Brain Surgery Recorded in VR a World First

VRS Brain SurgeryThere’s something fascinating about watching surgery videos. You can find academic and educational videos of just about every surgical procedure imaginable. Yes, if you have a weak stomach these videos can also be incredibly disturbing, but for those who are fascinated by biology and medical science easy access to videos such as these are an amazing opportunity to observe one of humanity’s greatest achievements.

Obviously these videos aren’t created just for curious people on the web. Students who are learning to be surgeons or other medical professionals use them to become intimately familiar with every aspect of an operation.

It’s Like Being There

Now for the first time ever, a professionally produced 360-degree video of a highly-invasive brain aneurysm operation has been created, as Wired reports. The video is incredibly-detailed and both lets the viewer see the actual operation up close, but also lets them look around the operating theater and watch what everyone on the surgical team are doing.

That’s pretty revolutionary from an educational standpoint, since few things are as complex as the intricate dance that each person in the surgical team performs over the hours it takes to complete a surgery. By having this 360-degree video everything is captured, so one can re-watch the footage over and over again whilst concentrating on something different each time

The Brainbook

The video was commissioned by an online education platform known as Brainbook. Brainbook is an educational platform that has made several videos aimed at educating young athletes about concussions. Many schools in the US have now made it mandatory that students who want to participate in sports should complete the brainbook concussion course and be certified. This helps students understand the signs, symptoms and long term effects of brain injury.

This has been an especially serious problem when it comes to American Football, which has an incredibly high rate of insidious brain injury. Interestingly, this is not the first time that brain injury and virtual reality have been mentioned in the same breath. A company SyncThink have been using VR to help early detection of concussions on the field. Something that we also reported on in the past.

Seeing New Worlds

This historic VR video is a great example of the strong impact that VR could have on education in general. Although it’s arguable whether 360-degree video should be seen as “VR”, the use of HMDs to view these videos along with its immersive qualities definitely puts it on the VR continuum. We can only hope that more opportunities to capture defining content such as this.

If you have the stomach for it, you can check out the video yourself right here. (Video Credit: Brainbook)

https://youtu.be/1H9qNaP0W9o

 

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