Tech Trends

Bringing the Dental Education Classroom into the Metaverse

Technology continues to evolve at a remarkable pace. Oral health education and the profession must continue to stay relevant to the learning needs of future generations. Future concepts of oral health education call for schools that extend beyond their physical walls or geographic locations. With the latest advances in immersive virtual reality, the future is quickly becoming the present. Acadental, a well-known resource for products that support dental education, has developed Teo, a virtual dental trainer for the Oculus Quest 2, which brings the dental education classroom into the metaverse.

Teo is an app that is available for download through the Meta Store and requires an Oculus Quest 2 virtual reality headset signed in with a free Meta account and a paid Acadental subscription account. Once users are signed in, they are instantly transported into a 360-degree virtual dental simulation lab environment with a typodont in supine position. The center front panel is the main interface where users can choose the type of case they want to practice in the virtual simulator. Cases available include Crown & Bridge, Dental Anatomy (permanent and primary dentition), Endodontics, Licensure, Operative, and Pediatric. One important fact to note is that Acadental is also the manufacturer of manikin teeth for the American Board of Dental Examiners (ADEX) licensure examination. A panel on the bottom right simulates the dental delivery system and includes a selectable mirror, handpiece, probe/explorer, marker tool, and an entire array of diamond and carbide burs. Through the two touch controllers of the Quest 2, users can manipulate typodont positioning, remove/replace typodont teeth, use available instruments and handpieces to examine and prepare various cases on typodont teeth, all with real-time haptic, sound, and visual feedback. Through the dashboard on the center panel, users can also take self-assessments and quizzes on various subjects within the virtual environment. Collaboration in the metaverse happens when users enter a group with a join code on the left panel and are taken to a room where other users can see a shared typodont and any procedures performed on it in real-time with bidirectional audio feedback, which simulates a classroom but instead within a virtual environment. Although the application and accompanying hardware does not simulate the actual manipulation of dental instruments, handpieces, and rheostat, the immersive experience provides amazing benefits to oral health education students and supports learning anywhere and anytime.

-Hubert Chan, DDS

Startup Group Claims to Solve ChatGpt Limitations

ChatGPT is one of the best known generative artificial intelligence (AI) today, so naturally, competitors will spring up to challenge its dominance. Most are at least familiar with what ChatGPT can do: enter any text into a text box and the AI will respond with original content tailored to the prompt. Despite such a broad and sweeping capability, ChatGPT does have limitations such as lack of current data (most current information is January 2022), limitations in generating coherent, lengthy text, and the inability to apply its technology to documents that users can upload. Claude, a new AI product from the San Francisco-based startup group, Anthropic, claims to address these limitations while also being “helpful, harmless, and honest.” Claude is currently in beta and does not have a pricing structure.

Released in April 2022, Claude is billed as “a next-generation AI assistant for your tasks, no matter the scale.” It boasts a constitutional AI that gives principles to guide the applications’ learning and responses. Furthermore, Claude is focused on “complex, multi-step instructions over large amounts of content,” including user provided documents. These two capabilities distill down to Claude being an impressive technology to digest and summarize large amounts of text. For example, users can attach many journal articles and ask Claude to give a 3 sentence summary or provide a 12-page essay written in the style of a systematic review. The results, however, can vary wildly from insightful to completely unhinged from reality and often within the same series of prompts. This writer asked Claude to summarize a 2019 copy of the Journal of the California Dental Association—in 2 of the 5 requests for summaries, no reference to the cover article was made. Ultimately, Claude can be useful tool to process an overwhelming amount of information in a short period of time; unfortunately, the technology is not refined enough to provide accurate, reliable, actionable information.

-Alexander Lee, DMD