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Effective medical and biomedical engineering education is an important problem. Traditional methods are difficult and costly. That is why Virtual Reality is often used for that purpose. Educational medical VR is a well-developed IT field, with many available hardware and software solutions. Current solutions are prepared without methodological approach. As a result, each VR system used for medical purposes is unique - there is no standardization, which leads to increased development time and costs. The paper presents an original methodology that can be used for building immersive virtual reality (VR) applications dedicated to training medical skills. The methodology is named “knowledge-oriented medical virtual reality” (KOMVR), as it uses basic knowledge-engineering tools during processes of planning, building and verification of interactive educational solutions. The paper shows successive stages of the methodology and the tools used for its execution. Effectiveness of the proposed methodology is illustrated with a simple example – a human body atlas. Major time reduction can be achieved while using the methodology - time reduction in the presented case was from 50 to 14 working days. The proposed innovative approach can increase effectiveness of preparation of educational VR solutions in medicine, but also in other branches of engineering.

Virtual reality (VR) may be used as an innovative educational tool. However, in order to fully exploit its potential, it is essential to achieve the effect of immersion. To more completely submerge the user in a virtual environment, it is necessary to ensure that the user’s actions are directly translated into the image generated by the application, which can be achieved by means of various devices, such as tracking systems and VR headsets, as well as haptic devices. Recently, VR has become the focus of e-entertainment, which has resulted in the appearance on the market of numerous, low-cost peripheral devices. The paper discusses the examples of potential applications and steps necessary to adapt low-cost devices to immersive educational applications.