Touch My Heart: An Enhanced Version of a Real Heart
8 min readIt sounds like a sci-fi movie: floating anatomical models, holographic interfaces, and data-rich visuals you can manipulate with a gesture.
But this isn't fiction anymore. It's already happening.
At SoftServe, we've turned that vision into reality. Our R&D team partnered with expert cardiologists and Ultraleap to create Touch My Heart — an interactive virtual heart designed to transform how we collaborate, teach, and engage with patients.
In this article, we'll explore the technology behind Touch My Heart and unpack its most promising use cases.
WHAT IS TOUCH MY HEART AND HOW DOES IT WORK?
Touch My Heart is an extended reality (XR) experience developed by SoftServe’s R&D team in collaboration with expert cardiologists and Ultraleap. It brings a human heart to life in a fully interactive, sensory-rich environment, allowing users to see, touch, and engage with a digital twin of the heart in real time.
This experience blends mixed reality visuals, spatial audio, and haptic feedback to simulate real-world interaction in a deeply immersive digital space:
Magic Leap, a leading AR headset, projects the digital heart into the user’s surroundings, anchoring it directly in their field of view.
Digital twin technology replicates anatomical structures in high detail, providing a realistic environment that mimics both the look and function of the human heart.
Hand tracking recognizes and maps the user’s hand movements, allowing for intuitive gesture-based interaction in a mixed reality without controllers.
The audio experience is fully immersive, so users hear sounds coming from different directions, just like in the real world. They can:
Identify where sounds are coming from, whether static or moving, and connect them to the visual model.
Interact with the heart model using both sight and sound as cues.
Navigate around the heart by changing position and orientation, with audio adjusting dynamically to their movements.
Another important feature of Touch My Heart is haptic feedback, powered by Ultraleap, a company specializing in hand tracking and ultrasound-based tactile technology.
Ultraleap’s system allows users to feel touch in mid-air, delivering realistic sensations without physical contact. By using ultrasound waves, it creates pressure points and vibrations on the user’s hands, simulating the sensation of touching real objects. This haptic feedback adds an extra layer of immersion, engaging the user’s sense of touch and making the virtual heart model feel more lifelike.
Built by people who understand healthcare
Touch My Heart is a highly realistic, medical mixed reality experience designed to simulate the physical and visual characteristics of the human heart. What makes it special is the team behind it — a cross-functional collaboration between engineers, designers, and healthcare professionals.
With guidance from expert cardiologists and powered by SoftServe’s deep experience in healthcare and life sciences, Touch My Heart was created to address a real need: making medical training, education, and collaboration more immersive and effective. And this is just the beginning — the technology behind it opens the door to exciting possibilities in personalized care and the future of healthcare innovation.
HOW TO USE TOUCH MY HEART
Touch My Heart was built to be more than just impressive technology — it’s meant to be used. Whether you're a clinician, educator, or innovator, this XR experience gives you a powerful, hands-on way to explore and understand the human heart like never before.
Here’s how it works in practice:
Hear the heart beating
Experience the difference between normal and abnormal heart rhythms — like arrhythmia or aortic stenosis — through spatial audio. The immersive sound environment lets users not just hear the heartbeat but understand the spatial relationship between different heart structures based on where the sound is coming from.
Cut and slice
Get a detailed view inside the heart. Users can slice through the digital twin to explore chambers, valves, arteries, and vessels in high detail. This view reveals how the heart walls move through different phases of the cardiac cycle, offering a deeper understanding of cardiac anatomy, function, and potential abnormalities.
Visuals, sound, and haptics work together to simulate a realistic and sensory-rich experience. This helps build muscle memory and strengthen cognitive understanding.
Interact with a realistic model
Explore the heart from every angle. Zoom in on critical structures, rotate the model, and manipulate different parts to better understand how everything connects. The hyper-realistic 3D rendering turns a complex organ into something tangible, making it easier to study, explain, and work with.
Interactive 3D heart model use cases
Touch My Heart is designed to integrate seamlessly into a variety of settings — from classrooms and clinics to research labs and innovation hubs. Here’s how it can make a real impact:
Healthcare professionals can explore a shared, realistic 3D model of the heart to discuss cases, brainstorm ideas, or plan procedures. With multi-angle views and cross-sectional insights, this tool supports team-based decision-making.
Touch My Heart creates an immersive learning environment where students can examine the heart’s structure and behavior — normal and abnormal — using advanced sensory inputs. It goes beyond traditional materials, helping learners build stronger mental models and clinical intuition.
By showing patients a life-like digital heart model, healthcare providers can explain complex conditions or upcoming procedures more clearly. This makes patient conversations more visual, interactive, and understandable, ultimately boosting trust and engagement.
WRAP UP
Touch My Heart is a reliable, working foundation you can build on. Whether you're looking to enhance medical education, drive innovation in patient care and rehabilitation, or explore new frontiers in personalized healthcare, this technology is ready to adapt and evolve with your needs. Want to see it in action or explore how it could fit into your roadmap? Let’s talk.
Start a conversation with us