VERT is a radiotherapy training system
and it came about a number of years ago when there were some projects with
MSc students, where the MSc
students were looking at could they use virtual reality as a training system
to assist radiotherapy. In the latest REF, VERT was used as a case study.
In the previous REF, that was used as a case study.
Every time we’ve put VERT in a case study we've been awarded internationally
excellent.
Specifically, they're looking for research
feeding into something that impacts society.
In this case, it's very simple.
You've got research feeding in, you've got a software product,
software product is training radiographers, improving patient outcomes.
One day I was chatting with a friend, Roger Phillips, at the university
and James in the Computer Science department,
and I was telling him about some of the problems I was having
with teaching contemporary and upcoming radiotherapy techniques.
And so we just went down a path, just meandered and had a discussion.
It was one of those, I call them corridor discussions.
Off the cuff discussions take you in often wonderful directions.
I'd seen and was aware of computer simulations
being used in military training, pilot training.
We started looking at
visualisation and computer simulation in training and that became VERT.
I was a Research Lecturer in Computer Science.
The university had some fantastic facilities,
so we had the VR centre and all the technology there, 3D
projectors, head mounted displays, that type of thing.
I had a fantastic team of people around us with the expertise in computer
graphics and mathematics, you know, a real community of like minded people.
Andy approached us because we had some ideas
on how you could use this technology to solve some of the problems he had.
You know, instantly I would say that we we hit it off. Virtual Limited is a company
that we set up in order to exploit the idea that we'd had
in creating this training tool. The university and the hospital
helped set the company up, they’re still stakeholders as well as us founders.
The system is now used in over 30 countries in the world
and we have over 160 installations in different parts of the world.
Since 2007,
every single therapeutic radiographer that trains in this country uses VERT.
We teach students how to program, and we teach students
how to produce graphics.
But there's nothing like producing something that is in a real application.
So we work extremely closely with local software developers,
local games developers to understand exactly what they need from an employee
and try to put their requirements into our curriculum.
I learnt an awful lot at university,
you know, there are some real talented people
and yeah, it was hugely important to me, my own personal development
and we still maintain a relationship
with computer science and I'm actually keen to expand on that
in future as well because I think it's been a
you know, it's been a very valuable thing to the business.
We all brought something very different.
It was a beautiful example of collaborative working by people
from slightly different areas of science, contributing together
to produce something which is bigger than the whole.