DEMO
Dr. Heidi Phillips, DVM, Janet Sinn-Hanlon, Alejandro Andrade, Carter Boyce, Alex Jerez
The time and cost of creating a VR application of an entire surgery with the polygonal density and texture detail needed to be educationally valuable to a veterinary student is prohibitive in a university setting. Creating medically accurate, believable models, textures and animations requires a team that minimally includes experienced professionals, such as a content expert - experienced surgical instructor, medical 3D illustrators for modeling, UV mapping and texturing, riggers and 3D animators, and a dedicated programming engineer. Rather than try and create a VR application of an entire surgery, downloaded to a headset, we propose creating small Unity or 3D viewer applets, of only the key steps in a surgical procedure. The applets would be viewed through either VR glasses or a headset tethered to a dedicated high-end computer workstation and embedded into a multimedia online course. Tethering to a high-end computer would provide the GPUs needed to run applets with high polygon counts, detailed texture maps, and vertex animations that are required to accurately represent a surgical procedure. Segmenting the surgical VR experience into tethered applets allows us to test their educational effectiveness with students before incorporating them into a more comprehensive totally immersive application.