2019 Marks Arch Virtual’s Fifth Year in Business!  

I am truly grateful for the visionary clients we’ve had the pleasure to serve, and the phenomenal development team I’ve had the pleasure of working with.   Thank you!

As we reflect on this exciting milestone, I also look forward to the next 5 years on the virtual frontier. What possibilities lie ahead that we can’t even imagine today? I hope you’ll consider joining us on this exciting adventure. 

Here are some updates from a very busy second quarter of 2019:

Teach and Learn in VR with Acadicus

Our Acadicus VR Training platform provides everything needed to access, create and share VR training created by instructors.

Schools and Businesses
can set up their own Acadicus Pro Space, which can be used to host multi-user meetings, showcase products and services, and create VR training content.

Featured Simulations

Emergency Response

By Dr. Eric B. Bauman.  Learn more about this simulation (link).

Clinical Setup Simulation

By Dr. Eric B. Bauman.  Learn more about this simulation (link).

We’re currently offering a 20% discount on Acadicus Pro Spaces through July 31st, 2019.  Use promo code JULY19.

Meet Madison

We witnessed an epic launch for Greater Madison Chamber of Commerce‘s new Oculus GO experience.  Stay tuned for more information! 

The Environment is Virtual, The Experience is Real

Envision Experience, a client we’ve had the opportunity to create VR educational experiences for, shared their “learning by doing” approach to VR, in the form of a 3 part series intended to help educators who want to embed VR in their lessons to avoid pitfalls and roll-out the sort of engaging learning opportunities that VR can offer students of all ages.

Envision’s NYLF Advanced Medicine and Health Care program, held on the Johns Hopkins University campus, uses VR technology to put students into a virtual operating room with the sights and sounds of what performing a bone fracture reduction surgery would actually be like.  Paired with a hands-on simulation to actually cut open, fix, and then suture for a bone fracture, the VR experience gives a real view into the OR experience for this type of surgical event.

In part 3 of their series covers the updated use of VR at Envision’s 2018 program.

Harnessing the Power of AR with Magic Leap

We’re excited to be working on our first Magic Leap Augmented Reality application.  We can’t say much about it yet, but stay tuned and we’ll be sure to post more details in the months ahead.  If you’re interested in exploring an AR application with us, we’ve got the gear.

With your support, we hope to continue building top quality VR and AR experiences for another 5 years and beyond.  Please send us a note to get started on your project!  

At your service,
Jon Brouchoud
Founder and CEO

The intersection of healthcare simulation and VR is an exciting place to be.  We’ve been focused since day one on the praxis of VR and how it can be used to solve real world problems, and are now asking:

How can VR add measurable value to healthcare simulation?

We’re witnessing a massive wave of VR innovation in the last few years.  Not only are headsets are getting more comfortable and higher resolution, but the software used to create VR is getting easier to use and capable of higher visual quality and performance than ever.

We’ve had the opportunity to introduce thousands of people to VR, were honored to win Best in Show at IMSH 2018, and gathered a lot of great feedback we’re using to improve our capabilities and platform.  We continue to be inspired and encouraged by the overwhelmingly positive reaction we’ve seen to VR medical training.

You can now download our free Acadicus VR training platform at http://www.acadicus.com to begin creating your own virtual reality medical education experiences.

Our goal is to create VR solutions that will help train the next generation of healthcare professionals.

We’re building on the following 7 characteristics of VR that we believe offer innovative, game-changing potential in the healthcare industries.

1. Expanded Access

Not everyone has access to state-of-the-art simulation labs, mannequins, or qualified trainers who know how to utilize these technologies.  VR can greatly augment, support and extend the reach of current simulation content within and beyond the lab, enabling learners to spend as much time as they need to in a virtual simulation, or where sim labs and mannequins aren’t available.

2. Time and Money Savings

VR enables access to the virtual equivalent of millions of dollars worth of equipment and environments, in a setting where learners have unlimited access to rehearse scenarios virtually, multiple times.  This helps them make efficient and effective use of their time in traditional simulation labs, saving the increasingly scarce and highly valuable time of instructors and sim technicians.

3. Remote and Collaborative Learning

If you haven’t tried multi-player VR, I sincerely hope you have the opportunity to do so in the near future. It’s a force-multiplier to a solo virtual experience that opens the door to powerful new opportunities in healthcare education and simulation.

To stand face-to-face virtually with someone physically located in a different part of the world is a mind boggling experience. This is one of the many reasons we’ve invested so much and so early in our multi-player platform. Learners can work together on a lesson collaboratively, or take direction from a remote expert who can give them the latest and greatest insights on any given procedure. The possibilities are endless.

Sign Up for our Newsletter to Learn More:

4. Focus

One lasting impression I took away from an afternoon of remote multi-user demos to the American College of Cardiology last year was the comment of one cardiologist, who said he was most intrigued with VR’s potential capacity to train focus — something that’s very difficult to teach in the real world, but comes with experience.

When it’s time to perform a procedure, you might have a long list of real-world distractions in mind, but it’s vitally important to leave all of that behind and bring laser sharp focus to the task at hand. VR could be a powerful tool to help learners retain that kind of focus in the midst of chaos and tremendous responsibility that comes with caring for a patient.

5. Fun

With VR, we have the opportunity to not only make the learning experience very realistic and immersive — we can also make it fun. Plenty of research indicates increased retention when learners are more engaged with and enjoying the content. VR can be something learners look forward to.

6. Immersion

In VR, we can evoke a very strong sense of being ‘there’ — in an operating room, clinic, or on the scene of an emergency. We have the opportunity to take the learning experience to a whole new level by instilling a sense of urgency that correspond with real world healthcare scenarios that can be very difficult, expensive or even impossible to do in the real world. I believe this will prove to yield a much higher retention rate, and help train learners on the nuances of place, context and responsibility as they absorb virtual training materials.

7. Retention

Research indicates greater learning retention from VR-based training over traditional methods [link].  More research is underway to gain a better understanding of this potential, but early adopters are already witnessing the obvious and increased efficacy of learning in VR.  The training experience provides a new level of realism that is engaging, impactful, and perhaps most importantly – memorable.

This list only scratches the surface of the possibilities we see on the horizon, and will be sharing additional insights as we continue exploring this exciting intersection of VR and healthcare simulation.

3 Ways to Learn More:

2.) Sign Up for our Newsletter:

Check out this sneak peak of our latest medical simulation project for Envision’s upcoming National Youth Leadership Forum at Johns Hopkins University.  To learn more about the forum and to enroll, click HERE.

The goal of this project is to expose high school students who are seriously considering a career in medicine to a very immersive virtual experience tending to a patient with a bone fracture.

This project is still a work in progress.  We’ll be following up with more info as the project becomes more refined in the weeks ahead, but in the meantime, we wanted to share this sneak peak of our development progress.

This VR experience will accompany the last application we developed for them (image below) where students work together collaboratively to treat a patient with a laceration.

Support Immerse Creator and join the community via Steam Early Access [here].

This post is one of several in a series where we’re brainstorming the UI/UX overhaul for Immerse Creator — available on Steam in Early Access (here). Immerse Creator is compatible with Oculus Rift CV1, HTC Vive, and basic compatibility with Windows Mixed Reality headsets.

We’re very interested in hearing your input! Please share thoughts below in comments, or on the Community Hub here.

Previous UI/UX posts: [Post 1] [Post2] [Post3] [Post4] [Post5]

Follow us on [reddit] [twitter] [facebook]

2018.1.26

Today was a particularly exciting brainstorming session, as we started testing prototypes inside VR, inside Immerse Creator. Don built a prototype implementation of the UI system we’ve been brainstorming, and it worked really well. We had to run to other meetings before finishing this discussion, so we’ll continue on Monday.

• Left Menu button pops open the menu
• Pointing at the menu highlights green at which point it can be grabbed and moved around.
• With two hands pointed at a UI object, the object can be scaled by grab/pinch/dragging
• UI objects always stay oriented toward center camera
• UI element positions remain persistent as you teleport around the scene
• Discussed snapping nodes for UI elements

Next steps:

• Prototype a row of main feature buttons (Shapes, Lines, Saver, etc.) that can move and scale together as a bar — the way the single panel prototype does now
• Add ability to detach one of the feature buttons and position it in space
• Re-attach menu button via snap node to the main feature button row

Check out Immerse Creator VR UI/UX Post 6 on Medium here: [link].

Follow Immerse Creator on [reddit] [twitter] [facebook]

Support Immerse Creator and join the community via Steam Early Access [here].

The process of becoming a VR developer has been a wild ride.

There are times I’m so excited about the possibilities I can hardly sleep, followed by bouts of deep existential questioning about our strategy, cash flow, and so many other typical startup issues that keep me up just the same.

This is life on the virtual frontier, at least from my perspective here in Madison, Wisconsin, USA.

I wonder how other VR developers are adapting to life on the virtual frontier?

We hear the occasional success story — the handful of games that made it big. I hear a lot less about their origin stories, postmortem lessons learned, or their plans for the future. I hear even less from what must be thousands of other indie VR developers out there making a go of it. What are you up to?

For better or for worse, with this post and others to follow, I’d like to share some of my experiences. Maybe others out there are thinking about getting into VR development, and my experiences can help you? Or maybe you can help me with advice on some of the hefty decisions I face on a regular basis?

Or maybe nobody cares. That’s fine too.

I’d like to share more about our process — the issues we face, the opportunities that excite us, and the hopeful future of what we’re trying to build. I’m afraid many of us are busy working in our corners at a time when we could gain so much from being more sharing and open as an industry. At the very least, if we open up and get some of our experiences in the open, it will give us something to look back and laugh about when we’re all hanging out in the Oasis someday.

First, I need to establish a few ground rules — just for myself and my own sanity:

• This is going to be a stream of consciousness. I’m not going to spend too much time editing the ramble. I apologize in advance.
• I think in spirals. It drives my team and my family nuts, but I’ve been this way as far back as I can remember. You might even think it’s two or three different people writing these posts, with competing viewpoints. Nope, it’s just me — thinking in spirals. That’s what I do. The good news is, spirals circle around a center. I might stray a bit, but I eventually bring it home. Bear with me, if you can. Maybe this ledger will help me manage it.
• I’m a highly sensitive introvert, and I’m prone to deleting an entire post, video or tweet at the first negative comment or down vote. I’m kind of a baby like that, but I promise to resist that temptation.

As is my tendency, I made a lengthy Google Doc to start planning this new endeavor. Somehow, it feels very productive to type away on a Google Doc. I’ll admit to spending an inordinate amount of time careful grooming and combing through my various planning docs, as is the habit of any good introvert. I have dozens of them covering every nuance of the business. If Google is ever hacked or gets shut down, I’ll be screwed and I’d deserve it (note to self — back up Google Drive). I rambled out a 5 page plan of intentions and topics for these posts before realizing I should just start writing those thoughts here openly instead.

These might not always be posts like this. I might just tweet. Maybe I’ll even make a mixed reality video, or audio podcast. I’m not sure yet.

I might also post ‘scraps’ of ideas that I’d like to dial in on at some point, but don’t yet have time. Rather than letting these ideas collect dust in my Google Drive, maybe I’ll post and revise drafts over time as time permits.

I’m also going to start being more transparent about our development process. For example, we’re about to completely overhaul our user interface and user experience design on our Immerse Creator. Rather than keeping it a secret and having our team work quietly in a corner, I wonder if anyone else would find this process interesting? We’re in Early Access on Steam after all, isn’t that what it’s all about? We haven’t been nearly as transparent with our process as I had hoped we would be.

We’re also in the early stages of pitching for seed funding for Arch Virtual. I know there must be lessons I’m already learning in this process that could help other VR devs. If you’re a VR developer and already went through this, what advice would you give me and anyone else attempting the same?

Another topic might be the fact that we’re a remote team. I know this isn’t nearly as unusual as it was when we first started, and probably common in VR development, but I know there are lessons learned from being a virtual team building virtual stuff that could benefit others. I’d love to tell a few of those stories.

Off the top of my head, I’ll ramble out a few topics I could cover in future posts below. If you have any other ideas, let me know. Some of these are issues I’ve already faced and resolved. Some we’re up against as I type this. Others are issues I know we’ll be facing at some point in the future.

The only thing I know for certain is the answers to these questions are anything but certain, and it’s a moving target as the industry evolves. I have an absolutely brilliant network of advisers across the country that I trust and lean on for the big questions we face as a company, but I’m always amazed by their total lack of consensus. There is no right answer to any of this. Sometimes you just have to listen to your heart, or shoot from the hip and hope for the best. At the very least, I can tell you how I’ve handled or how I’m currently handling some of these issues, for better or for worse.

• Should we start a VR development company? Is there a big enough market?
• Should we build a game or provide custom development services?
• Should we try to patent anything? (I consistently resist, but everyone asks…)
• Can we make any money in VR development? Should we be making money in VR at this early stage?
• Should we be focused on one industry or remain open to all possibilities?
• Should we bring in angel investors? How does that work from a legal perspective?
• How will we handle bookkeeping, payroll, accounting, taxes, etc.?
• What are some good resources to help with decisions like this?
• How can we move the needle, gain more traction, and let more people know that we exist?
• Can we function efficiently as a remote team, or do we need to be co-located?
• How can we find and retain VR development talent?
• Should we stay focused on services, or build a toolset to help other VR developers? (aka the story of Immerse Framework)
• Can we effectively support both services and platform?
• Is the VR market big enough to support a toolset like Immerse Creator?
• Should we raise a seed round or grow organically?
• Should we bring in a business adviser? If so, who? Where do we look for someone with VR or similar experience? (p.s. if you know anyone, let me know.. )
• Should we have an advisory board? Who should be on it? How often should we meet? How much should they be compensated?
• Should we stay in Wisconsin or relocate to California?
• Arch Virtual is a confusing name — should we change it, or do we stick with it now?
• Should we overhaul the design of our website?
• Should we have a separate company for platform and services?
• Should I be spending my time writing all of this, or should my time be spent doing other things to help grow the business? Why am i doing this again?

You can already see the spirals.. I’m looking forward to sharing more of the joys, trials and tribulations of VR development, and hope it will be of value to someone, sometime, somewhere.

See you on the virtual frontier.

Greetings Creators!

For the past several months, we’ve been hard at work on some epic new features for Immerse that we’re excited to be rolling out in today’s update.

Absolutely everything about Immerse is subject to change over time! That’s precisely why we’re in Early Access with this beta launch, and this is a very preliminary ‘version 1’ debut for these new features. While we encourage you to sketch and create as much as you’d like, we urge everyone to please keep in mind that this is definitely not a polished product. There will be bugs, and there will be changes.

You can now import your own FBX models into Immerse Creator! This was the community’s most requested feature, by far, so we’re very excited to have a preliminary implementation in place for you to try out. There are limits to the import, which I’ll talk about more in the video linked above. I got a little crazy during Turbosquid’s last weekend sale, as you can see in the screenshot above. =)

You can now export your Shapes Creations using the new export feature! It will only export your shapes – not any assets or imported meshes, but you can then bring that file into your own modeling software, or even use it as the basis for a 3D print.

Immerse Shapes tool has some new features in development, including the ability to modify vertices, faces, and edges. Our intention is only to make it possible to quickly sketch very basic forms with Immerse, so we’re purposely keeping our Shapes tool fairly simple. If you want to create more advanced models, we encourage you to model in Blender, Maya, 3DS, etc. and import your model as an FBX.

We’ve introduced a new ‘Packs’ tab in the Immerse Assets tool. In there, you’ll find tons of new asset packs available. We’ll be adding new assets frequently, which will show up automatically in your Immerse Creator without requiring an update.

You can now take a screenshot inside Immerse Creator. We would love to see what you’ve created! Please post your screenshots to our subreddit: r/immersecreator

You can now lock and toggle the visibility of containers. Getting into the habit of actively using the container system is requisite to effectively managing your Creations.

We’ve incorporated the awesome MixCast tool into Immerse Creator, so if you’re subscribed to their tool on Steam and hit ‘1’ on your keyboard, it will activate MixCast so you can easily create your own mixed reality videos!

User Experience and Polish. We now have version 1 implementation of our core feature set, and now we’re going to keep polishing and refining those features. We know there are lots of basic usability issues we need to address, so we’re undertaking a UI/UX overhaul that will make Creating a lot easier and more comfortable. This is another pretty major undertaking, so it may take a while, but we’re hoping to get it right and look forward to launching our next major update.

We’re very interested to hear your input on new features, bug reports, etc. Please use the Steam Community Hub for Immerse Creator to share your thoughts: Here.

We would also love to see your creations and hear your thoughts on our subreddit: Here.

That’s it! Thanks for your interest in Immerse Creator and happy Creating!

Jon Brouchoud and the Immerse Team

info@archvirtual.com