The presented work describes our experiences in the development of virtual reality (VR) and 3D visualisations for education in heart surgery and nephrology as well as their implementation into a multi-user, database-driven, internet-based educational system: LaMedica.

To mediate procedural knowledge about heart surgery and invasive procedures in nephrology we have authored different teaching applications. Initially we intended to focus on educational videotapes and images for that task and produced high-quality media. First tests revealed that, on the end-users side, comprehension of the content was often not satisfying. Therefore, we started to develop 3D visualisations, which represent a virtual reflection of reality with special focus on important and pre-determined details. These further explain and describe the important points of procedures from different perspectives and outline the basic principles of the performance.

According to the learning target they have been encoded as either VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling-Language), QuickTime, QuickTime-VR or MPEG-4 applications. These technologies provide different advantages and disadvantages in terms of interactivity, design, size, and data-transmission. They have the power to strongly support comprehension of procedures, where temporal and spatial events play an important role. They may be used as standalone applications, however we believe they show the strongest effect when they are implemented in clear didactical and pedagogical concepts where different media-types are orchestrated to create educational units. The high development costs suggest multi-institutional sharing of such media in database-driven systems with content management facilities.

We will demonstrate advantages and disadvantages (interactivity, design, data transmission) of 3D technologies and how their use may affect the learning target. The added value to multimedia teaching scenarios is discussed. We point at the different steps of 3D-development and lessons learned. We further refer to an innovative process of online authoring and to the employed methods of database-driven content management.

Reinhard Friedl
Dept. Heart Surgery
University Hospital of Ulm
Steinhˆvelstr. 16
89075 Ulm
Germany
Phone: ++49-731-5002-7321
Fax: ++49-731-5002-6698
Email: reinhard.friedl@medizin.uni-ulm.de
Website: http://www.lamedica.de

CO-AUTHORS:
H. Höppler (1)
Ch. Aymanns (1)
B. Lindemann (1)
F. Keller (1)
A. Hannekum (2)
S. Stracke (1)

LaMedica Project-Group: http://www.lamedica.de

Dept. Heart Surgery (1) and (2)Nephrology

University-Hopital of Ulm
Steinhövelstr. 16
89075 Ulm
Germany