Their patients are the ultimate non-complainers - plastic heads whose mouths open wide to reveal removable jaws and sets of plastic but incredibly realistic-looking teeth.
Students can drill, fill, scrape and clean, and even practise building bridges and dentures on adult and child-sized teeth.
Each of the 73 mannequin head and partial torsos lies in a dentist's chair just as a human patient would, and each work station comes equipped with a computer screen and headphones and microphones so students can watch and listen to their tutors giving a lecture or demonstrating a technique, and ask questions whenever they wish.
"It is quite different to the way we have done things," clinical services and facilities associate Dean Dr Warwick Duncan said.
At first, the students were expected to fit the teeth into the jawbones themselves, until staff discovered not many of them were handy with a screwdriver, he said.
Now, the task was left to team leader Diane Noble and her staff.
They were also responsible for the "finishing touches".
Cheap pink fingernail polish painted on to the teeth replicated realistic plaque for students to scrape off.
The laboratory was created in the old dental school library in a project costing almost $4 million. The work involved shifting the library into a lecture theatre and "half a staff tearoom" on another floor.
Two years in the planning, the laboratory opened at the start of last year. It was now used virtually full-time during business hours, Dr Duncan said.
"Most of our students are spending at least part of their week there ... They love it. And the staff are very positive about it too."
The dental school, the only one in New Zealand, has about 500 students including dentists, specialists, researchers, technicians (who specialise in dentures) and therapists (who specialise in children's teeth and oral hygiene).
Once the students left for mid-semester breaks or summer holidays, the laboratory was also used by graduate dentists attending professional development classes, mostly overseas-trained dentists who needed to demonstrate their skill levels to obtain New Zealand registration.
Dental simulation had been part of dental training "forever", Dr Duncan said.
Previously, trainees practised on cadavers (dead bodies) - and still occasionally did - but most of the simulation work over the past century was on plaster models with real teeth embedded and, later, on plastic "phantom heads" strapped to a regular dentist's chair.
Otago's new simulation unit was world-class, he said.
"There is a similar one being built in Melbourne, but it is about half the size of ours. We are now an example to others of what you can achieve ...
"We decided if we were going to do this, we would make it big enough to take a whole class at once. It was the efficient and logical way to go."
Otago has had a long tradition of allowing students to work under supervision on live patients from throughout Otago and Southland and that would continue, Dr Duncan said.
"The number of people we see will remain about the same. The simulation laboratory enables us to free up chairs in our [main] clinic for live patients."
It was important students learnt to deal with live patients, he said.
"We have to find a balance. Simulation is useful and a good starting point, but ultimately people don't graduate and treat lots of plastic dummies. Simulation teaches them the technical side, but it doesn't teach them the art of dealing with patients and understanding them, and that is a very different thing."
The next challenge for the dental school would be upgrading the main clinic, he said.
The German-made KaVo dental chairs, installed in 1982, were now at the end of their life, he said.
"We've done very well. The chairs were very good quality and lasted a long time. Instead of investing in an old Ford, we invested in a brand new BMW, but now it's a very tired BMW."
But outfitting the clinic was a major capital cost and finding the money was not easy, he said.
"It is about $40,000 plus for each student bay and have 127 of those. So it gets very expensive."
