Suiting up for Ready Player One tonight… Such a good […]

Suiting up for Ready Player One tonight… Such a good Friday!

The VR rig was not for the Oasis but a new approach to surgery, a form of synthetic AR (from a startup in stealth mode). Let’s say you are doing some brain surgery. Today, the MRI files of the tumor location and other imaging data is off on a separate screen. To integrate these views, you need to integrate into the field of view. So, they use a light field camera to capture holistic images of the brain in real time; the surgeon wears the VR rig and sees the brain (not a 3D model as typically seen in VR). I was looking at a demo of this. As I tilt my head or zoom in or out, it happens in real time (the light field camera captures so much data that all of these views can be constructed in real time). And the data overlay occurs in the VR domain.
My conclusion is that VR on a light field capture is a clever new way to do AR.

While this is deployed in the surgery room initially, it offers a gateway to robotic telemedicine in the future.

Genevieve is sporting the safest football helmet, designed to deform and flex to minimize the risk of concussions on the field. Most of their meetings are with famous football players (who I don’t know), so it was a special treat to have them drop by for the evening. From https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/10/the-nfl-calls-vicis-zero1-helmets-the-safest-yet.html “A recent study of the brains of deceased NFL football players found signs of degenerative brain disease in 99 percent of former players. As PBS Frontline reported, data also suggest that the risk of long-term, cognitive problems for some players is up to 35 times greater than it is among the general population, thanks to head injuries sustained on the field.”

Co-founder of both, Sam Browd is Genevieve’s cool cousin: https://vicis.com/meet-sam-browd-co-founder-of-vicis/ (not mentioned there, he is also an expert on separating conjoined twins: http://thejns.org/doi/abs/10.3171/PED-08/01/001 )