Virtual learning environment for medical education based on VRML and VTK

Virtual reality (VR) is being applied to a wide range of medical areas, including medical education/training, surgery and diagnostics assistance. In the medical education field, VR opens new realms in the teaching of medicine and creates new effective learning procedures for the students. In contrast with the expensive immersive virtual reality learning environment (VRLE) such as CAVE, ImmersaDesk, virtual reality modeling language (VRML) technology provides a cheap and simple way to create such an environment and can be easily deployed in the classroom. In this paper, we describe some traditional application of VR in medical education and design a prototype of VRLE system based on VRML and visualization toolkit (VTK). The system architecture and module design are described in detail and some results are presented.