Winslow Burkeson of the Rory Meyers College of Nursing at NYU described what he called “experiential supercomputing”. He is basically trying to build a medical holodeck with funding from the National Science Foundation. It will apparently combine motion capture, interaction gloves and a physical space to roam within, presumably while wearing some sort of HMD. The floors and walls will be covered with pads fitted with sensors.
One concept is to allow a surgical team to examine a child’s heart and to not only see it, but feel it and interact with it. Another scenario would be to rehearse how junior medical personal can react to ethical issues which require them to challenge seniors in authority. He also showed the JPL Mars exploration and interaction scenario to validate if the proposed science can be achieved on distant planets.
Burkeson says they will be working with IBM to bring in Watson’s AI capabilities and working on a wireless HMD solution as well. The graphic shows the roster of Universities collaborating on the project, which appears to be in the very early stages of development.
Mark Squire of the NYU Augmented Reality Lab described a number of AR projects the Lab has developed in the past. They focus on create AR solutions based on technology that is available now rather than working on future AR technologies. He showed some fairly rudimentary AR overlay applications.
SketchPad is a platform that can accept 3D content and games in up to 28 different formats and help to transform them into VR experiences that can play on a wide variety of VR headsets. They are working with “all the major AAA game developers” and have a user group under Unity that has 1400 members. 500K creators have used SketchPad to create over 1 million 3D scenes, Squire claimed.
Fove presented their eyetracking solution that they plan to offer to developers by the end of the year (see FOVE Shows Eyetracking Technology).
Chris Bobotis of Mettle described his plug-in for Adobe AfterEffects and Premier Pro that adds a VR tool set to these popular cinema-grade color grading, object placement and special effects programs.
