vrClinicals for Nursing, a groundbreaking VR training application that simulates lifelike multi-patient clinical scenarios, is currently in its early adoption phase and already delivering clear value to nursing educators:
Key results and benefits include:
For nursing schools, vrClinicals offers a transformative way to deliver clinical experience. For students, it’s a lifeline to practice in a safe space. And for Laerdal Medical, it’s a stepping stone to even broader innovation.
Closing the transition gap from nursing to practice with AR/VR
Laerdal Medical is a global leader in healthcare solutions, dedicated to helping save lives through innovative products and services. With a legacy spanning over 80 years, Laerdal Medical has a broad portfolio of medical training and therapy tools—from high-fidelity manikins and simulation systems to emergency care equipment—used by hospitals, universities, and first responders around the world.
The company is recognized for its commitment to patient safety and improved health outcomes through realistic, evidence-based training. In recent years, Laerdal has expanded this mission into the digital realm, blending physical and virtual learning environments to meet the evolving demands of modern healthcare education.
Today, Laerdal is leveraging Unity’s real-time 3D technology to create immersive, scalable training solutions that empower healthcare professionals and students to build critical clinical skills with confidence. The solutions address a pressing challenge in healthcare education—ensuring consistent, high-quality clinical training for all learners, regardless of access to physical placements.
Developed in partnership with Wolters Kluwer Health and the National League for Nursing, vrClinicals for Nursing, provides nursing students with highly realistic, interactive clinical experiences in virtual reality—helping bridge the gap between classroom learning and real-world care.
Video courtesy Laerdal Medical
In this case study, we dive into how Laerdal Medical and their partners are delivering clinical training at scale by blending physical simulation and immersive virtual reality to train the next generation of clinicians—contributing to better preparedness, safer care, and improved outcomes across the continuum of care.
Healthcare is growing more complex—and the systems used to train new professionals haven’t kept pace. Nursing schools and clinical programs around the world find it more and more difficult to provide consistent, high-quality training experiences amid shrinking access to hospital placements, overburdened faculty, and rising student numbers.
Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, securing hands-on experience in real clinical environments was becoming more difficult. Then, lockdowns and staffing shortages exposed just how vulnerable and unsustainable traditional training models had become. Many students were left without the exposure or experience needed to build confidence—or competence—before entering practice.
Meanwhile, healthcare professionals are expected to continuously upskill to meet the demands of modern patient care, from advanced technology to complex case management. But physical training environments alone are no longer enough.
Nursing education has relied on a mix of in-person hospital placements to ensure that students get access to relevant clinical experience before starting their professional career. While valuable, clinical experiences at hospitals are resource-intensive, and are often inconsistent and not scalable.
Laerdal’s vrClinicals for Nursing brings high-quality, repeatable clinical training into virtual reality. Built using Unity’s real-time development platform, the application enables students to assess patients, make decisions, and practice clinical skills in a safe, controlled environment—on demand.
Video courtesy Laerdal Medical.
Unlike traditional simulation, vrClinicals delivers immersive, experiential learning that mirrors the pace and complexity of a busy hospital unit. Students must care for multiple patients at once, respond to changes in patient status, and manage common interruptions—building prioritization skills and clinical judgment in high-pressure scenarios that closely resemble real-world conditions.
Complementing vrClinicals is Next Gen vSim for Nursing, a browser-based solution focused on improving the clinical judgment of nursing students as they see one patient at a time. This platform helps students develop safe, effective care plans within specific content areas, strengthening core decision-making and reinforcing clinical foundations through guided scenario-based training.
Together, the two solutions offer a comprehensive and scalable simulation strategy: vSim supports mastery of individual patient care, while vrClinicals advances readiness for dynamic, real-world practice.
Beyond nursing education, Laerdal’s broader simulation portfolio, Unity’s real-time 3D engine, continues to evolve. Laerdal is exploring how mixed-reality simulations can help address learning objectives in maternity care, and the HEROS CPR training program has been developed for home responders in Korea.
Whether used independently or as part of a blended curriculum, Laerdal’s simulation tools are designed to scale access, standardize outcomes, and deliver experiential learning that transforms classroom knowledge into clinical competence.
Behind Laerdal Medical’s ability to deliver lifelike, flexible, and scalable healthcare training lies a powerful technology stack built on Unity’s real-time 3D development platform. From VR and MR-based clinical scenarios to community CPR training and mixed-reality birthing simulations, Unity enables Laerdal to bridge the gap between physical and digital learning environments.
Unity also plays a critical role in the early stages of product development. Its flexible, C#-based architecture allows Laerdal’s teams to rapidly prototype new features and iterate on proven simulation logic from legacy systems—accelerating time-to-value while maintaining technical continuity.
Developers at Laerdal use Unity’s extensible environment to build immersive simulations, while artists and designers leverage ShaderGraph, Universal Render Pipeline (URP), and custom-built Unity Editor tools to create clinically accurate, responsive training content.
Here’s how Unity powers every layer of Laerdal’s simulation ecosystem:
1. Cross-platform deployment Accessible across Meta Quest headsets, Windows PCs, and Mac computers, Laerdal Medical uses Unity’s cross-platform capabilities and visual scripting tools across products like vrClinicals for Nursing, ManikinMR, and the HEROS CPR training program to deliver a consistent, high-fidelity experience regardless of hardware.
2. Visual fidelity and performance Tools like Universal Render Pipeline (URP), ShaderGraph, and Application SpaceWarp allow Laerdal to deliver high-quality graphics and maintain smooth performance—even in complex VR scenarios.
3. VR integration OpenXR and OculusXR plugins ensure compatibility with a range of VR hardware, supporting immersive experiences critical for modern clinical training.
4. Custom development workflows Using Unity’s extensibility, Laerdal has developed in-editor tools that automate QA, streamline scenario creation, and accelerate prototyping—all while maintaining consistency across projects.
5. Codebase reuse and system integration Unity’s support for C# allowed Laerdal to port simulation logic from earlier Haxe-based systems, preserving proven functionality while optimizing for modern hardware.
6. Scalable, team-wide collaborationOver 30 team members across Laerdal’s product lines—including developers, 3D artists, technical designers, and product specialists—collaborate in Unity to build and maintain training applications for diverse healthcare needs.
Video courtesy Laerdal Medical
From rapid prototyping to global deployment, Unity gives Laerdal the flexibility and power to innovate fast, iterate confidently, and meet the evolving demands of healthcare education with immersive, high-impact learning tools.
As Laerdal Medical’s simulation portfolio grew, so did the need for a more structured and scalable way to manage its growing library of 3D content. Previously, assets were stored in Git LFS, with individual artists preparing content directly within product-specific Unity projects—often leading to duplicated efforts, outdated versions, and misaligned workflows across teams.
Unity Asset Manager (UAM) is changing that.
Now being rolled out across Laerdal’s product lines, UAM acts as a centralized interface between 3D content creators and development teams. Artists upload fully QA’d assets once to the Asset Manager, where they become easily discoverable, reusable, and version-controlled across any Unity project in the company. This reduces friction between teams, improves traceability, and ensures content meets quality standards before it ever reaches the build pipeline.
“Reusability, traceability, quality assurance, and discoverability were all pain points before,” says the Laerdal team. “With Unity Asset Manager, we’ve simplified all of it.”
By ditching raw FBX files in favor of native Unity asset formats—with meshes, materials, skeletons, and animations stored separately—Laerdal has also optimized its dependency graph, making it easier to manage updates and avoid cross-project conflicts.
Although in the onboarding phase at Laerdal Medical, UAM is already streamlining how cross-functional teams collaborate, and it’s expected to save time, reduce duplication, and enable Laerdal to scale its simulation content pipeline without adding overhead.
With Unity Asset Manager, Laerdal is laying the foundation for sustainable growth—ensuring that its immersive learning solutions can evolve quickly, scale efficiently, and maintain the high-quality experience healthcare education demands.
Nursing students face growing caseloads, time pressure, and high-stakes decision-making—skills that are difficult to practice in traditional classrooms. vrClinicals recreates that intensity in VR.
Learners take on complex scenarios involving multiple patients, prioritizing care and applying clinical judgment in real time. Immediate feedback and performance analytics help students understand the impact of their choices and iterate on their decision-making. It’s a safe space to make mistakes and learn from them, critical in building both competence and confidence.
Institutions benefit too: standardized training, easier scheduling, and scalable implementation lower costs while improving student preparedness.
Video courtesy Laerdal Medical
Dr. Susan Forneris, the Director of the Department of Innovation in Education Excellence at the National League for Nursing, and Dr. Michelle Moulton, Assistant Professor at Johns Hopkins University, respectively, are strong advocates of the game-changing potential for vrClinicals for Nursing.
Looking ahead, Laerdal Medical is focused on expanding vrClinicals for Nursing with additional clinical scenarios and deeper layers of complexity—ensuring learners are exposed to the kinds of real-world challenges they’ll face from day one. With more rigorous automated testing powered by the Unity Test Framework and ongoing performance optimization across devices, the goal is to deliver consistently seamless, high-quality simulation at scale.
From patient safety to emergency care, and from nursing schools to community CPR programs, Unity will continue to play a central role in helping Laerdal reach more learners, more efficiently—with experiences that are standardized, accessible, and impactful.
“Unity is a key enabler of our mission to improve patient outcomes by providing healthcare professionals and students with the best possible training tools,” says the Laerdal team. “
By uniting decades of clinical expertise with cutting-edge real-time 3D technology, Laerdal and their partners are scaling something far greater than software. It’s scaling confidence. It’s scaling readiness. And ultimately—it’s scaling the ability to save lives, wherever care begins.
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