Immersive Virtual Characters for Educating Medical Communication Skills

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Immersive Virtual Characters for Educating
Medical Communication Skills

• J. Hernendez, A. Stevens, D. S. Lind
• Department of Surgery (College of Medicine)
• M. Duerson
• Department of Community Health and Family
  Medicine (College of Medicine)
• K. Johnsen, R. Dickerson, A. Raij, B. Lok
• Department of Computer and Information Science
  and Engineering (College of Engineering)
• The University of Florida, Gainesville, FL
• J. Jackson, M. ShinDepartment of Computer
  Science
• The University of North Carolina at Charlotte,
  Charlotte, NC

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What is a Virtual Character?

• Virtual character - a character who represents
  the state of a system
• In TRON (1982), humans and humans that represents
  software interacted within a world that
  represented the hardware.

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What is a Virtual Character

• We aim to to have humans and human the represent
  software interact in the real world.
• r

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Virtual Character Research

• Mostly
• Rendering
• Animation
• Artificial Intelligence
• Newer approaches
• Affective power
• Human response to VCs
• Clinical Psychology
• Fear of public speaking

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Motivation

• Current methodologies
• Books
• Standardized Patients (actors)
• Restricted in
• Training frequency
• Scenario variety
• Immediate feedback
• Affects medical student preparedness

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Solution

• Interactive Virtual Characters
• Life-Sized
• Computer Generated
• Natural Interaction
• Responds to User
• Responses based on accepted medical procedure

• COTS Equipment
• Projectors
• Laptops
• Web cameras
• Tablet PC

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Why Do We Want Virtual Characters?

• Propose Digital Characters as a new (meta-)
  medium to interact with information
• Effective Interaction
• Better than keyboard and mouse for certain tasks
• Dynamic
• 3D
• Natural interaction
• Low Bandwidth
• Effective Collaboration
• Controlled conveyed visual information
• Non-verbal communication (60)

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Combines

• Speech
• Computer Vision
• Eye Gaze
• Gesture Recognition
• Repeat your gestures
• High Quality 3D models
• Animation
• Rendering
• Visualization

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Integrates

• Computer Science
• Computer Graphics
• Image Processing
• Natural Language Processing
• Medicine
• Training
• Education
• Standardization
• Education
• Multimedia Learning
• Technology based Learning
• Training
• What other areas could this be used for?
• Psychology
• Social Science
• Education

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