1. Immersive Virtual Characters for Educating Medical Communication Skills
J. Hernendez, A. Stevens, D. S. Lind
Department of Surgery (College of Medicine)
M. Duerson
Department of Community Health and Family Medicine (College of Medicine)
K. Johnsen, R. Dickerson, A. Raij, B. Lok
Department of Computer and Information Science and Engineering (College of Engineering)
The University of Florida, Gainesville, FL
J. Jackson, M. Shin Department of Computer Science
The University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Charlotte, NC

2. What is a Virtual Character?
Virtual character - a character who represents the state of a system
In TRON (1982), humans and humans that represents software interacted within a world that represented the hardware.

3. What is a Virtual Character
We aim to to have humans and human the represent software interact in the real world. r

4. Virtual Character Research
Mostly
Rendering
Animation
Artificial Intelligence
Newer approaches
Affective power
Human response to VCs
Clinical Psychology
Fear of public speaking

5. Motivation Current methodologies Restricted in:
Books
Standardized Patients (actors)
Restricted in:
Training frequency
Scenario variety
Immediate feedback
Affects medical student preparedness

6. Solution COTS Equipment: Interactive Virtual Characters Projectors
Life-Sized
Computer Generated
Natural Interaction
Responds to User
Responses based on accepted medical procedure
COTS Equipment:
Projectors
Laptops
Web cameras
Tablet PC

7. Why Do We Want Virtual Characters?
Propose: Digital Characters as a new (meta-) medium to interact with information
Effective Interaction
Better than keyboard and mouse for certain tasks
Dynamic 3D
Natural interaction
Low Bandwidth
Effective Collaboration
Controlled conveyed visual information
Non-verbal communication (60%)

8. Combines Speech Computer Vision High Quality 3D models Eye Gaze
Gesture Recognition
Repeat your gestures
High Quality 3D models
Animation
Rendering
Visualization

9. Integrates Computer Science Medicine
Computer Graphics
Image Processing
Natural Language Processing
Medicine
Training
Education
Standardization
Multimedia Learning
Technology based Learning
What other areas could this be used for?
Psychology
Social Science

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