正文
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.
