaverless is an economic decision for new programs. It costs several million dollars to build a cadaver laboratory, which requires a lot of space, as well as safety measures that meet legal regulations. And although cadavers are donated, medical schools still pay for preparation, maintenance and, eventually, burial. These costs are an even bigger challenge for schools in less wealthy nations, Young says. What is more, many countries still face a shortage of donations and rely on unclaimed bodies for dissection, according to a 2018 study.
Scientific American, October 1, 2019
The order of magnitude of the costs to own a cadaver lab is in the order of magnitude of millions of dollars. Not all Universities can afford that. There is at the moment a slightly better alternative, that is using ultra-realistic synthetic cadavers, that are also able to simulate some motions of the human body (e.g. the heart pumping), but the cost of each one of them is $60-100,000. This means that to own them a university must invest much money anyway.
We all know that virtual reality can replicate real objects pretty well, so VictoryXR had the idea of trying to reproduce a cadaver lab in virtual reality: apart from the fixed cost for the 3D elements, this laboratory would scale pretty well with the number of students and would need almost no maintenance cost. This is a very smart solution to make education more accessible for medicine students. Thanks to this, many more universities would be able to afford to have a virtual cadaver lab, even in non-wealthy countries. We always talk about VR being able to democratize education, and this is one bright example of how it can do that.
Fisk University, HTC VIVE, T-Mobile and VictoryXR launch 5G-Powered VR Human Cadaver Lab
The project of the cadaver lab has been actually a joint work of many institutions. Fisk University is the first university that exploits this virtual laboratory: this university had never been able to purchase cadavers for their high costs, and now it can compete with higher-rank universities thanks to these innovative projects. VictoryXR has provided the software, that is clearly based on the famous ENGAGE platform. ENGAGE has been chosen because it is the social VR space that is focused the most on education and offers better tools and better services for whoever wants to create social educational VR experiences. HTC Vive has provided Vive Focus 3 devices that will be used inside Fisk University to enter the virtual cadaver lab: Vive Focus 3 is one of the most advanced standalone headsets, and with its high resolution and FOV is able to provide a more realistic experience to the students (not to mention the fact that HTC is very good in offering good services to educational institutions). T-Mobile has installed its high-speed 5G network inside the Fisk University campus so that to offer a better experience to all the students connected together.
All made quite sense to me, with the exception of the 5G network: what is the purpose of a 5G network if the Vive Focus 3 can connect only over Wi-Fi? Bryan Fries, VP, Technology Ecosystem Development at T-Mobile, gave me this exhaustive answer:
T-Mobile’s Ultra-Capacity 5G network, which runs on our mid-band spectrum, is a critical enabler because of the throughput demand and responsiveness that 20 concurrent VR students require from the wireless network. Good quality WiFi can deliver an adequate experience for a few VR headsets. But serving a full classroom of 20 students carriers a much greater capacity demand profile, which is better served by 5G. As well, because the students are learning together, the latency of the serving network needs to be low enough to keep all students, and the instructor, in sync with one another. This is another attribute where T-Mobile 5G shines. Finally, the experience is able to be developed and rendered to a significantly higher level of detail when the capacity is available to support the extra bandwidth requirements. This can make the difference between seeing the veins and arteries in an organ, or not. For all these reasons – to provide the best student VR learning experience possible – the VR classroom at Fisk will be served over 5G, using a 5G mobile hotspot as a gateway for the devices to connect.
All these companies together are so able to provide all Fisk University students a shiny virtual cadaver lab within which to learn all together everything about the human body as if they had a real laboratory in their university.
My experience with it
As I’ve said before, I had the opportunity of entering the lab and test it by myself. Honestly, I had no expectations of big surprises: I know ENGAGE pretty well, and I expected the demo to be something like a person taking an organ outside of a cadaver with his own hand, watching it from all angles, and saying “this is the future of education!”. Actually, it was pretty interesting.
The tour guided by Steve was composed of three parts. In the first one, we found ourselves inside a room, and from the windows, we could see a 360 photo of the Fisk University, that was useful to create a bridge between the virtual campus and the real university: I found it a nice touch. Then on the table, there was a semi-transparent body with some visible organs inside. More than a cadaver, it looked like a 3D anatomical model. I was pretty disappointed: I mean, if I’m invited to see corpses, I want to go full creepy and see all the gore, not clean 3D models.
Steve and the people from Fisk, T-Mobile, and Vive started presenting the solution, then someone grabbed the 3D model of an organ, rotating it with his hand and saying that it was the future of education. I can’t say I wasn’t expecting this.
Then I was actually surprised by the teacher highlighting one of the superpowers of this VR lab: if you take an organ and make it incredibly big, scaling it in VR, you can actually enter into it and see how it is inside. If the organ has been modeled well, you can easily see it in all its tiniest details, and this is something that is impossible in real life.
The lab also had a tool that gave you info about every organ that you had in your hands. This way it is possible to discover the name and the characteristics of the organs the students don’t know.
Another cool thing was that there was a big screen in the room that showed the video stream of a virtual handheld camera. The teacher can so move the camera to frame some particular organs, or to show something about surgery, and all the students can see that on the big screen in the room. This can come in handy.
Then we switched to the second room, where there was a complete skeleton made with bones reconstructed with high quality and precision. The teacher took them in her hand (that’s the future of education) and explained to us the characteristics of some of the bones, then we made a game where we could compose the full body like a jigsaw using all the bones that were on another table (I guess this is the favorite game of all serial killers).
The third room was to teach us about the muscles. There was another body with all the bones and the muscles on them. We could remove the various muscles groups, take them in our hands and examine them from close. Since we were very serious people, I took the group of muscles of the eyes and put them on my face as if they were the mask of a superhero, while another guy took the abs and put them on his body and said “Look, I’ve big abs now!”. I guess that Fisk University will ban us forever after this performance. Yes, I am a terrible student.
After that, we had a little chat, then I removed the headset. At that point, I started wondering: should a metaverse of cadavers be called “cadaverse”?
Hands-on impressions
I had just a short demo with the virtual lab, and I think that it is a good start for Fisk University and VictoryXR. I don’t think that at the moment it can replace the real experience with a cadaver because you miss all the tactile sensations, the weight, and also the creep of having a real organ in your hands. But it can be a good substitute to start learning about the human body, to observe the organs in detail, to start getting confidence with having a bone or a part of the body of someone else in your hands. It could be able to offer a good course, and after that, maybe the students can have just a few final lessons with real corpses in another location. It is a good way of giving value to many medicine universities not only in the US but in the whole world, especially the ones that can’t afford to have real or synthetic cadavers for tests.
What impressed me the most is the potential that this solution can have in the future. There are things that VR can give to students that are hardly possible in real life. The fact that you can enter with your teacher inside an organ and examine it both at macro and micro level is one amazing thing for instance. The possibility of organizing minigames (like the puzzle) that are engaging and improve the learning efficiency via interactivity is something that VR enables and that would be too creepy to do in real life. The possibility of doing many simulated surgeries on the cadavers with the possibility of repeating every operation at no additional cost is another cool thing. Speaking with Steve and all the team, I understood there is the intention to pursue all of this, and I think this can be the real added value of the solution that Victory XR and Fisk University are proposing.
Technically speaking, it was the usual experience that you can have in ENGAGE, that is probably not the shiniest of the social VR platforms, but it does well its job in offering a learning environment that appears serious, and where the organizers have full control of what is happening in the room. Probably what should be investigated by Victory XR is the ability to increase the graphical fidelity of the experience (still not super-realistic) and also to find a way to give more tactile feedback to the users in the lab (maybe with dedicated gloves?) to increase the realism of the experience.
As I’ve said before, I think it’s a good first experience to give the students, and that should be improved in the upcoming times to make it the most adherent possible to a real cadaver experience with the plus of all the new possibilities that VR can offer. I came out satisfied from it.
The future plans
I enjoyed speaking with Steve about the present and future plans of Victory XR. He said to me that Fisk University is the first institution to use this shiny new cadaver lab, and it will be important to evaluate the feedback of the students. He is confident it is going to work well because the biology lab they have already created and that has similar functionalities with it has been already well-reviewed by students: they are usually very engaged by the lessons. I pushed him also to tell me a possible drawback of this solution, and he told me that because of VR fatigue, it is better not to have lessons longer than 45 minutes.
In the upcoming academic year, around 50 students should try this lab. And Fisk University is ready to double down on virtual reality: “Fisk is also rolling out a history class on the digital twin campus this fall as well. This is a demonstration project, but if it goes as well as Morehouse College, then it should be easy to expand it in the spring of ’22.” said Steve to me.
Victory XR is very bullish on VR for education: “We expect that every school with remote students will have a VR lab component within five years” forecasted Steve. With all the advantages it can give to universities, including offering a more effective learning experience with a much inferior operational cost, I think he stands correct. And I wish good luck to Steve Grubbs and all his team at VictoryXR for that.