ABSTRACT
The benefits of virtual environments (VEs) to health care can be summarized in a single word: revolutionary. The “Information Age” has yet to arrive for medicine, and the infrastructure put in place by other disciplines and industries can be used to leapfrog into the next generation of health care. The most pervasive aspect of VE will be the core technology of interactive three-dimensional (3-D) visualization (see chap. 53, this volume). Those aspects of VE that are relative technologies, such as whether the experience is immersive, augmented (see through), or whether the display is an head-mounted display (HMD), 3-D video monitor, or room-size Cave Automatic Virtual Environment (CAVE), or whether the experience is on a local computer or distributed over the Internet, are analogous to peripherals that can be used to customize the VE application to best suit the health care provider or patient. While there are many different ways to classify the medical applications, one that incorporates the essentials for the practice of medicine provides an excellent framework. The key components are diagnosis, therapy, education and training, and the medical record. However, it is essential that the implementation of these applications is totally integrated and that the full spectrum of health care is incorporated. One method to accomplish these two goals is through the 3-D representation of the patient as a virtual person “medical avatar” (Satava, 1998, p. 29) or Holographic Medical Electronic Representation or
holomerTM. The greater the amount of data used to recreate the “information equivalent” of the person, the higher the fidelity of the representation and the more accurate and useful for patient care.
