This project is a VR simulation used to train pharmacy students in using a Geiger Counter. When cleaning up after preparing radioactive medication, they need to survey their work area to identify hot spots and to confirm any spills or drips are properly cleaned.

This project was handed to me with two weeks available for development before a conference where it would be showcased. Most of the parts were there, though some needed a bit of work. My role was to put everything together and craft a user-friendly experience.

Passive Haptics

The first thing I did was build a calibration system. The simulation is meant to be run in a wet lab with a work table. A table is generated in the VR space to match the size, position, and orientation of the table in the lab. This provides a bit of passive haptics, as students can actually touch the table they see in VR. It also provides learning opportunities, as the geiger counter wand should never touch the table. When the table is actually there, it is a lot easier to tell whether it is being touched than if it only existed in the VR setting.

Flow

The bulk of the project was getting everything to flow together. I used the state programming pattern to allow the simulation to flow from calibration, to welcome screen, to the main activity state, to the evaluation state, and back to the welcome screen. UnityEvents were used for my OnStateEnter and OnStateExit events so that everything could be set up in the inspector quickly and easily.

Instruction

In my experience of giving VR demos, one difficulty that always comes up is instructing people on how to use it. They are often too eager to pay attention to instructions before throwing on the headset. Once it is on, they can’t see their hands or the buttons on the controllers. Because this was going to be shown at a conference, I prioritized minimizing this problem. Within the VR scene, I placed three giant monitors with world-space UIs attached to them. At every state these three screens tell the user what to do, both with text and animated diagrams.