Virtual and Augmented Reality

Virtual Reality in Healthcare

John Clauss — Wed, 18 Sep 2019 18:00:00 +0000

Virtual Reality in Healthcare John Clauss Wed, 09/18/2019 - 14:00

Stepping into the Marker Seven office, your eyes may roam towards the floor and be greeted by two huge white eyes fixed upon you. But there’s no need to be alarmed. Our companion robot, Kuri, soon after it spots you, will surely roll on over to give you a welcome. Kuri continually reminds us that the digital world and reality are becoming increasingly intertwined. With Virtual Reality presenting new worlds and opportunities, it’s no wonder that the industry is expected to grow from $9.1 billion in 2017 to nearly $160 billion in 2021.

While the value of VR is still being shaped in countless vertical markets, one of its most immediate and impactful uses is clearly in medicine. Recently, Marker Seven had the opportunity to interact with several medical device manufacturers looking to leverage VR tools in patient treatment. As we gained insight to the amazing work they’re doing, it made us excited for the future and proud of the good technology can for humanity. At Marker Seven, we are keenly interested working with companies that have wide-spread, positive social impact. And many VR companies are doing just that.

An important recent learning at M7 is that the medical VR industry is focused on two main tracks: physician training and patient rehabilitation. With VR’s versatile capabilities providing practice surgeries, teaching methods, consultation, and post-treatment care, it’s no question VR will be a significant guiding force in the future of medicine. More efficient care, better outcomes, lower costs, and easier access are just some of the top-line benefits. Close to home, Stanford Medicine is using a new software system that combines imaging from MRIs, CT scans, and angiograms to create a three-dimensional simulated model that physicians and patients can see and manipulate — adding clarity to both doctors and patients.

Marker Seven believes in the concept of technology as a tool for good, and we’re tremendously excited to engage with medical VR companies that support those ambitions. The work we do enables VR companies to focus on their primary technologies, while we develop digital products to support every other aspect of the business from custom application development, to websites, to digital marketing. If you’re with a VR company in the medical products space, we’d love to learn how our digital products we can support your mission to save and improve lives.

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Virtual and Augmented Reality

Part 3 -- Thinking ahead for our clients with virtual and augmented reality

John Clauss — Fri, 16 Feb 2018 23:45:00 +0000

Part 3 -- Thinking ahead for our clients with virtual and augmented reality John Clauss Fri, 02/16/2018 - 18:45

JC: We’re raising a generation of kids already addicted to screens. How much danger do you think we’re in of replacing vital human interactions with virtual ones? Are flesh-and-blood humans in danger of obsolescence?

EK: This is a recurring fear expressed in science fiction: if there’s a virtual world that’s better than the real world, will everyone stay in there all the time and abandon reality? The Matrix presents this as a dystopia; the novels Snow Crash and Ready Player One make it seem sort of appealing. Anyone with videogame addiction issues should definitely be wary of VR tech, but I think most people will continue to prefer real things in the real world, most of the time. What we’ll probably see instead is a blurring between reality and computer interfaces, and we’ll gradually get used to having our data and UI bleeding into the world around us – just as we all currently keep one eye on our smartphones at all times -- rather than replacing the real world entirely. That said, if you want a hilarious and terrifying vision of AR taken too far, see the short video Hyper-Reality (2016).

JC: Do you foresee VR in education taking hold in any significant way?

EK: Education is a natural application for VR, since you can fully immerse people in different places and times. Google already has an app called Expeditions that lets a teacher guide an entire classroom through a synchronized VR experience using low-cost Cardboard headsets. You can also use Google Earth VR to zoom into any location in the world, and walk through mountain ranges and cities, with skyscrapers up to your knees – you can imagine a lot more educational apps beyond these early concepts.

However, VR equipment currently ships with warnings about exposing children for long periods of time, because we don’t know enough about the side effects. You’re tricking some parts of the brain’s visual processing system, but not other parts, and feeding this non-real input into a developing brain for hours per day might not be a good idea. For that reason, we’re probably not close to the vision of the film Ready Player One, in which kids attend school entirely in VR.

JC: What are the incremental steps for companies interested to incorporate VR or AR into their digital experiences? Is it as simple as a pair of 3-D glasses and a plug-in pointer?

EK: AR is the easiest to incorporate today, since the technology is being widely distributed to iPhones with iOS 11, and increasingly to Android phones as well. The secret of AR is that it’s also relatively cheap to produce, since most of the experience is provided by the actual world, and you only need to build out the graphics for the “augmented” parts – think about how Niantic’s Pokemon Go introduced a popular game at the scale of the entire Earth, simply by adding Pokemon graphics as an overlay to real-world locations.

With VR, there are some obvious marketing applications today, such as showing customers what it would be like to sit in various car models with different options; IKEA already has a VR app where you can explore their kitchen setups. But at this point, potential customers mostly won’t have the headsets in their homes. That makes VR more appropriate for tradeshows, dealerships, or internal corporate training, where it makes sense to provide the equipment on location. And of course the development cost of VR will tend to be higher than AR, since you need to produce a fully immersive experience, with your users’ expectations already set by the high-fidelity 3D graphics of console games. In the best case, you can repurpose 3D assets you already have, such as CAD files of your equipment; in the worst case, you’ll need to build everything, using specialized game-design tools like Unity. For that reason, VR production will generally be done by specialized agencies, much like the early days of mobile apps. So let me turn it back on you, John—what have you been thinking about how to expand AR and VR offerings to our Marker Seven clients?

JC: Great question, Evan. One place we’re seeing a kind of AR is in purchasing retail products online. Since the Internet, retailers have been jumping over each other trying to find ways to reproduce the hands-on experience of the brick-and-mortar store. One great example is Flutter Eyewear, which produces high-end fashion reading glasses, featured in Oprah magazine. With a form of AR, their customers can “try on” glasses online, to see which ones will look best on them. This helps to increase the customer’s level on confidence in buying a product online that they had previously only bought in-store.

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Virtual and Augmented Reality

Part 2 -- Thinking ahead for our clients with virtual and augmented reality

John Clauss — Wed, 29 Nov 2017 22:00:00 +0000

Part 2 -- Thinking ahead for our clients with virtual and augmented reality John Clauss Wed, 11/29/2017 - 17:00

This interview is the second in a series of three where our CEO John Clauss talks with longtime friend and Marker Seven advisor Evan Kirchhoff about augmented and virtual realities. You can see the first part of the interview here.

JC: Science fiction has lots of examples of VR turning deadly. But in real life, is there any basis in physics for the possibility of a holo-game potentially causing physical harm?

EK: You can look at the Holodeck in Star Trek as a good example of what’s currently missing in VR. We have a persuasive visual illusion, and you can walk around a room and make gestures with your hands and have a vivid sense that you’re in a real place…but you still can’t touch or feel anything. A lot of companies are working on equipment like haptic feedback suits that give you a sense of things “pushing back” on your arms or legs, but nothing that would exert enough physical force to hurt you. It’s also hard to imagine a big market for software interfaces that require you to change your clothes, on top of the current hassle of having to move your couch out of the way. VR might remain mostly “untouchable” in a physical sense.

On the other hand, psychological fear is very easy to trigger in VR, and there are a lot of horror games already leveraging that. There’s a game for the Vive headset called Ritchie’s Plank Experience that simulates walking on a wooden plank extending from the edge of a skyscraper, high above a city. It’s hilarious to watch other people do it, but it’s terrifying to play if you have any fear of heights. When I tried it, my brain was screaming “NOT SAFE! GO BACK!!” the entire time – and then a cruel friend ran up behind me in the real world and “pushed me off” the plank. For about one full second, I genuinely thought I was going to die. The rational part of my mind, that knew I was really just playing a video game, was completely overridden by a primal survival system that was completely freaking out. It was literally a near-death experience, which you might call a kind of “harm”. On the positive side, there is already widespread use of VR in cognitive therapy: for example, you can slowly cure someone’s fear of public speaking by exposing them to simulated audiences in VR.

One lesson from VR is that your brain is this very complex and subtle system that’s also really easy to fool with just a bit of visual stimulus. It’s fascinating and a little disappointing at the same time.

JC: I’m thinking about additional potential uses. How can we best factor in AR and VR when thinking ahead for our clients?

EK: VR is probably going to have a lot of applications in industries that people currently don’t expect. For example, in any situation where an expensive vehicle or piece of equipment is used in training (think heavy industry, or healthcare), there’s a potential case for VR simulation instead. VR tech is expensive and cumbersome from a consumer standpoint, but trivial compared to the cost of taking big industrial devices out of service. However, it always takes awhile for sexy new technology to percolate into non-sexy industries far from Silicon Valley, due to cultural gaps on both sides. There will be big opportunities in bridging those gaps, but it may take a few years.

JC: Most people already have technology like computers, cell phones, and other similar devices—will emerging AR/VR technologies need to mesh with these? Or will VR, as Mark Zuckerberg predicts, become the next computing platform? If that’s the case, how long do you think that will take?

EK: AR makes good use of the cellphones we already have, which is exciting. VR works less well on phones – it requires an additional headset to mount the phone in, at minimum, and to really get the Holodeck experience you need a high-powered gaming PC with a cable connected to your head. Both technologies will evolve past this phase, but AR provides more bang for the buck today, so it will spread much more rapidly over the next year or two.

Facebook is essentially about sharing experiences remotely, so they’re betting big on VR as a way of doing that in the long term. Zuckerberg’s vision is that we’ll ultimately have lightweight wearables in the form of normal-looking glasses that will handle both AR and VR. However, for various technical reasons, that level of technology is probably 5 years from being practical and 10 years from being widespread. We may even have to weather another cycle of VR being declared “dead”, although I hope not -- I think today’s hardware is finally good enough to get a permanent toehold in gaming, at least, while we figure out the other uses.

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Virtual and Augmented Reality

Thinking ahead for our clients with virtual and augmented reality

John Clauss — Thu, 02 Nov 2017 20:00:00 +0000

Thinking ahead for our clients with virtual and augmented reality John Clauss Thu, 11/02/2017 - 16:00

Our CEO John Clauss sat down with Evan Kirchhoff, a virtual reality expert, and one of the members of our innovation team who has worked with us as a strategic advisor since 2001.

Their goal was to think together about the current and future states of virtual reality and augmented reality. Marker Seven is particularly interested in this line of thought because a number of our clients come from industries or are working on projects particularly conducive to AR and VR, such as medical equipment, educational platforms, and retail products.

We’re also in conversations with a number of other companies about how we can—as always—think ahead for them about how AR and VR can help them meet the future. Not everyone who can make great use of AR or VR thinks of themselves that way—yet.

JC: First, let’s talk terms. Virtual reality, augmented reality, and the fast-fading mixed reality. What terms do you favor for the kinds of applications you’re doing, and why?

EK: Virtual reality and augmented reality share a lot of technology, such as motion tracking, but they have very different uses. VR is for fully immersive simulations: it lets you go inside the computer and experience a completely fictional world. AR does the opposite: it brings the computer out into the real world, in the form of graphical elements attached to real places or things.

VR works amazingly well today, and creates very compelling experiences – but doing it properly requires high-end computers, clunky headsets, and either cameras on your desk (Oculus Rift) or lasers mounted on your walls (HTC Vive). That’s a lot to ask of the average consumer, so the primary adopters so far are basically gaming enthusiasts.

AR has a much wider range of practical applications -- probably close to the scope of the web itself -- but the experience is currently farther away from its ideal. Today, most AR experiences use smartphones, since it’s a camera and motion-tracking technology that everyone already has in their pocket, but it limits us to holding a phone out in front of us with one hand and looking at the world through that tiny window, and interacting only by tapping on the screen – so the experience is both more limited and more mediated than VR.

The term “mixed reality” was intended as an umbrella for both of these. We might eventually think of AR and VR as aspects of the same technology, where VR is something like “AR turned up to 100%” and running on the same wearable hardware. But for the foreseeable future, VR is something you put on your head at home in your living room, and AR is something you look at through your phone.

JC: How would you contrast the VR/AR strategies of the major platform companies like Google and Apple?

EK: Google is working simultaneously from the low end, by adding VR features to Android phones, and the high end, by building immersive apps for HTC’s headset like Google Earth VR and the 3D paint program Tilt Brush. They’re also working with HTC on a new headset, and this will probably be accelerated by their acquisition of HTC’s hardware engineers. Apple is focusing on AR, since it works very well on today’s iPhones, whereas VR works best on high-performance gaming hardware that you can’t use with today’s Macs. Microsoft is doing a bit of everything: they have a high-end AR headset (HoloLens) and are working with OEMs to produce midrange VR headsets for PCs.

This interview is the first in a series of three. In the next segment within a month, Evan speaks to some similarities and differences between the Star Trek Holodeck, and the actual capacities of virtual reality.

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Virtual and Augmented Reality