Development of Augmented and Virtual Multi-User Applications for Medical-Technical Exchange in Immersive Rooms (AVATAR)

The exchange of surgical experience and competence nowadays mainly takes place at conferences, through the presentation of surgical videos and through the organisation of visits to each other. Complex manual skills and surgical techniques have to be newly developed, trained and passed on to younger surgeons or colleagues. With the methods currently used, this exchange is very costly and time-consuming.
In this project, VR interaction and visualization techniques will be developed to improve the exchange of experience and competence between medical professionals. In a virtual reality, several users are to train collaboratively - simultaneously and in real time. The positions of locally distributed persons will be determined using hybrid tracking systems based on ultra-wideband technologies and inertial sensors. On this basis, VR training scenarios are designed, implemented in a multi-user communication system and clinically evaluated over distance.
The innovation of this project is the combination of collaborative interaction and visualization techniques with hybrid tracking technologies in an advanced multi-user communication system. The project results should form a basis for the development of future VR-based communication and simulation systems in medicine.