Task Week 3 - The intelligent Virtual Training Environment for Dental Surgery

From the Intelligence Unleashed what most got my attention was how Intelligent virtual reality systems can be used to aid the student in learning in authentic environments. As stated in the paper, virtual reality provides authentic immersive experiences (the subjective impression that one is participating in a realistic experience) that simulate some aspect of the real world to which the user would not otherwise have access (such as dangerous environments or somewhere geographically or historically inaccessible).

The intelligent virtual training environment for dental surgery is a tool that is described perfectly by quote from the paper inserted above. It allows students (in this case dental students) to practice dental surgeries and procedures in a virtual environment before getting to try them out on a real patient. A paper exploring this type of of virtual training environment can be found linked below:

Applications_20of_20intelligent_20virtual_20reality_20in_20dentistry_20paper.pdf

An example of such a training environment I found which was not mentioned in the paper is a project which was conducted by the Faculty of ICT at Mahidol University in Thailand.

As it can be seen in this video this type of intelligent virtual environment can offer multiple benefits to students who are training to become dentists. This type of technology simulates the patient and the entire operating environment that a normal dentists would be in. It uses CT scans to generate 3D models of teeth which are then also simulated in the virtual environment.

What is even more interesting about this research is that they haptoc devices that control the drill and the mirror, and when a student is drilling a tooth it feels as if you are actually drilling a tooth. This is due to the fact that the internal structure of the tooth is also simulated so the feeedback changes depending on how deep you have drilled into the tooth.

It also allows the student to rewind to a certain point in the procedure if he makes a mistake and allows the student to practice that part over and over again. This is something that is not possible using normal physical simulations.

Furthermore this device can also be used to help surgeons and not just students. A simulation of the patient can be geneted and the surgeon can then use that to practice doing the procedure before actually doing it on the real patient. Their study showed they this allowed the surgeon to do better in the actual procedure itself due to he had beforehand.

In conclusion we can see that intelligent virtual reality can be very beneficial. Apart from dental surgery there are many more useful cases to this type of technology such as to train normal surgeons, simulating field trips which go back in time and many more cases. This is what makes this type of technology so interesting and I can't wait to see how the classroom will be disrupte with this kind of technology.