Understanding Empathy Training with Virtual Patients.

While the use of virtual characters in medical education is becoming more and more commonplace, an understanding of the role they can play in empathetic communication skills training is still lacking. This paper presents a study aimed at building this understanding by determining if students can respond to a virtual patient's statement of concern with an empathetic response. A user study was conducted at the [blinded] College of Medicine in which early stage medical students interacted with virtual patients in one session and real humans trained to portray real patients (i.

Getting the point across: exploring the effects of dynamic virtual humans in an interactive museum exhibit on user perceptions.

We have created “You, M.D.”, an interactive museum exhibit in which users learn about topics in public health literacy while interacting with virtual humans.

Shader Lamps Virtual Patients: the physical manifestation of virtual patients.

We introduce the notion of Shader Lamps Virtual Patients (SLVP) - the combination of projector-based Shader Lamps Avatars and interactive virtual humans. This paradigm uses Shader Lamps Avatars technology to give a 3D physical presence to conversational virtual humans, improving their social interactivity and enabling them to share the physical space with the user. The paradigm scales naturally to multiple viewers, allowing for scenarios where an instructor and multiple students are involved in the training.