VR in the healthcare design process

To make a 2D design into a 3D image, our only option used to be to visualise it in our mind’s eye, doing our best to make sense of the complex drawings and scales to see how we, and the things we need to use, would work within the given surroundings. The advent of Virtual Reality (VR) means we can cut out the middle man and walk straight into the design, try it out for size, move things around, experiment with different colours, without committing to a single thing until we have seen how we can work within it.

The obvious use for VR, and the most demonstrated example, is gaming. It may only be a virtual world, but it can feel very real – you only have to look at the people recoiling in terror from narrowly avoided shark attacks in their front room or boldly piloting the Starship Enterprise through cyberspace in Wigan. Increasingly popular pay-to-play VR arcades take the experience out of the living room and onto the next level, blending VR with real-world elements and allowing players to move untethered through a warehouse while battling virtual ghosts or zombies. 

However, virtual reality is much more than just a new form of entertainment. In the healthcare environment, VR is growing exponentially, being used right across the spectrum from directly treating patients to helping to design more efficient hospitals that facilitate better patient care, and we have only just begun to explore its potential. The variety of affordable headsets now available has made VR accessible to all. Certainly from a design point of view, it is an exciting time and embracing the many benefits VR offers can only be a good thing – an integrative and collaborate approach to planning spaces means everyone is more invested in both the process and the final product and VR becomes a place you are in, not just something you are watching.