Wear a skin disease!
Below is a snapshot of a very ‘quick-and-dirty’ AIDS-related Kaposi Sarcoma “skin” for use in-world (it’s actually a transparent undershirt with the lesions). People wearing it are able to see and experience on their own avatar how Kaposi Sarcoma looks/feels in AIDS patients. Of course the same principle can be expanded, refined and used to role-play patients with various skin conditions/presentations and at various stages of their disease (to show progress, worsening or healing). Such “patients” (driven by real humans behind the PCs, who should also have full patient knowledge about the conditions they are role-playing) can be used to train clinicians in-world (esp. on rare conditions and for undergraduate teaching). A kind of a virtual clinical round, you may call it, where trainee clinicians can also ask these virtual patients questions (history taking) and get intelligent answers by the patients in real time (using voice or text or both), conduct clinical examination in the usual way (avatars can take off clothes 
, ask for investigations, receive feedback, and have additional sensorial inputs in-world like streaming audio/videos (live or on-demand), photos and text, as well as links to flat Web pages and resources.
One can easily zoom into the lesions, and high-resolution is possible. One can wear a skin and take it off/wear another one in almost no time (but it takes considerable skill and time to develop these skins–thanks to SL:Bailey Yifu for the AIDS-related Kaposi Sarcoma one). This can help demonstrating the progress of a lesion/response to treatment (e.g., depending on trainee clinician’s answers in-world, the person role-playing the patient can switch to/show the approrpiate corresponding or matching skin, so that the trainee doctor is also able to see the effect of their diagnosis and treatment).
See also: IBM uses 3D imaging to visualise patient records (E-Health Insider – 27 September 2007)
http://www.e-health-insider.com
Source:
http://sl-sexualhealth.org.uk/?p=84
–M.N.K. Boulos – 30 Nov 07
