The advent of virtual environments is presenting new ways of training tomorrow’s workforce. Virtual environments offer numerous benefits in training applications. First, virtual environments allow extensive user interactions in a very convenient and natural manner. This interaction is greatly beneficial for increasing the user’s retention of spatial information compared to text-based or video-b...

BACKGROUND AND STUDY AIMS Skills in gastrointestinal endoscopy mainly depend on experience and practice. Training on endoscopy simulators may decrease the time needed to reach competency in endoscopy. The purpose of the study was to determine whether the GI-Mentor, a virtual reality endoscopy simulator, can distinguish between beginners and experts in endoscopy and to assess whether training im...

BACKGROUND Advances in virtual endoscopy simulators have paralleled an interest in medical simulation for gastrointestinal endoscopy training. OBJECTIVE The primary objective was to determine whether the virtual endoscopy simulator training could improve the performance of novices. DESIGN A systematic review. SETTING Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) that compared virtual endoscopy simu...

Over the last 15 years, a virtual revolution has taken place in the use of Virtual Reality simulation technology for clinical purposes. Recent shifts in the social and scientific landscape have now set the stage for the next major movement in Clinical Virtual Reality with the “birth” of intelligent virtual humans. Seminal research and development has appeared in the creation of highly interacti...

1 Computer and Information Science and Engineering Department, University of Florida 1 Motivation and Related Works For patients recovering from injuries, or individuals that require a system to provide feedback on aspects of exercise performance, physical therapy sessions with a professional trainer can be expensive and inconvenient. In addition, privacy might be an issue for some patients who...

Training systems based on virtual reality are used in several areas, as in the medical sciences. In these systems the user is immersed into a virtual world to have realistic training through realistic interactions. In such training is important to know the quality of user's training and by didactic reasons the user must receive his/her assessment immediately after of end of training. For this r...

In this paper, we (i) introduce the Computer-Based Training (CBT) context, in particular CBT that employs Virtual Reality (VR) technologies; (ii) describe the generic environment we developed to allow the employment of immersive hardware in Web3D applications, (iii) describe the immersive Virtual Training (iVT) application we have built for the training of industrial maintenance personnel.

In this chapter we present a novel s/w system aiming to disrupt the healthcare training industry with the first Psychomotor Virtual Reality (VR) Surgical Training Solution. We provide the means for performing surgical operations in VR, thereby facilitating training in a fail-safe environment that very accurately simulates reality and significantly reduces training costs, offering surgeons and t...

During the last five years, the maturation of incident and disaster management training has evolved substantially with widespread evidence that ICT positively impacts disaster outcomes. Virtual world (VW) technology with the use of avatars appears commonplace and widely accepted as either a stand-alone or a complementary learning strategy. However, the primary goals of emergency preparedness tr...

What is often missing from many virtual worlds and training simulations is a physical sense of the confinement and constraint of the virtual environment. We present a method for providing localized cutaneous vibratory feedback to the user’s right arm. We created a sleeve of tactors linked to a real-time human model; the tactors activate to apply sensation to the corresponding body area. The hyp...