The MHI289h course, Virtual Reality, Simulation and Robotics, an elective in the Masters of Health Informatics Program, gives Alberto Odor, MD, a chance to transmit the use of computer graphics and virtual reality use both physically and virtually for clinical applications. The virtual reality related courses (MHI289 and MHI214) are offered on site and around campus through the Health Informatics Master’s Degree, and virtually through the UC Davis Extension Certificate Program’s Online Learning Campus (with Peter Yellowlees, MD). The courses draw full-time graduate students and working staff and students from across the medical, IT, informatics, computer science, engineering, library and nursing disciplines.
Although the MHI289 class meets physically in the Education Building at the UC Davis Medical Center twice per week, the students have been introduced to virtual patients, including “METI man” the hospital’s Virtual Patient in the Center for Virtual Care. They have also toured the virtual medical campus of Imperial College London in Second Life where UK medical student avatars interact with a room full of scripted virtual patients through the Second Life Viewer, streamed in realtime via the web.
Back at the UCDMC Center for Virtual Care, an assortment of patient simulators are used, including: adult human patient simulators, pediatric and emergency patient care simulators, and number of focused clinical skills simulators. The physical tours of the Center are led by UC Davis medical faculty and the virtual tours of both Davis Island and the builds in the NHS funded virtual medical training environment are similarly led by UC Davis medical faculty with the help of avatars and the client viewers used to login to the virtual environments.
Exploring Virtual Environments and Research on the Davis Campus:
More local virtual environments, namely the KeckCAVES were the topic and tour for this week’s classes. The W. M. Keck Center for Active Visualization in the Earth Sciences (KeckCAVES) is a joint project between the UC Davis Department of Geology, IDAV, and the UC Davis Computational Science and Engineering Center (CSE). The MHI289h class will experience the state-of-the-art immersive visualization facility used by earth science researchers from Davis and afar. We had the great honor of meeting and viewing the research of Dr. Oliver Kreylos, hero to all Kinect hackers and followers, since his work went viral shortly after the release of Microsoft’s $150.00 Kinect Controller for XBox360 (“where you are the controller”).
Many of us became aware of the tele-immersion research of Dr. Oliver Kreylos, after first seeing his work on YouTube and the international Kinect forums.
This year Oliver Kreylos’ team and collaborators from UC Berkeley, received the “CENIC 2011 Innovations in Networking” award, in the category “High-Performance Research Applications,” for “Tele-Immersion for Physicians,” also known as the combination of 3D Video, Vrui’s collaboration infrastructure, and 3D Visualizer.
Watch the video: "All Quiet on the Martian Front"
View the video on YouTube | Uploaded: Dec 20, 2010 | 206,383 views
Here are a few monumental breaking news posts from Dr. Oliver Kreylos’ home page last November , 2010:
11/16/2010: 11:03pm, “one million views. Insane.”
11/22/2010: Since it’s been prominently featured in my most recent Kinect video, I figured I’d finally publicly release the Nanotech Construction Kit. GPL v2, yadda yadda yadda, you know the drill.
11/22/2010: I was featured in an article about Kinect hacking in the New York Times, 3D glasses and all. Yay!
11/25/2010: Vrui 2.0 has finally been released, after a long delay.
12/02/2010: Kinect package 1.2 with support for multiple Kinect cameras released and avaliable for download on the Kinect Hacking page.
More on Dr. Oliver Kreylos’ Research and Development work, publications and Kinect Hacking.
Related articles:
Kurillo, G, Bajcsy, R, Nahrsted, K, et al. (2008). IEEE Virtual Reality 2008, 269-70.
Vasudevan, R, Kurillo, G, Lobaton, E, et al. (2011). High-Quality Visualization for Geographically Distributed 3-D Teleimmersive Applications. IEEE transactions on multimedia, 13(3), 573-84.
Projects Using Kinect & Second Life:
Hacking Microsoft's Kinect using the FAAST Toolkit - PDF
Leading the hacking of Kinect to use with Avatars in the proprietary virtual environment of Second Life, is the Institute for Creative Technologies, University of Southern California. USC and OpenNI have released the FAAST (Flexible Action and Articulated Skeleton Toolkit) and it is available for download.
So where is the peer reviewed literature on Virtual Worlds?
You’ll find peer reviewed articles from Medical/Health Nursing & Engineering, Computer Science, Education, Sociology and Psychology and Multidisciplinary Databases… and more.
Start with the following databases: PubMed (from the Library website), Cinahl, Academic Source Complete and IEEEXplore, Inspec, Web of Science. The UC Davis Harvest Catalog has a selection of electronic and print resources, some published by UC Faculty. A quick search in Harvest: Using the following query and selecting “Subject Words” from the drop-down menu, retrieves over 500 related items: “shared virtual environments” OR “Second Life” OR “virtual reality”
Click on the link at the top of the Year column to sort your results by year.
Always go through the Library’s website (using the database direct links, database A-Z listing, or Online Journals link) to reach the Library licensed resources. If you are searching from off campus, be sure to login through the Library’s VPN so that you are authenticated as a UC Davis student, staff or faculty member.
“How do I find the actual article?”
When searching the library licensed databases, always use the UC–eLinks to reach the actual article (whether it’s print or online). If it’s not available, use the request from another campus option on the UC-eLinks page.If you already know which of the 795 databases you would like to use, just type in its name on the Databases A-Z page. For Health Informatics research, you really do need use a few of the Subject Guides that focus on the technology across the related disciplines. To locate a specific subject area and the library licensed resources, take a look at the Subject Guides. They have been created by the Library Subject Specialists and you’ll find their contact names and email easily accessible at the top of each subject guide.For UC Davis students , staff and faculty:
Logging in from Off Campus using the VPN
- Login to the Virtual Private Network (VPN) using your username and Kerberos pass phrase or password.
- If you are logged in using CITRIX from the UC Davis Medical Center (UCDMC), be sure to open up another browser and login to the VPN
- On the VPN welcome screen, copy and paste the URLs for the journal articles into the browse field directly below the VPN taskbar (usually at the top right of your screen).
- If you are new to the VPN, watch the YouTube video walking you through the UC Davis VPN login and UC-eLinks from off campus
You’ll know you are logged in when you reach the VPN Welcome screen [below] and see the VPN task bar (Home, Help & Logout icons) at the top of your browser window. Choose where you want to start… the Library Home page or the Databases A-Z list, etc. If you have a DOI (digital object identifyer for an article) or want to view an unrelated web page,and remain logged into the VPN, use the ‘Browse’ field below the VPN taskbar.
- Note: the VPN Taskbar & Browse field indicated by red arrow
MHI289h: Library related session using Second Life for simulation and research with Bernadette Swanson, Nov. 2011:
- View the PowerPoint on Slideshare.net
http://scholar.google.com or go right to the Scholar Settings: 
Now, the UC-eLinks will be visible when searching Google Scholar.
