Speech interaction in virtual reality

A system for the visualization of three-dimensional anatomical data, derived from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) or computed tomography (CT), enables the physician to navigate through and interact with the patient's 3D scans in a virtual environment. This paper presents the multimodal human-machine interaction focusing the speech input. For the concerned task, a speech understanding front-end using a special kind of semantic decoder was successfully adopted. Now, the navigation as well as certain parameters and functions can be directly accessed by spoken commands. Using the implemented interaction modalities, the speed and efficiency of the diagnosis could be considerably improved.