Not all Second Life is about being pretty, or about not being pretty, or about fun. Some of Second Life is serious. You can learn things here. This is where the promise of the metaverse starts to come into play. Sure, a website is good for that, but the web dates back to 1991. The metaverse is much younger than that.

So this brings us to The Heart Murmer Sim: Cardiac Auscultation Training Concept.

This is a great little building. It isn’t full of flashy textures or rotating or otherwise exotic prims, it is just full of useful information about heart murmurs.

There are four stations where you can listen to the various sounds healthy and unhealthy hearts make. There are “diagnosis” notecards that explain the condition. To listen, you touch one of the colored circles on the chest of the patient to hear what you would hear at that spot on a real body.

A ventricular septal defect (or VSD) is a defect in the ventricular septum (the wall dividing the left and right ventricles of the heart).

The ventricular septum consists of a muscular (inferior) and membranous portion (superior). The membranous portion (which is close to the atrioventricular node) is most commonly affected.

Congenital VSDs are collectively the most common congenital heart defect.

At the end you have two patients you get to diagnose yourself. Clearly this is a research tool. One takes a survery on entering and on exiting, and this data is communicated to the owner. The same is true for the “patients:” we are told that our results are being sent, but we never learn if we were correct or not! That was the only disappointing part of the simulation for me.

The Heart Murmer Sim is the brainchild of Jeremy Kapumpo, Jeremy Kemp in RL, an instructional designer working in San Jose State’s eCampus. There is a notecard with his RL email address in the Center, but I’m not comfortable placing that here. Contact him via SL for more information.

So grab a stethoscope and head on over to The Heart Murmer Sim and learn some about what makes you tick!