Immersive Electronic Books for Teaching Surgical Procedures

This paper reports on early progress with the use of immersive virtual reality technology for trauma surgery training. We discuss our technical goals and the application area, and then describe our work to date. The need to create a system that can be used by overworked, highly time-constrained surgeons and surgical trainees has affected many of our decisions, from the type of displays used to the focus on time navigation (to let trainees experience important moments and skip well-understood ones) to the use of easily-learned traditional 2D interfaces (vs. more demanding innovative 3D interfaces) for some of the interaction methods. This three-year research project, which is just entering its second year, is supported by a National Science Foundation Information Technology Research grant for collaborative research between groups at Brown University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.