U-M awards 6 XR projects under new initiative

March 23, 2020
Written By:
Laurel Thomas
Contact:
  • umichnews@umich.edu

U-M XR initiative logo

ANN ARBOR—A virtual reality chemotherapy simulation that helps train future medical professionals what to do when the drug leaks out of blood vessels and threatens a patient’s skin. A nuclear reactor simulation using virtual reality that offers training without the safety concerns of a live reactor.

These are two of the six extended reality projects to receive a first wave of funding under the University of Michigan’s new XR Initiative, announced in the fall.

James Hilton

James Hilton

“The university is always asking ‘What’s next?’ and it’s thrilling to see the creative and multidisciplinary projects in health care, engineering and architecture as part of the XR Initiative,” said James Hilton, U-M vice provost for academic innovation. “These projects are looking at long-standing challenges in new ways and will allow our faculty to use XR to redefine what a hands-on, immersive education looks like for our students and learners beyond campus.”

XR encompasses augmented reality, virtual reality, mixed reality and other variations of computer-generated real and virtual combined environments and human-machine interactions.

The three-year funded initiative calls for the Center for Academic Innovation to seed new projects and experiments that integrate XR into residential and online curricula, and to create innovative public/private partnerships to develop new XR related educational technology.

Financial awards for the first-round projects ranged from $12,000 to $25,000, and each award will be supported through a number of in-kind investments from the XR Initiative and the Center for Academic Innovation.

James DeVaney

James DeVaney

“The first wave of XR projects are looking at unique challenges in new ways and target a wide range of learners from high-schoolers through graduate students, said James DeVaney, associate vice provost for academic innovation and founding executive director of the Center for Academic Innovation. “That’s important to the center because to understand and make best use of innovative pedagogies and breakthrough technologies we need to design with diverse learners from the start.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says 650,000 people a year in the United States get chemotherapy as an outpatient. It is a high-volume, high-risk clinical intervention that requires interprofessional clinical teams to manage, Michelle Aebersold, clinical professor at the School of Nursing, wrote in her proposal.

Her team’s “Getting Under The Skin” project seeks to develop a 3D environment to help students interested in becoming nurses, pharmacists and physicians manage a serious side effect of the therapy.

“In the area of high-risk medications, we have only been able to show our students the devastating effects of when hazardous yet important intravenous medications leak outside the vessels and cause skin damage,” she said.

“XR has great potential to provide faculty another educational methodology to use in helping students understand their role in caring for patients, being part of a health care team, learning how to care for patients, and one added advantage over other simulation methods is that immersive VR can help students understand what it is like to be a patient.”

Michelle Aebersold

Michelle Aebersold

Another virtual reality project would create 3D models to give students experience operating a nuclear reactor.

Michigan Engineering is home to the No. 1 nuclear engineering program in the country. For several decades up to the early 2000s, the program included training at a physical nuclear reactor. The Ford Nuclear Reactor, originally established as a WWII memorial under the Michigan Memorial Phoenix Project, permanently shut down in 2003. It was decommissioned over the next four years, leaving U-M as one of the only programs without a research reactor, both in the Top 5-ranked university programs and the Big 10, said Brendan Kochunas, project manager and assistant professor in the Department of Nuclear Engineering and Radiological Sciences.

The Extended Reality Nuclear Reactor Laboratory simulation would allow some retired courses that used the Ford Nuclear Reactor to be taught again to upper level undergraduates and graduate students.

Students would use VR headsets to virtually walk around the reactor control room and floor, look down at the core, view instrument panels and interact with the control panel.

“In reality, one does not simply walk up next to an operating nuclear reactor core, but in virtual reality one can,” Kochunas said. “We can also overlay simulation results on the virtualized physical systems allowing students to experience neutron fields or temperature fields visually, where in reality this is not possible. Now we get the opportunity to have the Phoenix rise again—only virtually. I think that’s pretty cool.”

Other projects funded:

  • Cross-platform XR Tools for Supporting Student Creativity in Immersive Audio Design, Anıl Çamcı, assistant professor of performing arts technology, School of Music, Theatre & Dance
  • Crashing Trains and Launching Rockets: A Virtual Physics Laboratory for the Classroom, Thomas Schwarz, associate professor, Department of Physics
  • Augmented Techtronics, Jonathan Rule, co-founder of MPR Arquitectos and assistant professor of practice, Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning
  • Comparison of Student Learning of Head and Neck Anatomy and Diagnosis of Pathology Using XR, Hera Kim-Berman, clinical assistant professor, Department of Orthodontics and Pediatric Dentistry

 

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