Imperial College London visit.

One of our recent Friday classes was a bit different as instead of having a guest (usually online) at LCC, we went on a little trip. We paid a visit to Imperial College London (ICL) and talked to the team delivering Extended Reality (XR) learning materials to the students at ICL and working on other creative-tech projects for ICL’s in-house network.  

We were greeted by Daniel Mitelpunkt, the Head of Digital Media Lab at ICL and Thomas Shawcroft, the Director of Photography / Cinematographer at ICL. They gave us a tour around their department, so we had a chance to have a close look at their facilities before testing out their latest projects. 

Next, we all sat down and had a chance to see videos, demos and test out VR simulations the ICL team has been developing. We had an interesting and engaging conversation about our hosts’ approach to XR in their work and their experiences, we also shared our thoughts and ideas we are developing. 

It was a helpful visit and opportunity to see how VR ideas can be brought into life in a real-life, working environment, where ideas come from the within and projects are in-house responses to the needs of the organization. The simulation I had a chance to test out was a hospital treatment room where there was a patient suffering from a cardiac arrest. I was in the scene amongst the hospital staff as a medical student who is expected to react accordingly to the situation (under pressure) and learn at the same time. It is a brilliant new, and engaging way to teach and train people, where the adrenaline kicks in, and where all the gained knowledge and skills can be implemented and evaluated without the real-life risk. 

That project cleverly uses VR in a very specific field – medical training – and is proof that where there is the need, there is a creative solution and XR technology has a great potential to deliver that solution.