Alder Hey Launches 360 Virtual Hospital Tour
Alder Hey has launched an expanded 360° virtual tour to help children, young people and families feel more prepared and less anxious ahead of coming to visit.
Funded by Alder Hey Children’s Charity, the newly enhanced tour is designed to improve the experience of visiting Alder Hey by allowing children and families to explore key areas before they arrive.
For many children, particularly those with sensory sensitivities or anxiety, visiting a hospital can feel overwhelming. The virtual tour helps reduce uncertainty by familiarising young patients with both clinical and non-clinical spaces in advance, supporting their wellbeing and helping them feel more comfortable on the day of their appointment.
The virtual tour aims to:
- improve the experience of visiting Alder Hey
- help families understand where to go and what different areas look like
- reduce anxiety by making hospital spaces feel more familiar before arrival
The newly expanded model now includes 52 new embedded videos, bringing the total across the tour to 110. It also features avatars of staff and young people, explainers videos by members of Alder Hey’s Youth Forum, along with enhanced signage to help users navigate the site more easily and understand what to expect in different areas.
A wide range of additional clinical, research and community spaces have been added across the Alder Hey campus and beyond, with charity funded features throughout the hospital being signposted by an Oli the Oliphant icon. These include the MediCinema, the Roost Creatures sculpture, bronze statue artwork by artist Lucy Casson, various distraction technologies, Sunflower House and the Catkin Centre, The Alder Centre, the Research Institute, as well as many others.
By enabling children and families to experience the journey of their visit ahead of time, the tour helps ensure they arrive at appointments feeling calmer and more confident. It also supports hospital staff by reducing phone calls about facilities, accessibility, parking and directions, while helping solve the challenge of wayfinding once families are inside the building.
The tour is powered by Matterport’s state-of-the-art spatial capture technology, using 3D cameras to create a photorealistic 360° digital twin of the hospital environment. This allows patients to explore spaces from any web-enabled device, in high-quality 4K resolution.
The experience is brought to life through a bespoke interactive overlay, enabling the tour to be enriched with engaging media content such as behind-the-scenes videos with staff and Youth Forum members, text, PDFs, sound files and more. Custom-designed for healthcare, this approach is helping to improve patient engagement, communication and child-centred care.
Each area can be accessed through one link, with additional options available for families who wish to explore specific spaces in more detail.
You can take the 360 tour via the link below!
