Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: augmented reality

Looking for that perfect gift for the medical student in your life? Search no more.

Is it wise to make medical students feel like renegade fictional genius Tony Stark, magically waving human bodies apart like the holographic diagrams in the Iron Man basement lab? Should we use technology to make millennials feel like superheroes? Stop asking difficult philosophical questions and look at how cool this is.

This augmented reality app is called Project Esper. It uses hand gestures to allow the users move and study anatomy. Users can pull the human body apart and investigate the organs and limbs piece by piece. Look—just look at this magical Star Trek karate:

Read more

My doctor needs one of these.

CAE Healthcare announced the release of CAE VimedixAR, an ultrasound training simulator integrated with the Microsoft HoloLens, the world’s first self-contained holographic computer. The announcment marks CAE Healthcare as the first company to bring a commercial Microsoft HoloLens application to the medical simulation market.

VimedixAR delivers an unprecedented simulation-based training experience, allowing learners to interact and move freely within a clinical training environment that is augmented with holograms. For the first time, students will be able to examine 3D anatomy inside the body of the Vimedix manikin. As learners practice scanning an animated heart, lungs or abdomen, they will observe in real-time how the ultrasound beam cuts through anatomy to generate a ultrasound image.

Learners can elevate the VimedixAR hologram above the body to gain an understanding of human anatomy and how its circulatory, respiratory and skeletal structures are integrated. The hologram of the heart, for example, can be isolated and enlarged, rotated, and turned as it floats at eye level. If a learner is struggling to understand a concept, he or she will be able to walk around the hologram to gain a different perspective.

Read more

This post is also available in: heעברית (Hebrew)

Microsoft’s HoloLens hologram headset systems are already being used in the Australian, Ukrainian and Israeli military forces, and now the US military is also finding a use for Microsoft’s most advanced technology.

In recent exercises, forces from the Marines held a weeklong exercise called Spartan Emerging Technology and Innovation Week at North Carolina. The event featured various training technologies – from quadcopters to augmented reality developed with support from the Office of Naval Research (ONR) to accelerate the development of decision-making skills.

Read more

The limitless applications of 3D data visualization will enable a more efficient approach to many of life’s problems. Each day, developers exploring this technology are finding new ways to solve these problems in mixed reality; 3D modeling, easier house management, spinal surgery, and forest fire management are just a few recent examples of ways 3D data visualization can benefit us all.

The military, on the other hand, has quite a different set of problems to manage.

From a logistics standpoint, there are a lot of moving parts in the military to consider such as personnel, deployment, training, resources, and supply lines, to name just a few things that have to be managed constantly. Here we are talking big-picture ideas that could utilize 3D data visualization from a top-down view. If we scale down to real-time operations for individual missions, there’s recon, intel, tracking, and response, and this list could keep going.

Read more

The Royal Australian Air Force is exploring the potential of augmented reality as the organisation undertakes the largest technological upgrade in its history.

The Defence Science and Technology (DST) Group (part of the Department of Defence) and Saab Australia, demonstrated a 3D visualisation application developed for Microsoft HoloLens to 50 key Air Force and Defence personnel towards the end of last year.

Chief of Air Force, Air Marshall Leo Davies, trying the technology for the first time, indicated a growing role for augmented reality vision (ARV) tech in the Air Force.

Read more

This kit by Royal College of Art graduate Heeju Kim uses sweets to recreate the tongue-tying experience of living with autism. Kim created three tools and a mobile application as part of the project, which is titled An Empathy Bridge for Autism.

A set of six awkwardly shaped lollipops and candies impede tongue movement in various ways. They make it hard for users to hold a conversation, conveying how unclear pronunciation has an impact on autistic individuals.

An augmented-reality headset is worn over the eyes and connects to a smartphone to alter the user’s perception of what’s in front of them. It restricts the view of their periphery, gives them double vision or obscures their focus with a patch of black.

Read more

Quantum will be the most important technology in 2017; as it will touch everything as well as change everything. Until we see a better integration of AR in Enterprise Apps, platforms, and published services; AR like VR will remain a niche market gadget.

I do know companies like Microsoft, SAP, and Oracle have been looking at ways to leverage AR in their enterprise platforms and services such as ERP and CRM as well as Big Data Analytics; however, to see the volume of sales needed to make VR or AR have staying power on a large scale; the vendors will need to it a pragmatic useful device on multiple fronts. And, yes it is great that we’re using VR and AR in healthcare, defense, engineering, and entertainment (includes gaming); we just need to make it an every consumer device that people canot live with out.

2016 has been a remarkable year that’s brought continued growth and awareness to the worlds of Augmented, Virtual and Mixed Reality. Set to become a $165 Billion dollar industry by 2020, there’s still a common question that lingers among many newcomers trying to understand this fast moving digital phenomena we are just beginning to watch evolve: What’s the difference between them and how will it impact the digital world as I currently know it?

Before we jump into the mind-blowing future Mixed Reality is set to usher in over the course of 2017, let’s first discuss the distinctions between Virtual and Augmented Reality. Their technologies are very similar but have some fundamental differences.

TNW is at CES 2017! Get the low-down on the latest and most insane tech being showcased in Las Vegas.

Read more

The coming year promises to be a good one for those of us watching the augmented and mixed reality world. And the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), starting Jan. 5 in Las Vegas, Nevada, for its 50th year, is bringing 2017 in with a bang—we’re expecting a ton of great announcements on the horizon.

From the HoloLens developers edition release and ever-churning Magic Leap rumor mill, to Pokémon Go and the resurgence of the smart glasses movement, augmented, mixed, and virtual realities have been all over the place in 2016. So, it’s no surprise that for its second year, CES will dedicate an entire section of the floor to augmented reality called the Augmented Reality Marketplace.

Read more

The HoloLens field of view issue has been preoccupying Microsoft for some time, and they have been exploring a number of solutions, which tend to show up in their patent filings.

As Microsoft writes:

This discussion relates to complementary augmented reality. An augmented reality experience can include both real world and computer-generated content. For example, head-mounted displays (HMDs) (e.g., HMD devices), such as optically see-through (OST) augmented reality glasses (e.g., OST displays), are capable of overlaying computer-generated spatially-registered content onto a real world scene.

Read more