Probably back in 2014, I attended an ‘Emerging Technologies Brainstorming’ session hosted by CEDICT at Flinders University. One of the things we talked about was use of the Oculus Rift. I had just ordered a DK2 a week or so prior – just because it was cool and not that expensive. I was looking for something ‘official’ to do with it.
The idea was to create a procedures video library for health professional students (medicine, nursing, paramedics, etc). This was largely inspired by the Moveo Foundation in France where they filmed a procedure (in stereo) from the surgeon’s PoV. The idea was that when assisting as a student, you are sometimes given a job – e.g. hold a retractor. You know that you have to do this job well and will get yelled at if you don’t, so you concentrate on doing a good job. The result of this is that you miss out on the details of the procedure, and you certainly don’t have a view from the surgeon’s perspective. Having a video from the surgeon’s perspective allows anyone to see what is done and review it at leisure. A commentary by the surgeon, even after the fact could be added for further instructional value.
We thought that there might be many procedures that could be filmed in this way for students to view when learning how to do them. The question is, how much effort is needed to produce these videos? Options range from a single camera up to a spherical stereo video (11 or 12 GoPro cameras) best viewed with a VR rig (like the Oculus Rift). Obviously the more cameras, the more complex and time consuming the post-production.
- Single camera
- Stereo pair (2)
- Spherical (5 or 6)
- Spherical stereo (11 or 12)
