Editorial: Immersive Media in Connected Health

According to Fortune Business Insights, the market size of extended reality (XR), a blanket term comprising augmented, virtual, and augmented reality (AR/VR/MR), is estimated to grow to 30.4 billion USD by 2027 from an estimated 1.56 billion USD (1). This simple figure outlines more succinctly than any literary review the explosive growth of XR in the healthcare sector. With XR being only one vista in the whole landscape of immersive media in connected health, the scope of this research study becomes readily apparent. Medical image fusion, educational immersive visualizations, web-based virtual scenarios, and XR interventions for mental and physical health are all parts of the research ecosystem of this topic. This special issue aims at contemporary immersive media research study as it pertains to healthcare. From the whole spectrum of XR to a diverse landscape of image processing and fusion, educational simulations, and technical/usability issues in proliferating immersive media in the whole connected healthcare ecosystem, this special issue aims to explore both the technologies of immersive media and their impact on contemporary healthcare. On the educational front, virtual patients (VPs), with current web-based rapid development and deployment cycles, are ubiquitously present in the healthcare curricula. Meaningfully combining immersive three-dimensional (3D) virtual environments with VPs leads medical training to new aspects of open social learning. Learners can absorb educational content at their own pace and engage in an experiential way and not only feel the presence but also affect the sense of presence in the training event (2). Developing such resources and repurposing them for virtual reality (VR) are a rather straightforward task, that is, one, however, that must adhere to sound game-informed design principles and narrative techniques to achieve measurable impact both in learning outcomes and engagement (3). However, education is not the only healthcare field that XR applies. Preoperative surgical planning using mixed reality (4) and 3D prints for patient-specific surgical approaches are proliferating (5). Haptic controls in conjunction with XR visualization and novel medical image co-registration and fusion are becoming common practices in surgical training and preoperative preparation. Beyond “hard” medicine applications, the whole spectrum of immersive health is benefited through healthcare interventions. The general public and targeted sensitive groups of people are benefiting from physical and mental wellness interventions based on immersive media such as XR, m-health, or even virtual environment ecosystems (6).