Virtual reality brings home horror of hospital attacks

GENEVA: Doctors and nurses bustle round a patient with a broken leg, when suddenly there is an explosion, darkness and panicked screams. Now imagine that patient is you.

That is the experience the MSF medical charity is aiming for with a new virtual reality film it is testing and planning to get before decision makers, military commanders and soldiers on the ground.

The Doctors Without Borders group, known by the French acronym MSF, is launching the film in a bid to counter surging numbers of attacks on medical facilities and medical workers in conflict zones in places like Syria, Yemen and Afghanistan.

“This kind of tool, the 360-degree VR film, could be very, very useful in sensitising fighter jet pilots for instance” to what is at stake, explained Francois Delfosse, who heads an MSF project on hospital attacks and protection of medical missions.

And indeed, once you slip on the VR headset and large headphones, you are there, in the middle of a bustling trauma ward, looking down at your outstretched broken leg and waiting for one of the doctors to tend to you.

When the explosion hits, you are stuck in the middle of a darkened corridor, unable to move as bloodied people run screaming past and staff pound frantically on the chest of a person stretched out on the floor in front of you.

If you turn your head, you can see more people running, including an older man, his face caked with dirt and blood, holding what looks like a lifeless baby.

“There was this sense of powerlessness,” explained Irene Raciti, of the Red Cross, who volunteered to help test the MSF film on the sidelines of a film festival in Geneva last week focused on human rights. Sitting in a secluded room with the headset and earphones on, Raciti twisted and turned her head in different directions, at one point gaspin.