Force Feedback Haptics for Virtual Reality Surgery

Simulating laparoscopic procedures in a virtual re-ality environment has a number of pedagogical ad-vantages over other traditional training methods. It also has a number of obstacles that must be over-come, some of which are discussed here. One chal-lenge discussed in this paper is to provide the sim-ulated instruments a sense of touch, with the ap-plication of appropriate force feedback techniques. A set of preliminary specifications for a proposed virtual reality system is presented, along with some discussion of existing systems and related technolo-gies.