3D visual component based development system for medical training systems supporting haptic devices and their collaborative environments

This paper treats a development system for medical training systems supporting haptic devices. The research group of the authors has already proposed a 3D software development system called IntelligentBox. IntelligentBox has provided various software components called boxes, which are 3D visible, reactive objects. IntelligentBox allows the user to develop 3D graphics applications by combining already existing boxes through direct manipulations on a computer screen without writing any text-based programs. This is the main feature of IntelligentBox, which is different from other conventional systems. Recently, the authors have been developing functionalities as boxes dedicated for medical training systems supporting haptic devices like Phantoms. In this paper, the authors introduce such new boxes. Also, IntelligentBox has already provided a particular box called RoomBox, which enables to build distributed 3D graphics applications. Using this box with the new boxes introduced in this paper, it will become possible to build collaborative environments for medical training systems. In this paper, the authors also explain how easily such collaborative environments of medical training systems can be built.