Despite the fact that the product isn’t even on store shelves yet, Google’s controversial Google Glass technology has inspired many uses since entering the discovery phase earlier this year. Now “medical school education” can be added to the list. According to a report from ABC News, a team of surgeons at the Ohio State University Medical School have put the wearable computing glasses to use for training the next generation of doctors.

One of the leaders of the new Google Glass tryout is Christopher Kaeding, an orthopaedic surgeon on the OSU Medical School staff. In order to allow students a first-person view of what life is like in the operating room, Kaeding recently donned the Google Glass during a torn ACL procedure. The surgery was transmitted via the Glass camera to a Google Hangout, a video chat conference that allowed Robert Magnussen, a fellow OSU professor, as well as a group of second year medical students, to track Kaeding’s every surgical maneuver.

While Kaeding was initially distracted by the Glass, the surgeon said that he quickly became comfortable with wearing the computer. Magnussen and the observing students, meanwhile, were thrilled with the detailed level of observation the Google Glass allowed. Ryan Blackwell, one of the students in the video conference group, noted that Glass gave a much more up-close-and-personal view of a surgical procedure than most medical students, especially those only in their second year, have witnessed.

“Most students have shadowed a surgeon in the operating room, but you’re often stuck on the outside trying to get a glimpse of whatever you can,” Blackwell said. “With Glass, you get that experience that you weren’t able to get before.”

Magnussen was equally pleased with the Google Glass footage. Now that his students have seen a surgery play out in real time, Magnussen believes he will be able to create more compelling lectures based around that part of the human anatomy.

Since this was the first time Kaeding donned the Google Glass, there were some troubleshooting issues that OSU’s Medical School staff will want to address in the future. Blackwell noted that the location of the camera left some of the more important parts of the video out of the centerfold view, while momentary troubles with the Glass’s internet connection and the quality of the Google hangout video may or may not be fixable.

Meanwhile, Kaeding noted that the Glass will probably perform better in situations such as these once it moves beyond the prototype phase. For instance, the device’s battery life is still woefully short, not a problem for a brief surgery like an ACL procedure, but something that might cause difficulties during an eight or ten hour operating room job. Kaeding had a reserve battery waiting in his pocket, just in case the Google Glass died before the ACL surgery was completed, but the surgeon didn’t want to touch the Glass if he could avoid it.

“Once it’s on, it’s hands free,” Kaeding said. “You don’t have to break sterility so you won’t have to regown and reglove.”