Training Magazine - October 2007 - (Page 41) SPECIAL SECTION and residents use him and other avatars to participate in a detailed, 3-D simulation of a combat support hospital that treats wounded soldiers in a battle area. This simulation, developed by simulation company Virtual Heroes in Research Triangle Park, NC, is similar to other video games such as World of Warcraft, which is played online by thousands of gamers all over the world. The nurse or intern who is going through this simulation essentially is playing a game on a computer screen, where the chosen avatar makes certain decisions about a patient’s care based on the symptoms the patient displays. Because the simulation is intended to improve trainees’ teamwork and communication, more than one person is involved in care decisions and execution, and the two avatars talk to each other by way of instant messaging or voice-over-Internet-protocol (VoIP). Because the whole thing is conducted online, participants can be in different buildings, different cities, or even different countries. These imitations of reality solve several problems that those in charge of training everywhere have faced for a long time. How do you put trainees in a situation they’ll have to deal with regularly and let them learn, without allowing them to do harm? How do you get them to try and fail so they learn without feeling their mistakes are observed by their colleagues and superiors? Especially when the training is complex and difficult, how do you give participants that real-life feeling but still get the training done for everyone? “We used to use health-care simulators in the form of plastic mannequins, which are computercontrolled to display certain symptoms so health-care workers can practice on them,” says Jeffrey Taekman, assistant dean for educational technology and the director of the Human Simulation and Patient Safety Center at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, NC. “But when you need to train many people, your personnel and infrastructure costs go up—these mannequins can run from $30,000 to $300,000.” The simulation project described at the beginning of this article is a joint effort among Virtual Heroes, Duke University Medical Center, and the Army. The Telemedicine and Advanced Technologies Research Center, a division of the United States Army Medical Research & Materiel Command, funded the development of a prototype simulation to study whether gaming environments are effective places to train health-care workers, especially first responders. The simulation is scheduled to go live as this issue goes to press; the prototype is the first stage of a research project that will compare the results of training medical personnel with the game and by traditional means. A SECOND LIFE? The Duke Medical Center/Virtual Heroes project is typical of efforts to use virtual reality for training. Many companies and nonprofits are just starting to dip their toes in the virtual pool, trying out prototypes or pilot projects to see whether virtual reality might be an effective training tool. The health-care industry has been a solid pioneer in virtual reality, and many hospitals and first responder organizations (such as Duke Medical Center) have been exploring its possibilities. Given the need to protect real patients from the learning process of health-care workers, virtual worlds have made sense in that arena for a long time. For the record, this isn’t the holodeck on Star Trek: Next Generation. We’re not talking about an employee who puts on a helmet and experiences the total-immersion virtual reality environment. The virtual worlds these companies and agencies are using are 3-D representations of particular realities, but for now participants only experience these worlds on a computer screen. But the increasing sophistication of computer-simulated realities makes these worlds seem pretty darn real. But don’t take our word for it. One way to experience exactly what we’re talking about is to create an account at Second Life. Second Life is a virtual world maintained by San Franciscobased Linden Lab. Anyone can create an account w w w. t r a i n i n g m a g . c o m t r a i n i n g OCTOBER 2007 | 41 http://www.trainingmag.com
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