GiPSiNet: A MIDDLEWARE FOR NETWORKED SURGICAL SIMULATIONS

摘要

Virtual environments are a promising new medium among the simulation methods for surgical education. The network extension of surgical virtual environments will enable continuing education and advanced training over wide geographical areas. However, the network settings also pose several non-trivial problems in terms of bandwidth limits, delays, packet losses, etc. for distributed surgical virtual simulations. In our previous work, we presented GiPSi (General Interactive Physical Simulation Interface), an open source/open architecture framework for developing surgical simulations. GiPSi works on individual workstations and, in our ongoing development, we extend GiPSi to a network environment. This network extension involves the development of a middleware module (GiPSiNet) to remediate for the lack of network QoS (Quality of Service) and to enhance the user-perceived quality (fidelity and realism) of a networked simulation. In this paper, we introduce the design of the GiPSiNet middleware and describe the techniques to provide timely data delivery over the network. We also provide the evaluation measures for the performance of user-perceived simulation quality in the presence of network dynamics.