Hyper Hospital on the Satellite : An Extension of Hyper Hospital to the Satellite Network

Abstract

We have been developing the Hyper Hospital, a network based VR mediated medical care system. The Hyper Hospital is composed of two seamlessly integrated environments, that is, the virtual and the real worlds. Of them, its virtual environment expands the conventional medical care system using the virtual reality technology as a principal human interface and a collaboration tool. In the present study, an attempt to extend the Hyper Hospital system to a satellite communication based multi-media network using the Internet protocol is reported. Using the WWW as the human interface, transmission rate and other performances were measured with various data, including VRML pages and realistic medical image data. The satellite network was shown to be suitable to the Hyper Hospital network, and a plausible application of the network was discussed.