Schedule Tabs

The need for a robust and realistic platform for simulating complex surgeries for the purposes of training as well as patient education has long been established. From the common practice of using anatomical models to the more recent usage of virtual reality headgear, surgeons have employed a wide spectrum of technologies in an attempt to both prepare as well as communicate the complexities of each procedure to their patients. The existing technologies, however, have presented challenges by the lack of patient-specificity as well as the need to wear headgear that removes the surgeon and patient from the surrounding world. In this talk, Xenco Medical Founder and CEO Jason Haider will speak about and demonstrate the world’s first glasses free holographic surgical simulation platform, HoloMedX. Built with a holographic light-field display and a gesture-recognizing sensor, surgeons are capable of loading patient data from CT and MRI scans into the HoloMedX software, which instantly translates the slices into interactive holographic anatomy. Surgeons are also capable of adding holographic implants that match all of Xenco Medical’s spinal implants and can perform an entire simulated spine surgery in holographic space. The talk will highlight the technology behind the HoloMedX system, the applications of HoloMedX in healthcare, and will include a demonstration of the platform.

In VR, medically scanned, digitized human bodies become semi-transparent volumes that we can walk around, dive into, and interact with. These translucent data bodies can be combined with other kinds of personal identity, biometric and social data, thus promising new and powerful ways to represent and contemplate our digitized selves. In this presentation, Marilène Oliver and Walter Ostrander will present two VR projects made with medical scan data called My Data Body and Your Data Body that are currently being developed as part of the interdisciplinary art and science research project Know Thyself as a Virtual Reality. My Data Body seeks to make visible and manipulable all the data that humans as individuals now endlessly generate and are responsible for, whilst Your Data Body troubles how we interact with, and are responsible for, the data of others. Both works ask questions about the aesthetics and ethics of data ownership, privacy and automation. In My Data Body the viewer is presented with a prone, passive figure as data processing site. Mac terminal, Facebook and Google data is written into cross sections of the body, passwords and logins run through veins and arteries, organs can be extracted and used to leave emoji or hashtag trails. Your Data Body presents rows and rows of scanned body parts that users can pick up and manipulate. Depending on whether the scan was downloaded from an open source database or was donated, either an automated voice recites the scraped web data from the repository or a chatbot trained on various data usage agreements and digital charters converses with the user. Making these VR projects is allowing the team to refine and develop a suite of open source software tools (for Unity and 3D Slicer) which, accompanied by a set of ethical guidelines and datasets, will be made available to other researchers and artists by the end of 2021.

Dyscorpia gathers artists and thinkers in visual art, design, contemporary dance, medical humanities, virtual reality, sound creation, computer science, and creative writing in order to question what it means not to know the limits of our bodies. Dyscorpia is not science-fiction. Dyscorpia is historical time and biological time entangled. It forces past and future in a deadlock, so the present can be squeezed inside out for you to see. Now in its third year, Dyscorpia 3 is being hosted in a digital twin of the galleries where the first Dyscorpia was mounted in 2019, allowing artists continue interrogating the increasingly complex intersections of the body and technology.

Keram interviews author Regine Gilbert about designing digital applications with inclusivity and accessibility in mind.

We live in a 3D world, a multisensorial world. Where scent technology meet XR is, I believe the next frontier: the future of Human-Machine Interaction. I explore this frontier, and question how to engage audience, drive emotion, enhance immersion and in short, transform Human experience.