Electronic
Books for the Tele-immersion Age
University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Our
goal is to allow surgeons to witness and explore (in time and space) a past
surgical procedure as if they were there, with the added benefit of instruction
from the original surgeon or another instructor, as well as integrated 3D illustrations,
annotations, and relevant medical metadata.
Image
courtesy Andrei State, UNC
High-Fidelity Scene Reconstruction
For the time-varying surgical event data to be meaningful for review and annotation
it must be captured and displayed with very high spatial and temporal fidelity.
Effective immersive 3D illustration
styles
The trauma surgeons on our team believe that important opportunities for improved
training are available by deviating from purely realistic reconstructions and
applying visualization enhancements such as stylized, illustrative 3D reconstructions
of captured trauma surgeries. This is more challenging than merely tweaking
2D illustration techniques for monoscopic images of 3D scenes because of fundamentally
different perceptual cues.
Effective
immersive annotation techniques
While illustration techniques provide a technical foundation for perceptually
enhancing a 3D reconstruction, annotation techniques are concerned with achieving
a specific communication effect by describing how to specify, represent, and
access ancillary material within the virtual 3D environment. Thus, the annotation
task of a teaching surgeon is to combine illustration techniques to achieve
a specific communication effect that explicates some aspect of the cognitive
activity and decision making that occurs during a surgery.
Our
research includes three areas:
