eduBody

 

Serious games are becoming more and more common for learning purposes. They are applied to many different
areas such as health and medicine, cultural heritage or business (see for instance Serious Game Institute,
http://www.seriousgamesinstitute.co.uk/). For medical applications, the human body has to be represented with
realistic rendering, and has to support interactive exploration.
The challenge is how to satisfy both requirements: realistic rendering and interactive explorations, taking into
account that the voxel model is the most popular representation scheme for medical data. While game engines
provide a high degree of interactivity and ease of use in real time, they are limited in realistic renderings when the
model to be represented is not a surface model. On the other hand, volume visualization packages are capable to
generate realistic renderings from voxel models but their degree of interactivity is limited. Taking into account these
limitations our aim is studying how to combine the capabilities of games and volume visualization packages to
represent the human body.
Our idea is to maintain both systems and define a data structure capable to support volume and surface
representations simultaneously. This solution will lead to the research of efficient management of data, which can
be very large, enabling us to manage the available memory on the system to facilitate the loading and interaction
with these models.
The main goals of this project are (a) The study of volume visualization packages and game engines, analysing how
these environments can be combined to ensure the exploitation of their capabilities in a medical context. We will
prioritize in our analysis open public domain game engines, as Ogre (http://www.ogre3d.org/), and public domain
volume visualization packages as VTK (http://www.vtk.org/), VolumeShop or our in-house package StarViewer
(http://starviewer.udg.edu/), (b) Implement the proposed solution and evaluate it with real medical data.