Feasibility of Nurse-led Development of Custom Virtual Reality Experiences for Health Care Interventions

The immersive and interactive nature of virtual reality (VR) renders it a potential pedagogical approach for nursing education. A bottleneck for exploiting VR advantages has been the complexity of creating new experiences; however, recent advances with VR hardware and software enable novice users to create compelling experiences.

A case study describes an undergraduate nursing student with minimal technical skills using off-the-shelf VR software to create a pain management VR experience.

Using off-the-shelf hardware and software platforms eliminates the need to work with computer code. The team created a virtual environment and the objects in it through easy manipulation with click-and-drag techniques and by toggling simple settings.

The insights gained from this case suggest nurse educators can create simple yet powerful VR experiences themselves, which can greatly enhance existing tools for nursing education. [.