Making a Virtual Lab: How to Train Your Lab Members in a Lab for Brain Brain Neuroscience and Out-of-Body Perceptions

New avenues of research are being inspired by the ability to visualize oneself inside an alternative reality. The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne has a laboratory of cognitive neuroscience headed by Neuroscience Professor Olaf Blanke. After years of research into prosthetics and cognitive therapies for people with amputations, he thinks that VR technologies are revolutionizing scientific understanding of the human brain and own-body perceptions.

He has also been experimenting with VR to study out-of-body experiences — a phenomenon estimated to be experienced by 10% of the global population, the reasons for which are not fully understood3.

It seems the most practical use forVR in science and research is for training. Scaling up courses and improving accessibility are opportunities that are clear. But it is no silver bullet: barriers to access remain, despite the relatively low cost of headsets.

Developing Virtual Reality programs is no small task. He was a bit giddy with the idea of creating his own virtual lab, which started in 2000 and was spurred on by the swine flue in 2020. He adds: “Having developed our own 3D printing software and PC software for digital flow, we thought that we could easily make our own VR software, too. It turned out to be harder than we had thought. It has taken many years to bring Hilton’s software to a quality he is proud of, with plenty of help from his postdoctoral researchers and their 3D computer-aided design (CAD) skills.

“We have around ten people in the lab with a mix of backgrounds — biomedical, pharmacy and chemistry degrees, but no computing — and we train everyone from the ground up. First in design of equipment, then computer-aided engineering and finally virtual reality. All [lab members] run the sessions with users, so they then get used to VR training of others,” says Hilton. Not every lab has that much time and resources.

Why not use Virtual Reality? Explaining the problem of having internet access in mobile-phone usage and satellite usage in African universities, a conversation with an Indian master’s student

Such programs depend on a fast Internet connection, something many regions lack. According to the United Nations, there were still almost 3 billion people without Internet in 2011. Even major cities in South Africa struggle to have internet access because of energy disruptions. For De Beers, that means ensuring all the programs he helps to develop are designed to work with mobile-phone data and don’t rely on broadband Internet. But even this can be problematic, he says. He says that the use of satellites has made it simpler to plan ahead, although he still thinks that the use of Starlink makes it more difficult.

In 2019, after I had returned to Kenya to complete my PhD at KEMRI, I learnt about an open call for funding by the African Academy of Sciences (AAS) for innovative projects designed to encourage science communication and public engagement in researchers. The idea struck me: why not use VR?

My PhD was funded by the DELTAS Africa programme and as part of that, in 2018, I had the opportunity to spend six months at the University of Helsinki. At an international science open day there, I got talking to a master’s student from India. It was something I had never heard of and that she was trying to incorporate into her work teaching science to young people, so the conversation stuck with me.

He says that Virtual Reality is a very smart mirror. “As adults, it’s very easy for us to decide when we’re brushing our teeth that we’re not the image we see in the mirror — it’s a reflection. You can play around with a lot of different views once you have anavatar. The ability to ask questions about the self-consciousness allows us to do more.

Robotic Flight Simulator: Bringing Artificial Life Forms to Drastic Enviroments in Stephen Hilton’s Lab at the University of Glasgow, UK

According to Cronin his company Chemify has raised more than 3 million dollars from international investors, and they support his plans to automate the design of new molecules to speed up drug development.

He thinks that VR used in this way could have an important role in many other potentially dangerous scientific scenarios, including nuclear decommissioning and bomb-disposal research. And there are productivity benefits, too: “We need to invent more molecules if we’re going to solve big societal problems, like finding new drugs to target diseases. But chemical space is really hard to research,” he explains. 2,800 small molecule drugs have been approved for use in the clinic, and we must have tried billions of them. There’s a cure for cancers but we can’t go through each chemical reaction on our own.

The addition of the VR technology allows Cronin to move components and give instructions to the robots, wherever he is. “It also allows us to make shortcuts,” he explains. I can hold the phone and have a virtual conical flask at the same time. If I pour something from one hand to the other, the robot knows that and it can turn on a pump and valve. He says that the operating system is there even though it is not fully deployed. “It’s very similar to the way a flight simulator works.”

In 2020, chemist Lee Cronin and his colleagues at the University of Glasgow, UK, designed a VR programme that allows him to control the robots in his lab remotely. The researchers at Cronin’s group use a series of robot that are programmed to create artificial life forms, part of their effort to find new molecules and life forms. The chemical experiments are safer thanks to this automation, because the robots work much faster and the need for human handling of chemicals is minimized.

Visiting Stephen Hilton’s laboratory is a hands-on experience. No staff passes, qualifications or lab coats are required here; guests are welcome to wander around and prod at the equipment, even spill chemicals on the floor if they fancy it, without repercussions. In fact, he encourages it. “Science should be interactive. It’s about being able to make a mess, make mistakes,” Hilton says, handing over a 3D shape he has just scribbled in mid-air.

Hilton uses the Oculus Quest 2 headset (now sold as Meta Quest 2) because it is relatively low in cost (around £300, or US$380) and allows him to have multiple headsets on the go at one time. The software is run on a PC and can enable PC–headset interaction, as well as PC–PC or headset–headset combinations. The virtual lab he built was built with the Unreal Engine, a 3D design software from US developer Epic Games and runs on a cloud-based server for single users.

XR for Virtual Assistants: A Simple Way to Avoid Singing or Talking to Students in South Africa, without Speaking a Single Language

“Just recently, we’ve created a tool for the virtual assistants to speak ten foreign languages,” he says. “The knowledge base translates in real time, meaning I could speak directly in English to answer a student’s query, and they’ll hear the answer in their local language. There is a big opportunity to do this in many countries in the global south.

It is simple to make virtual training more accessible by avoiding spoken languages. “XR opens up the ability to use gestures and body language — showing over telling — without having to know the language very well,” says Koos De Beer, an XR solutions consultant and researcher at the University of Pretoria in South Africa.

In 2010 De Beer started working with the Department of Mining Engineering at the University to provide students with remote access to potential dangerous spaces through a virtual classroom. In recent years, his work has expanded to deliver VR programs more widely across engineering and in health care, particularly in poor areas of rural South Africa.

De Beer says that the avatars used to representVR users don’t have to speak a certain way. They can simply be shown as robots, for instance, without the need for race or gender — although human biases present challenges when designing the figures. The program uses robot characters that have masculine torsos, for example.

Filming a Virtual Lab to Recognise Sepsis in a Child’s Health: A UK Project Sepsis Research Collaboration

Using medical dummies to teach students how to diagnose and treat sepsis is considered the gold standard for training, she explains, but the pandemic made in-person training difficult. “It is also very expensive and resource-rich when you take into consideration the cost of the dummies — around £40,000 — the trainer’s time and the fact it is confined to specialist centres. And if you happen to miss a day’s training because you’re sick, it’s tough luck,” she adds.

During labour, pregnant people can become very ill from sepsis, and this inspired Sharma to change this in 2019. While a research fellow at Cardiff University, she helped to develop a VR education tool for sepsis recognition as part of Project Sepsis, a UK research collaboration across medicine and science. The project shows students simulations that show the differences between sepsis symptoms and similar conditions. Unlike Hilton’s avatar-populated virtual lab, Sharma opted to film actors playing out realistic medical scenes, which students can watch and interact with using VR headset and handsets. The students are then tested on the knowledge gained during the experience through on-screen multiple-choice tests.

In order to expose children to the different sciences and show girls that scientists can do the same, I travel with my virtual reality headsets.

Growing up in a small village in Africa, working in a research lab was a dream of mine. For those from remote regions with lack of classroom resources, this is the case in my country.

The first film I produced in this year was an award winning film from the US National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine.

Kiyuka uses the latest technologies to show young people what a researcher can do, and what science can do for society.

Video Production of Lab Biobanks and Bioinformatics for Education and Research: A Case Study of the KEMRI-Wellcome Trust Research Programme

The resulting videos can be uploaded to VR headsets and then shown to students — this bypasses the need for a fast Internet connection or other computing resources on-site.

The production company that I worked for was shooting a number of the lab areas including biobank, immunology, proteomics, genetics and cleaning and reagent-preparation section. We demonstrated the experiments and talked to the other researchers at their stations.

My research team wanted to shoot a 360-degree video of the KEMRI-Wellcome Trust Research Programme labs. Secondary-school students were invited to tour the labs as part of the script-writing process to see if they understood what was happening in the classroom.

Like many African countries, Kenya faces challenges in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) across all education levels in terms of enrolment, performance and gender disparity. And much more needs to be done to encourage uptake of these subjects beyond secondary school.