Haptic display of the VR arthroscopy training simulator

A specific desire to find new training methods arose from the new fields called "Minimal Invasive Surgery". With the technical advance modern video arthroscopy became the standard procedure in the OR's. Holding the optical system with the video camera in one hand, watching the operation field on the monitor, the other hand was free to guide, e.g., a probe. As arthroscopies became a more common procedure it became obvious that some sort of special training was necessary to guarantee a certain level of qualification of the surgeons. Therefore a hospital in Frankfurt approached the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics to develop a training system for arthroscopies based on VR techniques. At least the main drawback of the develop simulator is the missing oh haptic perception, escpecially of force feedback. In cooperation with the Department of Electro-Mechanical Construction at the Darmstadt Technical University we have designed and build a haptic display for the VR arthroscopy train ing simulator. In parallel we developed a concept for the integration of the haptic display in a configurable in a configurable way. This paper will describe our work on these challenging topics in more details.