Development and evaluation of a 6DOF interface to be used in a medical application

This thesis work was performed at the research centre CINECA in Bologna, Italy. An interface with six degrees of freedom, 6DOF, to be used in a virtual environment for the positioning of medical components was developed in cooperation with IOR, one of the most important orthopaedic hospitals in Italy. The main reason for doing this was to find out whether or not a virtual environment and 6DOF interaction could make the pre-operative planning of an operation more efficient compared to other techniques. Is it easy to position an object using stereovision and a 6DOF tracker tool? Furthermore, the interface might also be used in other applications and areas in the future. Described is the development of an interaction class especially constructed for the use of a tracking tool called a stylus pen. This tool takes advantage of all 6DOF, i.e. it recognises movements in the x, y and z directions and likewise the orientation of the tool around the three axis. Moreover, an application which uses the interaction class was created in order to evaluate its usefulness. The application enables the user to load, save and position objects within a virtual environment. The result of this evaluation is then described and discussed. In the evaluations it was shown that the stylus pen with 6DOF is an intuitive interaction tool which works well for positioning. The stereovision also seems to further improve the users’ ability to position objects. However, the created interaction class needs to be further developed before it can be implemented in a pre-operative planning tool. _________________________________________________________________ Title of series, numbering ___________________________________