Virtual Worlds and Team Training Parvati Dev, PhD a, * , Patricia Youngblood, PhD a , W. LeRoy Heinrichs, MD, PhD a , Laura Kusumoto, MS b a SUMMIT, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA 94305–5466, USA b Forterra Systems, 1855 South Grant Road, 3rd Floor, San Mateo, CA 94402, USA Medical education has increasingly adopted situated or experiential learning as an important component of medical training [1]. This training has taken the form of learning in a variety of simulated environments rang- ing from encounters with simulated patients to participation in team-based simulated medical activities [2,3]. A well-accepted simulation-based learning environment is one where a high-fidelity human simulator, an instrumented mannequin running a computational model of physiology and pharmacol- ogy, represents the patient, and a team of health care personnel manage the simulated medical case in a physical space representing an operating room or other hospital space. Virtual worlds provide the opportunity to rep- licate and extend this learning environment, supporting participation by multiple remotely located learners who access the virtual world simulation through the Internet, and manage the medical case as though they were to- gether in a real space. What is a virtual world? The concept of a geometrically accurate, earth-size, virtual world, or ‘‘metaverse,’’ was first articulated in a science-fiction novel [4]. It defines a virtual world as a computer-based, three-dimensional, spatially realistic, simulated environment intended to represent a real or fictional location [5]. The virtual world is operated on a server computer, or computer cluster, and users connect to the world from their local computers by the Internet. This work was supported by the Wallenberg Foundation, the Telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Center, and Adobe Systems. * Corresponding author. E-mail address: parvati@stanford.edu (P. Dev). 1932-2275/07/$ - see front matter Ó 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.anclin.2007.03.001 anesthesiology.theclinics.com Anesthesiology Clin 25 (2007) 321–336