3D Telepresence for off-line surgical training and on-line remote consultation

We present an overview of multi-year efforts aimed at developing technology to support natural telepresence over time for off-line surgical training, and over space for on-line or “live” remote consultation. Our goal is to capture and display high-fidelity, 3D graphical reconstructions of the actual time-varying events, allowing observers to change their (stereo) viewpoints naturally, by walking around, leaning forward/backward, rotating their head, etc. We describe the processes we use in our early prototypes, and present some experimental results. ∗University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Dept. of Computer Science †University of Kentucky, Dept. of Computer Science ‡University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Dept. of Surgery §Brown University, Dept. of Computer Science ¶Goteborg University and the University College of Boras ‖University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Dept. of Anesthesiology