Future Trends of Virtual, Augmented Reality, and Games for Health
Serious game is now a multi-billion dollar industry and is still growing steadily in many sectors. As a major subset of serious games, designing and developing Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), and serious games or adopting off-the-shelf games
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Future Trends of Virtual, Augmented Reality, and Games for Health Minhua Ma, Lakhmi C. Jain and Paul Anderson
Abstract Serious game is now a multi-billion dollar industry and is still growing steadily in many sectors. As a major subset of serious games, designing and developing Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), and serious games or adopting off-the-shelf games to support medical education, rehabilitation, or promote health has become a promising frontier in the healthcare sector since 2004, because games technology is inexpensive, widely available, fun and entertaining for people of all ages, with various health conditions and different sensory, motor, and cognitive capabilities. In this chapter, we provide the reader an overview of the book with a perspective of future trends of VR, AR simulation and serious games for healthcare.
1.1 Introduction The recent re-emergence of serious games as a branch of video games has introduced the concept of games designed for a serious purpose other than pure entertainment. To date the serious games industry is a multi-billion dollar industry and is still growing steadily in many sectors [1] including education and training [2, 3, 4, 5], healthcare [6, 7, 8, 9], engineering [10], military applications, city planning, production, crisis response, just to name a few. Serious games have primarily been used as a tool that gives players a novel way to interact with games in order to learn skills and knowledge, promote physical activities, support social-emotional development, and
M. Ma (*) · P. Anderson Digital Design Studio, Glasgow School of Art, Glasgow, UK e-mail: [email protected] L. C. Jain Faculty of Education, Science, Technology and Mathematics, University of Canberra, ACT 2601, Australia
M. Ma et al. (eds.), Virtual, Augmented Reality and Serious Games for Healthcare 1, Intelligent Systems Reference Library 68, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-54816-1_1, © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014
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treat different types of psychological and physical disorders amongst others. Many recent studies have identified the benefits of using video games in a variety of serious—even critical—contexts. Games technology is inexpensive, widely available, fun and entertaining for people of all ages, with various health conditions and different sensory, motor, and cognitive capabilities. If utilised alongside, or combined with conventional educational or therapeutic approaches it could provide a more powerful means of knowledge/skill transfer, promoting healthy behaviours, restoration and rehabilitation. This book Virtual, Augmented Reality and Serious Games for Healthcare 1 offers an insightful introduction to the development and applications of games technologies in healthcare settings. It includes cutting edge academic research and industry updates that will inform readers of current and future advances in the area. The book is suitable for both researchers and healthcare workers who are interested in using games for medical education and rehabilitation, as well
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