Immersive Technologies to Augment Anatomy Education

Abstract

Correctly defining the locations and positional relationships between anatomical structures requires learners to complete complex spatial mental transformations. Learners must ultimately be able to visualize structures and their relationships in order to apply anatomical concepts in practice. However, no group of students is homogeneous. Because students have varying levels of innate spatial ability, it is necessary to develop learning tools that provide scaffolding for individuals across this spectrum. To that end our multidisciplinary team is utilizing virtual reality technologies to address this need. Anatomy Builder VR is designed to encourage learning anatomy through exploration of 3Dimensional virtual skeletons. Learners start in a hub room and then choose to build either a human or canine skeleton. Novice learners start with introductory, guided lessons that demonstrate the following: 1) the use of directional nomenclature, 2) correct anatomical orientations, 3) basic movements of the joints of the thoracic limb, and 4) the proper names of each bone. Each lesson is designed with targeted learning outcomes and allows for exploration, practice of concepts, and assessment with immediate feedback. The application also has a sandbox component where learners can assemble skeletons with minimal guidance, and a game room that allows users to test their knowledge of osteology in a low stakes and fun environment. Our goal is to harness the unique features of immersive technology to help learners create their own accurate mental representations of the features and relationships of structures within the body. Overall feedback during interaction has been positive and the next phase of the study is to recruit undergraduate students and begin assessing the impact of using Anatomy Builder VR on visual‐spatial understanding.This abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2018 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal.