Tele-Immersive medical educational environment.

By combining teleconferencing, tele-presence, and Virtual Reality, the Tele-Immersive environment enables master surgeons to teach residents in remote locations. The design and implementation of a Tele-Immersive medical educational environment, Teledu, is presented in this paper. Teledu defines a set of Tele-Immersive user interfaces for medical education. In addition, an Application Programming Interface (API) is provided so that developers can easily develop different applications with different requirements in this environment. With the help of this API, programmers only need to design a plug-in to load their application specific data set. The plug-in is an object-oriented data set loader. Methods for rendering, handling, and interacting with the data set for each application can be programmed in the plug-in. The environment has a teacher mode and a student mode. The teacher and the students can interact with the same medical models, point, gesture, converse, and see each other.