For undergraduate nursing students, practical experience out in the field is invaluable. But it can also be nerve-racking.
“When we’re out shadowing nurses for clinicals, we have strict rules around what we’re allowed to do and not allowed to do,” says Kathryn Chapman, a senior nursing student at North Carolina Central University (NCCU). “[The patient] is a real person, so you have that concern of, what if I make a mistake?”
Now, NCCU nursing students like Chapman can learn important skills in a low-risk, low-stress environment thanks to a new “Immersive Interactive Room” at the Department of Nursing, unveiled Thursday during a ribbon-cutting ceremony and demonstration. NCCU is the first nursing program in the state to host the interactive technology.
“This immersive room represents a leap forward in how we teach, learn and simulate real-world scenarios,” said Yolanda Vanriel, NCCU Department of Nursing Chair. “With cutting edge interactive technology, our students can experience complex situations in a safe, controlled environment, strengthening their critical thinking, their cultural humility and readiness for practice in a diverse and evolving healthcare system.”
Inside the new interactive lab, projectors displayed on three adjoining walls create the immersive experience. The system comes pre-loaded with thousands of unique environments. Fans in the room can even pour in different smells, further enveloping participants in the experience.
“We can actually pipe in gas, burning rubber, or have the wind blowing,” says Tina Scott, experiential learning center director for the department. “Say we’re in the ED and we have a patient that arrives with a GI bleed, passing blood. It has a very distinct smell. We can take that scent and actually pipe it into the room.”
During the virtual tutorial, attendees got to ride along in an ambulance, take a trip to the emergency room, people watch under the Eiffel Tower, and decompress on a cozy beach, though there were no accompanying smells of saltwater or sunscreen.
The technology is a combination of 3D-enabled software and hardware that includes sounds and haptic (touch) feedback, providing students and professors with a space to create real-world scenarios in a controlled environment. Users can talk with virtual patients and review their charts.
NCCU IT Technician Michael Render worked with the product vendor, Echo Healthcare, to develop custom programs specific to the nursing program’s needs. The department plans to collaborate with other students and groups, like the art department, to build more customized assets that can be used in the immersion room. Other departments could also have the chance to leverage the technology in the future.
Noa Leger, a rising senior nursing student, and Render served as tour guides during a walkthrough of the program’s features. Large touchscreen icons appeared on the walls that the guides used to navigate the tutorial. A disembodied voice read out a greeting as information about the nursing program’s history filled the screens that stretched around the room. At the end of Thursday’s demonstration, folks in the room, including NCCU Chancellor Karrie Dixon, tested their scientific knowledge with a game of “Who Wants to be a Medical Millionaire?”
NCCU has over 100 students in the nursing program split between on-campus learning and online courses. Students come to the program in three ways: traditional four-year undergraduate students, accelerated “second-degree” students who transfer to the school with an associate’s degree, and online through the RN-to-BSN program for registered nurses looking to earn a bachelor of science degree in nursing. NCCU was the first school in the UNC System to launch an online degree program for adult learners through the Project Kitty Hawk online learning initiative.
The school began operating a similar immersive program last year through a partnership with 3B Scientific, which provides the nursing program with life-like, responsive mannequins that students use in conjunction with VR headsets to work through various training modules. The immersion room adds another layer to the training, taking it out of the theoretical.
“With the immersion room, the VR and our mannequins, it’s not a living, breathing person, so you can practice and learn correct practices and build proper habits and safe habits before you interact with a real person,” Chapman says.
The technology also saves the department money, Scott says. The flexibility and customization capabilities allow the faculty to simulate thousands of scenarios without the need to build additional spaces in the physical world. If a class wants to simulate performing surgery in an emergency department, or making a house call to a patient’s apartment, there’s an immersive environment for that. Like Leonardo DiCaprio in Inception, the boundaries are only limited by what the students can dream up.
“You don’t have to build a whole lot of rooms when you can actually just build your scenarios,” Scott says.
Overall student enrollment at NCCU has grown in the past few years. Online enrollment in particular is up 22 percent compared to 2024, and pre-nursing, both in-person and online, is one of the school’s most popular programs. In a competitive higher education market, unique assets like the immersion room and the school’s online degree programs are vital recruiting tools.
“It will let students know that they’re going to a university that’s not behind the eight ball,” Scott says. “They’re going to a university that has cutting edge technology that’s going to train them using that technology. So therefore, they’re going to graduate already ahead of the game.”
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