A Force Feedback Virtual Simulator for Education and Training

The essential requirements of a virtual reality based simulator are a realistic virtual environment and a reproduction of haptic sensation due to the interactions in the virtual environment. The interactions need to be performed in real-time, since a delay between the user action and the system reaction reduces the user experience. Accuracy and efficiency are two opposite requirements; in fact, increased accuracy implies higher computational time and vice versa. So, it is necessary to find a trade-off according to the application and, sometimes, to reduce the realism in favour of the real-time interaction. In this paper is presented a virtual simulator provided of a haptic interface and a virtual environment reconstructed from real patient´s medical images in order to have haptic sensations in addition to a very realist virtual environment.