WWW CREATES NEW INTERACTIVE 3D GRAPHICS AND COLLABORATIVE ENVIRONMENTS FOR MEDICAL-RESEARCH AND EDUCATION

Virtual Reality Modelling Language (VRML) is the start of a new era fo r medicine and the World Wide Web (WWW). Scientists can use VRML acros s the Internet to explore new three-dimensional (3D) worlds, share con cepts and collaborate together in a virtual environment. VRML enables the generation of virtual environments through the use of geometric, s patial and colour data structures to represent 3D objects and scenes. In medicine, researchers often want to interact with scientific data, which in several instances may also be dynamic (e.g. MRI data). This d ata is often very large and is difficult to visualise. A 3D graphical representation can make the information contained in such large data s ets more understandable and easier to interpret. Fast networks and sat ellites can reliably transfer large data sets from computer to compute r. This has led to the adoption of remote tale-working in many applica tions including medical applications. Radiology experts, for example, can view and inspect in near real-time a 3D data set acquired from a p atient who is in another part of the world. Such technology is destine d to improve the quality of life for many people. This paper introduce s VRML (including some technical details) and discusses the advantages of VRML in application developing. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science B.V.