Galderma had already heavily invested in the use of cadavers and other training labs, but when they polled their injector trainees, they weren’t retaining and learning the information as much as Galderma wanted. Our team saw an opportunity to adopt new adult learning principles by utilizing leading-edge technology to enhance their customer’s educational opportunities. The creative idea was to design a virtual, interactive cadaver to better educate trainees. Galderma Interactive Anatomy (GIA) is a motion-based Virtual-Reality (VR) experience designed to educate the Galderma Aesthetics Injector Network (GAIN) on the foundations of facial anatomy and where their products should be injected, to ensure the safest and most natural outcomes for patients.

The VR experience utilized the HTC Vive Cosmos headset and a motion-based platform with two degrees of freedom (DOF) to take trainees on a virtual roller coaster journey. Participants are welcomed into Galderma’s lab by a female character named GIA, brought microscopically close to explore GIA’s face and then shrunk down to explore the internal anatomy. Layers of her skin, muscle and ligaments peel back to show safe areas where the Galderma products should be applied and key areas to avoid. After reviewing each region, quiz questions pop-up on screen for the trainee to answer. The experience ends by returning to the lab and their score is displayed on a leaderboard, creating a fun- yet competitive- environment. This immersion makes for a memorable experience, helping the participants apply what they’ve learned much quicker than previous training methods and retaining the information afterwards.

The VR experience took around 4 months to create using Unreal engine. It was first implemented at Galderma’s National Sales Meeting in January 2020 to energize their Aesthetics sales force and give them a sneak peak of what was coming to the large Train the Trainer event planned for that spring. However, with the unexpected arrival of Covid, that plan had to pivot. The team moved to webinar formats and shared a video fly-through of the VR experience through webinars.

Metrics revealed that 91.4% of participants would recommend the GAIN Anatomy Training to fellow colleagues. Based on these positive results, the team is working to have the fully interactive version of the experience available on a microsite for continued learning on-demand to be available to the thousands of aesthetics injectors worldwide to improve their anatomy-based education. Galderma also plans to continue using the VR experience for future in-person events.