Lightweight bleeding and smoke effect for surgical simulators

A fully functional Virtual Reality (VR) surgical simulator often captures maximum CPU capacity due to computationally intensive tasks such as collision detection and response, physics simulation, fluid simulation, haptics etc. In order to maintain interactive rates, these major components are given high priority in sharing limited computational resource. Therefore, smoke and bleeding models that have lesser significance with respect to major modules often lead to poor and very unrealistic effects. In this work, a GPU based method was designed and implemented for creating realistic smoke and bleeding effect in a VR surgical simulator. The techniques were employed in Laparoscopic Adjustable Gastric Banding (LAGB) simulator [1][10].