Anatomy VR

Simple VR equipment to better learn knowledge about human body structure for medical beginners.

Team Member

Zhaoyue Sun

Bige Wang

My Role

Concept Design

UX research

Usability testing

Create module

Coding in Unity

Project Time

3 months

Tools

Unity

Cinema 4D

Visual Studio

Xcode

Miro

Canva

What is Anatomy VR ?

Simple VR equipment to better learn knowledge about human body structure for medical beginners.

With more interesting interactive modes to help entry-level learners memorize the human body structures more easily.

Design Aproach

Define Problems

Background research and competitor analyse

Identify target user and user needs

Prototyping

Usability testing and issues

Reflection

Background Research

Some key reasons about physical anatomy class

The Issue of Cadaver Shortage
Ethical, Religion, Legal Concerns
Lack of Donation Awareness

The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly affected education, particularly in human anatomy, by increasing the demand for online learning.

Research indicates that students utilizing virtual reality (VR) in their courses have outperformed those in traditional lab settings, highlighting VR's ability to enhance student interaction and engagement. To maximize its benefits, it's essential to explore optimal VR integration with various teaching methods in medical education.

Current VR market analysis related to anatomy

We compare several VR products currently on the market for understanding anatomy and human body structure, and compares their advantages and disadvantages to help analyze and discover potential opportunities.

Design Process

01. Target User

The target user group is focused on students studying in medical-related majors in Australia who use smart devices, ranging in age from 16 to 60 years old. Anatomy plays a fundamental role in understanding the structure of the human body.

From medicine to nursing, from physical therapy to radiologic science, almost all medical-related students need to learn anatomy. However, there are many existing obstacles that affect medical students to conduct anatomy experiments. VR anatomy can be seen as a supplement to actual operations, helping students understand the body's structure.

02. Design Concept

In view of the fact that our target users usually have long class hours, wearing a VR headset for a long time will cause discomfort such as dizziness. Moreover, there are a wide range of related majors that require studying the structure of the human body. Therefore, we put the design focus on all beginners who need to learn the anatomy of the human body.

Through google cardboard, to realize virtual reality, provide a fast, simple installation and low-cost learning materials for these entry-level learners learn human body structure. Whether it is for learners who need to learn more professional anatomy in the future, or for those who are unable to learn the structure of the human body in a more practical way, our design will provide a more immersive learning method to gain a more comprehensive preliminary understanding of the human body. And add more interesting interactive modes to help entry-level learners memorize the human body structures more easily.

LOW-COST

VIRTUAL REALITY

FAST

EASY INSTALLATION

GOOGLE CARDBOARD

03. Low-Fidelity

We use the prototype and the stroyboard to help with the VR experience test. The scene setting is mainly based on the anatomy classroom, simulating the situation that students learn in the anatomy classroom.

Lo-fi prototype demo

Preliminary Testing

Conducted preliminary user testing using lo-fi prototypes, and summarized some user feedback, suggestions for improvement.

For example, even if there is a complete background in the future, sufficient functional instructions or explanations must be considered to prevent users from getting lost in VR and affecting the learning effect, and the lighting in the classroom must be brighter, etc.

04. High-Fidelity and Usability Issues

In the Quiz mode, the original effect was to allow users to drag organs to the corresponding human body area. It was feasible executed in the simulator on the computer. However, in cardboard, it’s the first-person perspective, which means that the reticle of the camera is both the hand and the eye. In fact, it is not consistent with the physical structure of the human body. For example, in the real world, when a person holds something with his hands, the swing angle from point A to point B will be very large, but at the same distance, the angle at which the eyes move is very small. This situation causes the user to mistake their eyes for their hands when dragging objects, and moving at a large angle and too fast, causing the dragged objects to be lost, and ultimately the dragging fails.

To avoid affecting the overall user experience, we decided to disable the drag function during the experience process.

Anatomy VR

Future Works

Diverse VR interactions: Implement a variety of interaction methods and ensure compatibility with different VR devices. For example, by pairing with a controller, users can drag and drop organs, and play matching games in Quiz mode.

Improve our VR equipment: Such as hand controllers, to provide more interactive functions and more accurate hand positioning.

Different difficulty modes: Implement easy, medium and hard difficulty modes to cater to users with varying levels of expertise. We will add more detailed interaction modes for exploring anatomical structures such as bones, muscles, and others.

Timer, pause, continue enhancement: Add a timer function, pause function, and continue function in learn mode and quiz mode to enhance the user experience and improve the learning process.

Reflection

We chose to model using Cinema 4D (C4D) instead of creating models directly in Unity. Because Unity is a game engine that emphasizes interaction and game development. However, we encountered a material-related issue upon opening the models in Unity, as most of the materials had disappeared. We ultimately decided on the most reliable solution: importing each material in Unity. In hindsight, we should have considered the differences between the two software applications in terms of material formats and rendering methods.

What’s more, the rendering result on the phone is also different from the computer shown when we
testing. The image is not as delicate as I had hoped, and the colours get darker. And also, some factors such as room brightness, camera height, and moving speed can influence the user experience. It will still take several tests and adjustments if we want to get a more ideal result in the future.

Finally, the drag function in our project, after we have an in-depth understanding of the design principles of cardboard and actually compare the experience differences between cardboard and new VR devices, we learned some limitations of cardboard and how our project can develop in the future to supplement this function.