Revolutionizing Medical Training: The Role of AR and VR Technologies | Jeno Manickam Durairaj | TBCY
Welcome to another episode of The Brand Called You the vodcast and podcast show that brings you leadership lessons, knowledge, experience and wisdom from 1000s of successful individuals from around the world. I am your host, Ashutosh Garg and today I'm delighted to welcome an accomplished young entrepreneur from Chennai, India, Mr. Jeno Manickam Durairaj, you Jeno, welcome to the show. Thank you. Thank you. Jeno is the co
founder and chief technical officer of medicine VR. So do Jeno, before we talk about medicine, tell me about your own journey in brief and a little bit about medicine. Alright, so I started, I started my career as a game developer first, okay. I'm very, very engaged. Actually, I was very
fortunate to have access to PCs when I was getting my dad, this chemical engineer, but for some reason, he bought a PC, and we had at home, so I had to meddle with it. And I was very intrigued by how these games work, you know, they open up a different reality. It's active, it's interactive. We make the Russians academies. And I was very, very, very curious about
what happens behind the box, that led to getting into game development, and have tried multiple times since my manual to believe since my eighth grade, I've been trying to make one game, okay. And it took almost eight to 10 years to get to the place where I understood how to make a deal. Voting, I got my diploma and C C++ back in when I was in eighth ninth grade, because that was my first exposure, you know, attending a training company called CSC used to be very famous back in the days, they came on to me. And they spoke about programming. And I was like, Okay, maybe this is how I need to go. So I went and did the course, certain two years, then I did Java. And did we, because they there used to be a lot of Java games back then on mobile phones. But you know, I was never able to understand
how the visuals and logic went together. That was very cool. Yeah, yeah. So from from there, when I read my ug is when I got little bit more maturity and understanding of how things work. And then I was able to
make my first game when, when Android was very new. When Android was released, that was very interesting, it was open source, and you will get very clear guidelines to how to make things and that life easier. And I learned and I was studying, I had made my first game. And that went really well. Got a few lakhs of downloads back then I also made some money out of it. So this is how it started. And then it's out a couple of mates who are helping me make this happen when I was in college. So
we three together started a gaming company called hybrid contractor as soon as we finished up, so we never had any work experience we all had offers from CTS ago. But we all felt okay, let us do this. Let's try doing this. And that's how the gaming journey started. Amazing. From there to VR, again, does another shift. You know, once we figured out gaming a little bit, once we got comfortable, virtual reality was again new back in 2013. And we thought we should somehow do
something for this because the fundamental development pipeline for both games and VR is very, very similar. But it is drastically different. And the application is drastically different. Again, interested me a lot and I went in and did a lot of research. We were one of the first to launch products using VR in India, Singapore, we actually had a simulator in Sentosa in Singapore, back then. So I mean, it was a very, very
interesting journey. But I didn't really hit a spot where, you know, what do we do using VR? We kept doing projects for multiple industries like automobile oil and gas, entertainment, welding, hard skills. But we had to do a lot of learning and unlearning No, I had to be a welding expert to first simulate TIG welding. So understanding the temperatures metallurgy angle of attack, the speed at which they will, we had to do all that and then we'll have to unlearn everything and then move on to automobile that led to us to think, you know, if we are going to do something in VR, let's focus on one thing. The person doing that one thing, and that's what matters. And we thought, okay, let's do medicine. VR will only focus on
healthcare training using VR, and be the best at it. Amazing. And as they say, the rest of history welled up. So do you know my question, first question we get when we talk over medicine is what key factors do you consider When creating a game to ensure it resonates with the intended audience. Okay, so that's an that's an excellent question. I mean, being a game developer, each developer has a fundamental reason or drive to make a game. I see a lot of developers, including me who develop games for, based on our own experiences, you know, what we have played. It's more like, you know, we play a game and feel like, you know what, this could have been better. So I'm going to take the response,
responsibility up, and I'm going to do that. That's great when you do it with passion. But when you look at the industry, when you work as a business, that is not the best way to move forward about it. Right? So then things change, then then that question, your question makes more sense. Who are your target audience? Why are you making this? Who's gonna enjoy this? We have, I mean, not just our games, even games made by big publishers have very beautiful stories on the understanding their users. A great example would be Farmville. Right, they did a
search, understanding who's the most engaged user? And what they found was they're all elderly people in the US, and mostly women. Okay. And they were very curious how and why. And they try to invite 10s of people. And I interview them asking, Why do you play our games? And the answers were very interesting. Most of them said, we used to live in farms. Now, I don't hear
those noises, cow noises, bird chirping. So I love I play this game, because I can listen to all of this. And another lady said, I miss my grandchildren, here in family have very characters who are children, like, you know, they say, Can you help me with this? Can you help me with that? And that the connection these people have with these games, you know, as humans, even as developers, sometimes we fail to understand how they get how much the game was important for the user. How much more it is important for them than for us. Because a beautiful journey and a beautiful understanding which we get as we move forward. Amazing, amazing. So my in logical next question is and
given the amount of research you're doing with your users, how do you balance technical innovation, with user experience? Yeah, gaming is one of the very unique fields where creativity and technology should work together. Overly creative, and, you know, reduce the amount of technology use or you can't say, I'm a tech company, and I'm not going to have creativity, there needs to be a very good balance. And in our context, here, I am the tech technology person, right. And we have creative people who fight with me every day. So there's a push and pull
happening here every day, right. And when we try to deliver it to the users, we can take our train simulators, as an example here. We look at areas where how technology can take it to the next level. For example, we have a very good signalling system
inside, which might even work for real world, it's as good. So people love when they believe the game really works. The more you convince them that this is close to reality, the more they enjoy the experience, the more they forget that they are actually in a virtual world. And they say, Okay, this world really works. If I stop, another train is gonna come, honk,
something happens. If I don't stop the right place, something happens. That's where technology comes into making things more realistic, making things more scalable also, without technology, we can scale up, as we scale. Be trained simulators are not tax evaders. I mean, there's a clear advantage, you get a competitive edge you get when your technology is up there. For example, when we did our first train some little girls back in 2016. We started with four cities in it, because
we had to build build the cities and handcraft the cities. Today, when we released our Paxum, later this year beginning we have around 100 cities on by the day release because we're using generative algorithms. Yeah, yeah. So technology makes a huge, huge difference in terms of how our build and also how users perceive. But you know, and you develop the Indian Train Simulator, and you've just spoken a little bit about it. What well, can you talk a little bit about some of the insights in the development that made it so incredibly successful? That was a pivotal point for us. So when we developed our first
Train Simulator, it was not that impressive made on the first day, it's I'm not aware it was, you know, tried some of it. By the time I was doing my masters in the UK, doing high performance computing, engine designers what I was doing Newcastle, and the team was here. So we were still working together to get things done. And we did a game called Euro Train Simulator. So this play this game was focused on Germany,
Italy, France, UK, and it was instantly a huge hit. And we were topping charts and all these countries, what we noticed was almost 6050 to 60% of users where it is okay. It was really interesting. I mean, we made a game for Europe. And we see 50% plus u plus Indians in it. And some of them being vocal asking for an Indian version, right? Honestly, that's the starting point we learned from the users, we learn from feedback. And we
thought, okay, if so many people are playing the European version of our game, why not make an Indian version, and we know India better than anyone. So we started. But as we made the game, like, even in the process of making the game itself, what we realized was, I think that this is very well. And back in 2016, when we released this, it didn't feel like a train game for India. It felt like a game for India, which happens to be at right now. Okay, anyone who enters the game feels this is India, that this is a train, you know, you get the station announcement. That's very nostalgic for everyone. Right.
But when you hear that, ding ding sound that announcements on the so I got that quickly makes you feel at home. And you see people wearing saris walking around in the stations? Or does the red unit from and that feels you make that makes you feel like you're home? And then you then as a user, you realize why I mean, why didn't Why didn't why was I not playing games, which were made for I have grown up here. I know how it works here. Why should I play in Los Angeles? Correct. So like, why, like, I mean, we could argue Hollywood makes really good quality movies, but we watch Bollywood, we watch Tamil movies, because we like the localization. And that's what we
realized that that is. And then, you know, we went into developing game, which was, again, more focused on India, and less of a train game, and that worked really well for us. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, you know, I'm from very, very different generation, you know, I'm 67 years old. And I know over the last 3040 years, I've often wondered, why don't we have Indian products coming out. And I'm so proud that people like you are doing it now. And this Indian crimsafe simulator
is available on Android also available both on Android and iOS. So I'm going to download it. I'm going to play that game now. Thank you. My next question to
you Jeno is how do you integrate all these new AI technologies into your products? And what benefits do they bring to your own development? When we speak about interactive content and general first or most straightforward use of AI. This is a agents or what we call a CPU players. So again, gaming industry has been unique in this way. gaming industry has been using AI for the last 30 years extensively. Very important for games racing game or a PacMan you need a to compete with you. Always you play with other players when you play a single player game every day. So
luckily, I was exposed to AI since I studied game gaming early and I had to note because we can make games without knowing it correct. And that blended well when the AI revolution started. Latest revolutions, get pricing power, enough processing power to get things done. And another synergy which people often don't understand. Of course game none of us understand this. The impact GPU has made for AI. In
fact, we should all thank the gaming community for innovations we are getting today. Because Nvidia is the key hasn't come out with the GPUs which support large scale language models. We wouldn't be having chatty video Right? Right. Our understanding of GPUs also help in making much more efficient models. I mean, the opposite of MLMs if you asked me now those are large scale, do anything I know anything kind of AI's but it would help us power efficient, energy efficient guys, which can do exactly certain tasks, but really, that's what we try to excellent. And content generation is the second part first as the agent itself, the games industry. content
generation is something very new. We call it procedural AI, E. AR AR can generate visuals. help us create visuals or help us arrange the visuals while making games. And that is what we are using. In our latest game, the truck simulator. We really do target cities where everything is procedurally built, like records is built on the fly, the trees, the environment, you see the sky, everything is decided by the based on. So what even is the weather information, basic
information about the space, and they will decide what fascinating fascinating. My next question is, how do you approach problem solving, when you're faced with a technical hurdle, whenever you are doing a simulation or a new development, I think this is very much a case in medicine. Where quite recently, I've been working full time in medicine and just placing the game side. So there we have a lot of hurdles. I mean, to start with, we made skilled training for medical students. That's how we started developing. But the moment I was
able to go see how the students were consuming, I had a lot of things going on in my mind. Basically, there were so many problems, which I never expected. What I expected was software problems where you know, while using the experience might not be great, you might not be great, maybe we need to teach them better, maybe we need better onboarding. So that was the angle with which I went into the first university where we launched our product. So we basically set up a lab, we our lab, and students come in, like in our computer labs, they train on their medical procedures, catheterization or flaking. What What I noticed was the problem was the hardware or the software. So the tabletop PC set up to be so used doesn't work
for real. Because there's a lot of wire dangling going on. And medical students in specific, they don't like to metal, a lot of technology, like using mouse keyboard, and all that. And then again, putting it on top of the head is too much for them. So I had to again, take one step back and had to learn some hardware came up with a kiosk where the user experience was completely changed. I mean, from the outset, it looks like a small change. But for the user, it's a huge right. So we put a touchscreen instead of instead of a keyboard mouse setup. And
then the VR headset was hung from top rather than taking it from a table so there was no table there's small like ATM kiosk which has a headset hanging from the top. So I think that is one of the biggest problems we solve for the market, not just for the company. And for other VR companies coming up they can look at this and say okay, this is the right way to get into fascinating and you know, your since you're so deeply involved in medical training simulation, what do you see as the role of you know, AR and VR technologies in medical training simulation as these technologies become more mainstream.
The way we select medicine itself, I think that is one of the answers. Dr added when he spoke to us the way he convinced us rather was by saying his dad is a doctor his granddad and they said we all three of us are trained in the same way nothing has gone forward not much. And that is where the problem was, we were able to catch the problem of shipment. And we as
we know medical fraternity more than anything needs a lot of training and therapist which needs to be minimum and and that is where we also saw how here we are can help them. If for example, there are two major things or major let's say advantages we can put in one memory, memory retention. So why do we say a more experienced doctors better cases? What can go wrong? He knows this can happen this cannot happen. And to give students the Headstart, a little bit of extra before they start practicing, we can use we are where they will believe that whatever they see and we are almost like virtual real patients, right? And they can learn from these cases and understand better and there'll be more conflict when they vote. That is one aspect. The second aspect when you speak about AR
or Mr. Which are they are they coming in also the muscle memory coming in. So we also use haptics to train on certain skills, skills or protocol driven steps or understanding or knowledge, certain skills which are muscle memory driven. So probably let's say when we get into surgery will be focusing more on that both visual plus muscle memory areas, if we could scale it up or make it to a level where it is close to reality, I think we can see a huge reduction in errors, and also a huge improvement in training speed itself. I think especially this will help in Nursing Allied Health Workers, where there are not a lot of training methodologies available, and we can't afford to let them train on patients as well.
Great response. Thank you. So Jeno have time for two more questions? My next question is, what is the most important lesson you have learned from a failure or a challenging project? Again, in medicine VR, I think scale part, I think we did misjudge it. Especially from my part, when we started making these skill training modules, maybe because I'm a game developer, we look at level design, you know, how many stages or how many differentiates this can have. And I really underestimate how far this could go. And a few few
years later, I got the wake up call, know what this is not gonna end with the skills or 100 scales, this is 1002 dozen doses, because there are so much to do, there is so much to do. And geographically, there are so many different things to diseases, which are, there are only certain regions, and there are protocols, which are different region to region, screens cover at all, we need to scale massively. And that was a, it's a great wake up, I wouldn't call it a failure, but a huge wake up call we got I got in between. It's made me change the whole approach of how we build this, when we went to a very different platform based approach now where scalability and deployment was put on top of the wish list first. And that has made us much more confident today. Having the ability to make hundreds of content, and able to deploy anywhere in the world sitting here, and may be able to make changes to be it language or be smaller protocol changes quickly, as made us much more confident and hitting our targets.
Fascinating, fascinating. And my last question to you do you know as someone who knows gaming so well, and will actually build a business out of your passion? Where do you see gaming in the next few years? And how do you think this interactive simulation can contribute to making the world a better place? I think gaming, I think is the next natural step for movies, if you ask. And I think already that is happening. Netflix has interactive shows now you can select what decision you make, and the movie will go in that direction. And gaming has always been that. And that is what is more the most fascinating about
games is you decide what to do, you are the protagonist in your story. And that is why the GTA series are so famous and being one of the most sold and most revenue making series that putting that in one bucket as an entertainment product. But when you say interactive simulation, that was a lot, right from learning how to drive a car, to the pilot who's learning how to fly a flight is all coming under that umbrella. So huge. And the more we push the boundaries in this industry, and the more the companies come in and create products to make things better in terms of training, I think the better it is for the world in all areas will be will have a safer, more efficient, more productive, and what industries any take any. And I think that is what interactive simulation is all about. Correct? Correct. Correct. And just to add one more line to what you said just
now that you were saying about the medical training simulation that will bring it so close to reality that will probably reduce mistakes or minimize mistakes. But I'm so sorry. Please go ahead. Oh, we have around 3000 students in India training on our platform. Wow. I wanted to share the feedback they gave us. That's what drives us to do. A lot of
students they said we are 80% of them said we are happier or we are more conscious Built in dealing with a patient now since we are plugged in, and again, we have made the mistakes here. And the format with which we give them us, we have something called a train mode, or they can train this, you can do mistakes, we will make sure you don't make mistakes i Free mode, or evaluation mode where they can do what they want, they can make mistakes, they can go. And we tell them this is where you make mistakes. So since they have done it 10 times, some students are done the same project 10 times or 10 times till they get confident. And then when they go to the bishop, they're very sure this is the procedure. This is how I wrote this is a question I
have, that has made them very confident. Tools, what actually surprised us even more, this is what our goal was. But the surprising part was they said they're able to retain more money for viva. Wow, that was a bonus we got and I mean, we
didn't really expect that much. But students are very happy with the product. And I think that is what has driven us so far. I'm starting with one university, now we are across five, six universities, and 1000s of students are there. And they
still continue to give us feedback. And we are still trying to make it better and better. mazing amazing. You know, on that note, I just want to say what an incredible conversation this has been, from my perspective. You know, I think I've learned so many new things about gaming from you. I am going to now download as soon as I finished my conversation with you, your very, very famous and successful Indian Train Simulator and try it out myself.
And hopefully that will introduce me at my age to gaming in a different way. Thank you so much for speaking to me about your own journey about the way you are interacting with so many different people. Thank you for all the work that you're doing in your medical training simulation, supporting so many students. And thank you so much for sharing your own perspectives. Thank you again, and good luck to you. Thank you so much for this great podcast. I mean, I think I said more than what I thought I would say here because the questions were so on point. And it was nice having a chat with you. And
I'd love to hear from you about the feedback of the game. I will do that. Thank you so much. Thank you for listening to The Brand Called You videocast and podcast platform that brings your knowledge, experience and wisdom of hundreds of successful individuals from around the world. To visit our website www.tbcy.in to watch and listen to the story but many more individuals. You can also follow us on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Just search for The Brand Called You
2024-07-18 15:10
