Holograms, headsets and health care: The future is now
CBC
Imagine a future where someone in rural New Brunswick could be treated by a physiotherapist from a distance, by standing in front of cameras that provide a three-dimensional version of them in real time.
Or being able to train in aircraft engine repair on a hologram, instead of the real thing.
For Scott Bateman, these scenarios are within the realm of possibility and are what he's working toward at the University of New Brunswick.
SPECTRAL, the Spatial Computing Training and Research Laboratory, is where Bateman, a professor and director of the lab, works with companies to teach students and industry professionals about spatial computing and variations of reality.
Virtual reality puts the user into an artificial environment, augmented reality places virtual things into the real world, and mixed reality anchors the objects placed in the real world so they don't move with the user.
Bateman said using mixed reality to do this type of training allows people to make mistakes and learn from them.
"The cool thing that we'll be able to do with our students is be able to connect them together with industry and real world problems, and, you know, solving these real world problems with technology that's available today."
"It'll be a … tighter and more applied lens on their education … putting their experience in more practical real world terms right away than we would be able to do if we were just doing sort of a typical classroom-based education experience."
Bateman said a trainer might be on the other side of the world, but by putting on a pair of goggles, they can see what the student or worker is seeing and give guidance using virtual annotations that float in the air.
He said they've also been working with the prosthetics clinic at UNB's Institute of Biomedical Engineering in Fredericton.
People travel to the clinic to get fitted for prosthetic limbs, Bateman said, but when they go home they don't always have the muscle-training therapy to prepare them for the prosthesis. He said this leads to a lot of people abandoning their prostheses.
But by using augmented-reality headsets, he said the patient would be able to look down and have their prosthetic limb appear virtually, and they would be able to train their muscles as they would be able to with a real prosthesis..
Bateman said for a project like that, the technology would ideally be publicly funded or covered by insurance. He said when comparing an augmented-reality headset cost of around $4,000 to the cost of a prosthetic limb, it's a "worthwhile investment" to increase the adherence and use of a prosthesis down the line.
For a project like the mixed-reality physiotherapist, Bateman said while it can be done with special 3D cameras, they are also increasingly being able to do the same type of thing using laptop or tablet webcams.