Lustrum activity SIG AR/VR - XR technology in the spotlight: discover the endless possibilities!

By Tanja Nijboer, Kyliana van Hoorn, Eileen Bousché, Charlotte van de Wouw & Isa Willemsen

Brain damage can affect your motor or language skills, but a lot of people also experience disorders in their thinking functions, such as memory, attention or planning. To better predict the cognitive symptoms of people with brain injury and to explain current symptoms, new technological tools are very useful. In this research by Utrecht University, you therefore play several cognitive games with Virtual Reality glasses to map thinking functions in dynamic, challenging situations.

By Emanuel van Dongen & Antoinette Bakker

As a law student at UU, you get minimal opportunities during your studies to practice your pleading skills in a real courtroom. And yet such an authentic learning context could make an important contribution to learning how to plead, listen, respond, etc. At UU, it is possible for students to step into a virtual courtroom in their gowns during their studies to practise their pleading skills. For more information, click here.

By Vincent Jonker & Sylvia van Borkulo

Computational thinking is in high demand in education. There are also opportunities in mathematics class to apply the principles of computer science in solving mathematical problems. In this working group, you will be introduced to the Colette project (https://colette-project.eu/) in which several European partners are working on a collection of short assignments on the smartphone aimed at computational thinking. You will work on a series of assignments in which you will programme constructions of cubes on your smartphone, which you will then view using augmented reality (AR).

By Sophie Waasdorp

During the Monkey Reality Project, you get to be in the middle of a colony of Java monkeys through Virtual Reality glasses. How do we observe the behaviour of these monkeys? And what is involved? How do we train our BSc and MSc students to observe? These are questions that will be answered and more importantly experienced in this demonstration.

By Karin Valkenet

HoloLearn: An MR scenario training on movement-based care. Patients 'lying down in hospital' is a common phrase. However, bed rest is harmful, especially for vulnerable patients during hospitalisation. But how do you encourage an unmotivated patient to move? Or how can you still give your patients' exercise enough attention on a busy day? In HoloLearn, you will practice real-life scenarios with virtual patients.

By Tim Gallagher

Chemical laboratories are workplace environments where risks of injury and even fatality are always present. Laboratory workers, in academia and industry, are required to have proficient safety awareness in order to minimise risk to an acceptable level. However, investigation reports and reviews on laboratory accidents reveal that, due to lack of safety awareness and at-risk behaviour, unfortunate events still happen. Insufficient safety training is often identified as one of the causes for these accident, but we believe that the lack of a real life experience of risks and, at that point, immersive training comes into play. For this reason, researchers of the European Training Network CHARMING have collaborated to develop a laboratory safety training, called “VR LaboSafe Game”, that utilises Virtual Reality (VR) technology and serious game design to train the safety awareness and safety behaviour of laboratory workers. By using a VR head-mounted display, the trainees are fully immersed in a virtual laboratory performing realistic tasks that are otherwise too expensive or dangerous to replicate in real life. In this game, laboratory workers learn to accurately identify risks, minimise these risks and perform experiments safely. Unsafe behaviour and unresolved risks result in simulated consequences that trainees experience without real harm to themselves or others.

By Linda de Heer, Chris Hordijk en Jene Meulstee

These projects deal with the use of AR/VR/XR in the medical context. HeartMate is an application for the HoloLens to allow the patient, the patient's loved ones and healthcare staff to learn about everything important related to a supporting heart in a relaxed way. The PulmoVR (Medical VR) creates coloured 3D models of CT scans so surgeons can prepare, simulate and perform complex lung surgery.

By Beerend Hierck

Experience 3D learning via Augmented Reality within the veterinary medicine course. Students will be able to use an Augmented Reality headset to learn 3D anatomy. Research shows that this prepares students better than using a book for practice in which 3-dimensional relationships are very important for diagnosis and treatment. Could XR technology also help your students understand and solve complex 3D problems? Come experience it yourself and join us for a discussion on the added value of digital 3D technology (XR) for education.

By Kristi Jauregi & Silvia Canto

The bachelor programme 'Spanish language and culture' uses the possibilities of social virtual reality to connect students with students elsewhere in Europe. The VR application provides opportunities to practise the language in a safe place. For more information on this project, click here.

By Wolfgang Hurst, Ghazaleh Tanhaei; Boyu Xu & Lynda Hardman

Despite being a crucial part of the scientific process, reviewing large bodies of academic literature can be a tedious business. This is especially due to an ever-increasing number of publications. Is it thus time to start reviewing the literature in Augmented Reality? The DatAR team invites you to participate in the demo of a prototype AR system that supports neuroscientists in exploring scientific literature. We will demonstrate our approach by asking you to explore the literature for relations between brain regions and brain diseases with the help of AR widgets designed for this search process.

By Danza Onvlee & Anne-Petra Rozendal

Sterile VR is a scenario in which students learn to work in a sterile manner in a virtual lab. The app came about since there is limited lab availability and sterility is a trainable skill that has a big movement component. The presence, agency, and bodily involvement that VR offers are seen as the big added values and convinced us to utilize the technology.”

By Fiona Slond & Lars van der Planck

Students of the surgery assistant and nurse anaesthetist course have to learn how to prepare an OR for an operation and what tasks they have to perform in the process. They are now first given theory lessons on this topic after which they go directly into the OR. In the new educational set-up, students are prepared with the VR app Making OR Ready for Operation and can already practise the task in a virtual OR. The app is still under development and will be used in a teaching pilot in the vocational preparation period (BVP) in 2023.