Participants can be fully immersed and represented within the virtual environment or observed by others outside the virtual world. The immersed students or trainees wear a head-mounted display with trackers, which allows them to gain a sense of presence and interact within the virtual environment. Trainees can independently control their viewpoint and motion within the virtual world. Team members within the virtual environment will be able to see each other as full human figures and interact as if they were physically present even when separated by significant distances. Participants can examine a virtual patient in order to discover pertinent signs and symptoms. The Flatland environment allows real-time exploration, examination, and manipulation of 3D objects and images within the virtual world. The ratio between real time and virtual time can be varied to allow slower or faster progress of events. The relative size of the participant to objects within the virtual worlds will be variable to allow visual extensions and experiences to larger environments at a population level or smaller microscopic environments at the cellular or molecular level.
An interactive patient simulation engine allows a new dimension in experiential learning, in which the students can dynamically determine the direction of the case scenario. The simulator is composed of three components: 1) a real-time artificial intelligence (AI) simulation engine, 2) a 3D virtual reality environment with human avatars, and 3) a system for human-simulation interaction. The AI system reasons with case specific clinical knowledge in the form of rules, extracted from team medical experts using knowledge engineering methods. The AI engine is coupled to the virtual environment that contains a representation of the virtual patient, which manifests the signs and symptoms of the clinical scenario and provides a unique environment for experiential learning.
