Dental implants and fun are not concepts normally associated together but Roman Cibirka and colleagues at Medical College of Georgia believe they have pulled it off.

Dr. Cibirka helped to develop the Virtual Dental Implant Training program, which is essentially a video game to guide dental students through diagnosing, designing and putting in a dental implant. Dr. Cibirka, associate provost for academic affairs at MCG, will present data from early reviews of the game today at the Games for Health Conference in Boston.

The game, developed with a $6.2 million grant from Nobel Biocare, will be sent to 23 major universities worldwide, from China to South America and Saudi Arabia, and will be used to train thousands of students, Dr. Cibirka said. It could be just the start of what might eventually become a whole new way to train students through virtual reality, available on the Web at any place or time, even on mobile phones, a "classroom without walls," Dr. Cibirka said.

"This is the early development of health care virtual simulation," he said. "And I see it just becoming more and more sophisticated and more and more mainstream in health care delivery education."

The game allows the user to assess a patient in the chair and ask questions, decide on a course of treatment, pick and design the implant and restoration, and shifts to a close-up inside the mouth to do the actual treatment.

Along the way the user picks up tools, picks the site for injection and even selects the drill speed. Later versions might have actual interactive tools that can be manipulated by the user on the virtual patient, Dr. Cibirka said.

And while it sounds serious, and it is mirroring actual patient care, it had to be entertaining as well to appeal to students, Dr. Cibirka said. That's what dental students such as Sarah Padolsky, a rising sophomore, told the designers as they developed the game.

"For me the big thing was to make it engaging enough, fun enough for students to really want to play it," she said.

Students, including her, got to help develop the patient characters and how the user navigates through the game, Dr. Cibirka said.

"The main part of the game was making characters real enough and lifelike enough to keep it interesting," Ms. Padolsky said.

And it actually improves their learning. One problem with dental implants is students learn about it from a lecture, practice for a few days on a manikin, and then work on patients the next year.

"We don't have time in between to really brush up our skills," she said.

"Whether it is virtual or a manikin-based type of experience, students can learn, make mistakes, but they're not costing our patients," Dr. Cibirka said. "It allows a nice continuum from the classroom to the clinic."

They are already working on refinements to the game and might be adding other skills and procedures in the future, Dr. Cibirka said.

"This technology, and I think where this is going, I really see MCG as a leader in this right now just because of the enthusiasm we generated," he said. "We're getting a lot of interest and calls."