If you’re a medical student, or interested in becoming one, I hope you’re prepared to operate on a giant caveman. No, not a prehistoric bearded guy with a sloping brow, bad posture, and a leopard-print loincloth. I’m talking about CAVEman, the gigantic glowing practice dummy for budding surgeons and anatomy classes of the future.
CAVE is an acronym for ‘Cave Automated Virtual Environment,’ and how CAVEman works is scientists and graphic artists at the University of Calgary mapped the human body using 3-dimensional imaging techniques, then reconstructed all the parts and bits on a projector. That projector is then used to create a massive virtual patient who never needs a sponge bath or a crate full of oatmeal for breakfast. CAVEman is improving all the time, too.
While he started as a tool for massage therapists, CAVEman is rapidly advancing up the medical ladder. The next stage in CAVEman’s evolution is tactile feedback sensors. After that, he’ll get respiration and blood-flow in the hopes that experimental surgical procedures can be tested on an electronic man before going out into the field to be perfected on actual men. He’s the next best thing to having your own personal giant to operate on.
If CAVEman keeps improving, pretty soon he’ll be alive. Then he’ll need food and water, someone will have to take him for walks around the campus, he’ll need a gigantic pair of pants made out of projected light, and then he’ll get a job on campus. Once that happens, you know his HMO won’t cover any experimental surgeries, so the whole project will be back to square one with nothing to show for it except the University of Calgary’s new star basketball player.