Virtalis Creates VR System for Ground Breaking Surgical Research

IN RECENT years, significant resources and research activities worldwide have been invested in the creation of Virtual Reality (VR) environments to train specialised skills for surgeons.  Virtalis was one of the first, creating a trainer for minimally invasive therapy.  Now, a research team from De Montfort University has begun work on assessing the feasibility for a whole team VR surgical trainer with Virtalis both supplying and designing the VR research platform.

NATIONAL Grid has embarked on a voyage of virtual discovery. It has installed a StereoWorks system from Virtalis, Europe’s leading Virtual Reality (VR) Company.

John Tyler, National Grid’s transmission technical training manager, explained: “We are poised to revolutionise the training of our operational field force and training scheme recruits. Everyone who has seen the Stereoworks system agrees it certainly has the “wow factor”. Our trainee engineers are already conversant with digital technology when they join us, so it makes sense to take that familiarity one step further and introduce them to the Company’s engineering assets via VR. Now we’ve got the infrastructure in place, we are beginning to create 3D training. A National Grid switchgear supplier has supplied us with their CAD models and we are converting them into VR models.”