Medworld医疗世界为您提供准确、及时、有用的医疗器械行业及医疗圈的市场动态，产品信息，技术进展等
资讯
！
来源： Medical Software by Jamie Hartford
From
Oculus Rift
to
Pokémon Go
, once-futuristic virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) technologies are fast becoming mainstream. And like many technologies that take root in the consumer world, VR and AR are also making their way into medtech.
MD+DI caught up with VR and AR expert Brandon Bogdalek, consultant for advanced development with Minneapolis-based design firm Worrell, to get his take on why these technologies are catching on now, what they mean for medical device developers, and more. Below are his answers, which have been edited for clarity and brevity.
MD+DI: When it comes to these immersive technologies, a lot of different terms are getting thrown around—VR, AR, mixed reality. Can you explain the differences?
Bogdalek:
Let’s start with virtual reality. Here at Worrell, we are experimenting with 360 video, where you take a 360-degree camera that pieces together and stitches together footage from 360 degrees. You then put that footage into a virtual reality headset, and you would be able to look around as if your head is the camera. That's one way to create a virtual reality experience. Another way is a computer-generated experience, where you literally have computer scientists and developers go into computer programs and create virtual environments. You’re actually creating the environment on the computer. So those are traditionally the two different ways to create a virtual reality experience.
Augmented reality is an overlay of content into the real world, but the content overlaid is not anchored to or a part of the real world. Pokemon Go, the game that was very popular on the cell phone, that's a form of augmented reality. Another form of augmented reality would be floating text on a screen. So, imagine you're watching a football game and you have statistics that pop up. Those aren't anchored to the field itself, but that's literally a content overlay or something that's real but not anchored to the real world.
Mixed reality, on the other hand, is able to track space. So, for instance, the mixed reality technology that we use here at Worrell is the Microsoft HoloLens. It actually has the capability to track the room that you're in and will place holograms relative to what's tracking. The use case for a surgical setting, for example, would be a mixed reality approach, where I'm using a head-mounted display—let's use the Microsoft HoloLens for example here. So, let's say a patient has a tumor that's located in the liver and I input that CT or MRI data into the HoloLens. It should be able to pretty accurately detect where that tumor is in approximation to the body and overlay that information.
MD+DI: Why is there so much interest in AR and VR technologies right now?
Bogdalek:
The technology has really improved over the past 10 years, and industries—whether it be gaming or entertainment or healthcare—are starting to see the potential business benefits from having augmented or virtual reality as a primary platform. I think it's a combination of the technology, industries starting to recognize the benefits of AR and VR, and people becoming more fascinated with the technology and wanting to really dig deeper.
MD+DI:
There has been buzz about AR and VR starting, really, back in the 1930s, with the
View-Master, and continuing through the 1980s and ‘90s, but it always seems to be a passing fad. Will this time be different?
Bogdalek:
I think
AR and VR is here to stay, and I think the main reason for that is consumer adoption. It has been around for quite some time, but it was nowhere near consumer adoption like it is today. We are much closer to the mass population being able to utilize this technology than we ever have been before, and I think everybody is starting to get a taste of that. For that reason, I think it's beyond its fad stage now.
MD+DI:
Why should medical device developers be paying attention to AR and VR?
Bogdalek:
Here at Worrell, we look at how this technology can improve our design process. We like to make our designers feel like Tony Stark. By empowering them using a head-mounted display, they have an entirely new medium to explore the design process, so rather than spending time on 3-D CAD or computer-based design programs, you're quite literally able to take those designs in a virtual format and view them in the real world, which has been nothing that designers have really been able to do before.
From the medtech perspective, that's extremely powerful because you can you can view these designs in relation to important things like anatomy. Medical device manufacturers can design on 3-D CAD all they want, but they need to be able to see what that device looks like in the leg or bolted into the femur or the tibia. I think the keyword here is perspective. Designers and engineers a lot of the time will get what's called CAD-vision. After you're looking at a design on a computer for so long, you kind of lose all sense of scale and what is happening around the device because you're so narrowed in on one specific thing. Augmented and virtual reality can really help that by taking your design from a computer to the real world, and that gives you a totally different perspective of what you're looking at. You can design in relation to anatomy.
