Emre Baydogan

A Virtual Operating Room for Context-Relevant Training

A fully immersive virtual environment simulating an operating room is described. The Virtual Operating Room (VOR) is a platform that integrates procedural medical simulators into a coherent, context-relevant training environment. Trainees interact with a surgical team comprised of real and/or virtual team members (e.g., attending surgeon, anesthesiologist, scrub technician, and circulating nurse). All characters are defined by their procedural knowledge and personality. The interface capitalizes on natural interactions and is largely driven by voice recognition and text-to-speech software. A custom designed controller manages the VOR functionality, rendering platform, speech recognition, and text-to-speech generation modules. The VOR allows instructors and researchers to simulate the physical and social context in which surgical procedures are performed. The VOR can be used to train surgical teams and address issues in judgment, decision making, team dynamics, and interpersonal skills. Most importantly, the VOR allows medical teams to train the way they operate without putting patients at risk.

Common scene definition framework for constructing virtual worlds

Developing VR applications is a challenging and rewarding endeavor, complicated by the variety and complexity of the available VR platforms. Furthermore, efficiencies realized in a specific platform may be lost if the application is migrated to a different platform. In this paper, we introduce and investigate the common scene definition framework (CSDF), a modeling representation consisting of a superset of capabilities taken from a collection of existing VR platforms. The purpose of CSDF is to serve a quick prototype framework for synthesizing an interactive virtual environment for a particular platform while attempting to optimize the translation to leverage strengths of the target platform. In an implementation independent fashion, the CSDF is envisioned to extensibly represent all geometry, appearance, interaction, and behavior for a VR application. Finally, an example is provided for demonstration of these basic ideas among the VRML 1.0, VRML97 and Java3D platforms.