How Random42 is revolutionizing medical visualization with Unity

Note: This article contains medical images that may be uncomfortable for some.

Driving positive outcomes

Unity-powered interactive applications created by Random42 are demonstrating clear value for healthcare enterprises, professionals, and patients worldwide. Key results and benefits include:

- 200% increase in sales representatives' engagement time with healthcare professionals vs using traditional visual aids.

- Reaching audiences via multiple digital channels with high efficiency.

- Reusable digital assets and cross-platform deployment.

- 100% success rate in hitting approval and release deadlines with Unity apps.

- Greater empathy-building through patient-focused narratives.

- Stronger understanding of medical science.

- More engaging education and training tools.

For healthcare professionals and patients, Random42’s apps bring clarity to complex science. For enterprises, they deliver measurable business impact and cost efficiencies. And for Random42, Unity enables a future of ever-more engaging and accessible medical storytelling.

Making complex science accessible with extended reality: A Unity case study

Random42 Scientific Communication is a London-based, global leader in scientific storytelling. Since 1992, they’ve specialized in creating high-end medical animations and digital content for pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and healthcare organizations.

As medicine grows more advanced and treatments become more targeted, the need to clearly communicate how diseases progress and therapies work is intensifying. Random42 is meeting this demand by reimagining medical visualization with real-time 3D technology-creating experiences that educate, engage, and inspire. By blending art, science, 3D graphics, and interactivity, they are creating applications that not only educate but also encourage curiosity and empathy.

Today, they use Unity to deliver scalable, cross-platform solutions, from gamified Mechanism of Disease (MoD) and Mechanism of Action (MoA) explorations to XR-powered congress installations and patient education tools.

This case study explores how Unity helps support Random42’s innovation pipeline, the impact on healthcare enterprises and patients, and what’s next for XR in medical storytelling.

Breaking down barriers in medical visualization

The healthcare industry is experiencing rapid growth, driven by an aging population and increasing demand for innovative treatments. With many new therapies and research areas emerging, the challenge of communicating complex science clearly is reaching new heights.

Yet, medical concepts are often so intricate and complex that even experts struggle to fully grasp them. Traditional tools, such as static slides or pre-rendered cinematic animations, can only go so far in making science understandable and engaging.

Random42 recognized the opportunity to go further. Building on its foundation in high-end medical animation, the company set out to create interactive and immersive solutions that would:

- Simplify complex science for diverse audiences

- Enhance scientific storytelling with real-time exploration

- Offer new ways to educate, train, and engage across healthcare

Instead of replacing traditional animations, Random42’s interactive applications extend their value by repurposing detailed scientific visuals into experiences that allow users to explore complex biology firsthand. These experiences are now in high demand, not only for education but also for sales enablement, patient engagement, and marketing.

Immersive tech and animated visualization bring the hidden world of the human body to life

Random42’s established methodology centers on cinematic, pre-rendered medical animations created by their team of talented VFX artists, who utilize tools such as 3D Studio Max, Redshift, and Houdini.

Increasingly, clients are seeking out these interactive capabilities, identifying real-time technologies as a key growth area for the business.

Using Unity, Random42 has developed a suite of interactive applications and XR experiences, including:

- Mechanism of Action (MoA) visualizations: exploring how drugs work inside the body.

- Mechanism of Disease (MoD) experiences: raising awareness of disease pathology.

- Gamified applications: turning biology into interactive challenges.

- XR deployments: across PC, iOS, Android, Meta Quest, Apple Vision Pro, and Pufferfish displays.

These experiences let users zoom into complex biological structures and trigger processes themselves, making the science both interactive and memorable. They are showcased at global congresses and widely used for patient education, internal training, and sales enablement.

From molecules to multi-platform: Unity at the core of Random42’s innovative applications

Unity is at the heart of Random42’s immersive offerings. As their engine of choice, Unity enables the team to deliver multi-platform healthcare applications-whether showcased at global congresses, deployed in sales meetings, or used for patient education.

Random42’s team of five Unity developers work closely with more than eighty artists, including Hollywood VFX experts, and a dedicated, PhD-qualified science team to ensure every experience is not only visually stunning but also scientifically accurate. Together, they’ve built an efficient real-time pipeline that transforms complex biological processes into accessible, interactive applications.

For microscopic real-time cells and proteins, Random42 turns to Unity shadergraph and render features to approximate the look of materials used in their pre-rendered animations. Their organic meshes are created by their 3D team. These are sent to Houdini where any cleanup and optimization is done while various textures are generated. A custom subsurface scattering node in shadergraph uses these textures, including a mesh thickness texture along with scene lighting information. These are combined to establish the look of the asset. It’s here, especially in their visual development, where science and artistry combine.

Render features are also used to efficiently provide custom rendering to the camera. Various additional effects to the scene, such as color grading and more stylized effects, can be layered on as desired. In some cases, Random42 will use the post-processing stack but they love the flexibility of working with Unity's scriptable render pipelines.

From an engineering perspective, Unity XR Foundation and AR Foundation are key parts of Random42's approach. By using Unity build targets and designing interactions with multiple platforms in mind, they're increasingly finding it achievable to help their clients explore the benefits of going multi-platform.

Key Unity solutions, tools, and features include:

- Unity Editor: foundation for building, testing, and deploying multi-platform interactive experiences.

- Unity UI toolkit & UGUI: building intuitive, UI-heavy applications.

- Unity physics & particle system: simulating interactions at the cellular level.

- Unity Timeline: sequencing voiceover, visuals, and animations in narrative-driven projects.

- Unity cloud services: leaderboards for gamified applications and analytics for tracking performance.

- Unity Asset Store: rapid prototyping and open-source plugins.

- Unity Asset Manager (in adoption): streamlining asset creation and enabling clients to reuse their assets across different campaigns.

"Unity’s Asset Store, in addition to the many open-source plugins available for it, have allowed us to rapidly prototype in areas we had no prior experience or technical solutions for", explained Bradley Stapelton, a Unity Developer at Random42.

By building their applications in Unity, Random42 has created a range of core approaches that help users explore medical biology, ranging from interactive UI elements to complex molecular simulations. This work, built on top of Unity's efficient platform, helps Random42 embody best practices at every turn and allows the customization necessary to deliver bespoke one-of-a-kind applications across countless medical fields.

Capturing imagination, inspiring understanding

Random42’s Unity-powered applications are transforming how science is experienced across healthcare, from patient education to professional training and enterprise marketing. What once required pages of slides can now be explored interactively, allowing users to see and even initiate biological processes for themselves.

For healthcare professionals, these experiences create a deeper appreciation for complex science and, in some cases, greater empathy toward patients. Medical students gain a safe, engaging way to build understanding, while patients walk away better informed about their own conditions and treatment options.

Enterprises also benefit. With Unity’s cross-platform functionality, pharmaceutical and biotech companies can deploy applications seamlessly across PC, mobile, and XR, reaching wider audiences while saving time and cost.

The most telling impact comes from the audiences themselves. Patients and professionals are captivated—many asking, “Where was this technology when I was in school?” Even seasoned specialists are struck by the chance to explore the human body in a way they never imagined possible.

Looking ahead: expanding the frontiers of medical visualization

Random42 supports clients deploying across multiple interactive campaigns. In response, they are expanding their pipeline with Unity Asset Manager to help clients reuse and repurpose initiatives across a variety of deliverables and campaigns. This enables them to support coherent multi-year initiatives with a focus on coordination, scientific accuracy, and artistic quality.

Their vision goes beyond human healthcare, bringing immersive scientific education and storytelling to new markets and ultimately making complex science more accessible to audiences everywhere.