Virtual reality is a technology that can be used not only for gaming applications. To help medical professionals, the BioflightVR team decided to develop a medical VR education virtual reality project. Why did they choose medicine? The fact is they have excellent relations with the pharmaceutical industry, and their specialists have a relatively high level of medical qualification. It would seem that nothing could prevent them from developing a professional VR training platform for medical professionals. But it turned out to be not that easy.

The current situation

The BioflightVR team has attracted highly qualified medical professionals to develop the platform. They are experienced information technology developers, so they know all the nuances of developing VR products well. They faced a difficult problem – the inability to install the program on top of an existing platform. They had to bypass somehow the Oculus and HTC Vive platforms with the help of side-loading. Problems they faced:

  • Oculus Go offers an inconvenient side-loading. To select the necessary file, one should scroll through the long list of APK in “Unknown Sources.” There was an option – to download a preview of the app with subsequent distribution of such a tester to interested parties. Both decisions were inconvenient and unproductive.
  • Regarding HTC Vive, the situation was a little better – the executable file refers to a shortcut. But it was impossible to update otherwise than manually. It won’t be a problem for a specialist, but there are not many doctors well versed in computer technology.

The situation in the market

For example, Walmart orders an incredible amount of Oculus Go – 17,000 headsets. The company uses a unique corporate platform developed by STRIVR to train employees. It is perfect for Walmart. But what about other companies who want to implement VR education into medicine? STRIVR is not likely to update the same amount of Oculus Go. There must be another solution.

Proposed solution

Companies who used to work with Oculus and have no experience with HTC Vive Focus may suggest Oculus to develop an enterprise version based on Go or Quest. It should meet the needs of companies in various industries that need to use stand-alone VR training applications. The benefits:

  • The Enterprise application provides work in “kiosk” mode, supporting menu selection and transitions between the user and home screens.
  • The user does not need to register in the system for connecting the headset to his account.
  • Updating and automatic extraction of Home and App files are held from the corporate server.

This will be enough to simplify the work in virtual reality as much as possible – the user puts on a headset, selects the desired module in the menu, and starts training by pulling the trigger! The current “Unknown Sources” are entirely unnecessary for the learning process. We are sure that manufacturers of a wide variety of goods and services would use virtual reality training platforms in this format.

Unfortunately, Oculus distributes its applications exclusively through its own store so far. This can be explained by the desire to get maximum profit and to control the level of quality of the product. But what is acceptable for gaming and entertainment applications is utterly inappropriate for corporate training. One way forward is to apply to Enterprise Edition for the development of unique products for the pharmaceutical industry. It may be more expensive than for Oculus Go – the price can be discussed and economically justified. Maybe there are other ways to pay for applications using Enterprise Edition. Hopefully, Oculus will calculate the average statistical profit from each headset user and take a step towards manufacturers sooner or later. This will be mutually profitable.

Nanobot Medical is the pioneer in utilizing VR in medicine since the year 2015. We are glad to apply our knowledge in solving ever coming tasks and enrich the digital pharma marketing realm with new exciting projects.

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