Dundee students mix reality with Microsoft HoloLens surgical training apps

A group of Scottish university students will join a world-renowned medical technology company after developing new learning tools in augmented reality.

The seven students from University of Dundee have been offered internships with Medtronic following a three-month project which saw them develop apps to train on surgical anatomy and related procedural approaches relevant to ENT (ear, nose, throat) conditions – through Microsoft HoloLens.

The HoloLens is the first self-contained, holographic computer, which allows users to interact with holograms in mixed reality.

Professor Tracey Wilkinson, joint programme lead with Nicolas Denervaud from Medtronic, said the aim of the project was to design and create innovative augmented reality apps for medical education and training, using the HoloLens device as a training tool.

She said its benefit is to help healthcare professionals train in an efficient way to improve their practice and ultimately reach better patient outcomes.

“We have a large number of active, fertile, creative minds in our university who are very comfortable with modern technology”, Wilkinson said. “Allowing our students to develop their ideas with support from Medtronic has led to immersive and fascinating learning.”

Denervaud said that the Medtronic team were really impressed with what the students had achieved in such a short time.

“The company are now sponsoring seven summer internships, giving several of the students an opportunity to develop their ideas further”, Denervaud said. “This is an important project for us, in our effort to develop new teaching modalities, with the aim to help Health professionals deliver improved patient outcomes.”

“Our interns will be tasked with bringing an educational app in anatomy and ENT surgery to completion, so that it is ready for use by trainee health professionals.”

One of the prototypes focused on Temporal Bone surgery will be demonstrated at the European ENT congress in October.

Medtronic has also agreed to run the project again next year, this time over six months to allow more time for development.

Medtronic plc, headquartered in Dublin, Ireland, is among the world’s largest medical technology, services and solutions companies.

Urho3d Could Be a Development Bridge Between HoloLens & ARKit




Developers looking to create shared experiences that support both HoloLens as well as ARKit may be able to get it working in Unity since that the engine supports both platforms — though, the amount of effort it might take to get that working could be a bit much. Up to this point, Unity has been the only real approach to attempt this combination — at least, until now.

According to a report by MSPoweruser, UrhoSharp, a small and lightweight game engine in similar scope to the Apple SceneKit and SpriteKit, which currently supports Android, iOS, Windows (including HoloLens), and macOS, recently added ARKit support.

Microsoft software developer Egor Bogatov (formerly of Xamarin, which Microsoft purchased) has released a video of UrhoSharp working on an iPhone through the ARKit. He also released the corresponding code to a GitHub repository as well.

UrhoSharp is a .NET and Xamarin-based wrapper for the Urho3D game engine, a full-featured 2D and 3D cross-platform C++ game engine. The feature list for Urho3D is too long to list here, but some of the more notable features that UrhoSharp supports are:

• support for Direct X And OpenGL rendering standards
• physics simulation
• await/async .NET functionality
• 2D integration into 3D scenes
• networking
• audio playback

While this demo does not demonstrate the HoloLens and iPhone gap being bridged, it is fair to assume that between UrhoSharp and Unity both currently supporting both platforms, it won't be long before someone figures out the solution. And this tool set could likely simplify that process.

Change of Plans !!

Hololens 2 will be released after all.


Microsoft announced that the next generation of its mixed reality HoloLens headset will incorporate an AI chip. This custom silicon — a “coprocessor” designed but not manufactured by Microsoft — will be used to analyze visual data directly on the device, saving time by not uploading it to the cloud. The result, says Microsoft, will be quicker performance on the HoloLens 2, while keeping the device as mobile as possible.

The announcement follows a trend among Silicon Valley’s biggest tech companies, which are now scrambling to meet the computational demands of contemporary AI. Today’s mobile devices, where AI is going to be used more frequently, simply aren’t built to handle these sorts of programs, and when they’re asked, the result is usually slower performance or a burned-out battery (or both).

But getting AI to run directly on devices like phones or AR headsets has a number of advantages. As Microsoft says, quicker performance is one of them, as devices don’t have to upload data to remote servers. This also makes the devices more user-friendly, as they don’t have to maintain a continuous internet connection. And, this sort of processing is more secure, as users’ data never leaves the device.

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