The Design of Perceptual Representations for Practical Networked Multimodal Virtual Training Environments

This paper is a discussion of our experience in designing perceptual representations for virtual environments for surgical training. Networked virtual environments can be used for training and education, and indeed can have some benefits over hands-on training in the real world. In designing content for such an environment there is a tension between including realistic models of real world objects and choosing other types of representations. We present AFRADERVITE, a framework for describing representations in virtual training environments. The framework identifies which representations are needed, and classifies them according to directness. The paper presents examples of representations taken from surgical training systems for cholecystectomy and temporal bone drilling.