Now, I would like to go a little bit more into the future.

Discussing with you, what do you think is the future of AR and MR your specific fields?

And then also, really,

what are the shortcomings,

the challenges, and maybe some concerns that you have?

So, yeah. So I talked a little bit about using VR,

in particular, immersive VR,

for some of the healthcare, health professional education.

And we recently have been sort of delving into that area.

Some of the challenges that we find in doing that,

I talked a little bit about the difference of using this mannequin simulation.

So we use these computerized mannequins

and bringing people into the lab and doing this team training.

And the advantage to doing it that way is,

of course, you have people there,

and you can collect a lot of data,

and you can give them immediate debriefing.

And we have a lot of control over that.

Well, now when we bring them into the immersive environment,

we are faced with now trying to recreate that environment.

So when I bring them into the same lab,

I can use a defibrillator and

a IV pump and a cardiac monitor.

And so, now we're trying to recreate some of that thing in the virtual environment.

And I'm not sure that things are going to have the same level of

fidelity and the same level of

ability for me to project things like hears this heart rhythm that you need to treat.

And so, some of those scenes are going to be important for our team training.

We're not trying to train the nurses and

physicians how to do procedures in this team training environment.

We want them to really learn how to communicate,

work together as a team.

But in order to do that,

there needs to be some level of sort of patient illness going on.

The patient has to have something happening.

And in our case, we're trying to simulate a cardiac arrest.

So they have to be able to respond to something happening,

going wrong with the patient.

And that's where the challenge is.

And so, we're not sure if the virtual reality environment is going to

be able to let us do that with the amount of dollars we have to spend.

Nobody is going to pay

the same amount of money for this game like they're willing to pay for.

This is not the gaming industry.

So that, I think,

is where the concern and that's where the trade-off is.

We're not going to be making a lot of money on this.

I mean, clearly, this is for training.

So, that's our concern,

and that's our challenge,

that's kind of the conundrum that we're in.

And the other thing is,

we know that debriefing is very important for this training.

That's sort of the after when we talk about, okay, how did you do?

And we sort of cement those learnings.

And so, if we have people from around the world playing this game,

how are we going to kind of debrief that?

So those are some of the challenges that we're being faced with.

And so, I don't think they're insurmountable.

We're kind of figuring that out.

But it's one thing to have a single player game,

and there are some great success with single player,

but we're entering this whole idea of multiplayer.

And I think that's going to be something important in the future,

but we just have some challenges ahead of us that we need to overcome.

The other area that I talked about was this whole idea of using

head-mounted display for pain management or distraction.

And the great opportunities we have in

doing that are lessening people's reliance on drugs,

using it in a way that allows patients to be more comfortable,

less anxiety, and all of that.

However, I mentioned the burn patients.

So, when you get this kind of burn treatment,

you might have to be submerged in this tub,

so this kind of hydrotherapy.

Well, some of these head-mounted displays

aren't going to do so well in that wet environment.

So we're going to need different materials.

Or let's say you're having dental procedure done.

I don't know about your dentist,

but my dentist isn't going to be really happy with me

if my hands are up here doing this or this.

So, we need things that are going to be responsive to certain,

maybe, head movements, or maybe just slight arm movements, or things like that.

So we're going to need head-mounted displays specially crafted for

the types of patient needs depending on what we're using them for.

So those are some of the concerns that I have.

And then one last thing is, MRI.

I don't know If anybody had an MRI, but I'm claustrophobic.

And the idea of putting me in that little round metal tube,

yeah, I don't do so well,

but I'd really like to not have to take

Valium and sort of be out for the rest of the day.

So, if I could have that MRI compatible head-mounted display,

I'm just be in there playing a game,

but I can't move my head because I'm not going to get a good MRI picture.

But, could we come up with something like that?

It's probably not insurmountable.

But to me, that's the future.

That's where we're going, but we're going to have to have people willing

to market something beyond just one type.

So, those are my thoughts.

Thank you Michelle. This is very interesting.

Particularly, given the recent developments,

where I think, in particular, for virtual reality,

eye tracking will play an important role so that you can

interact with devices just with your eyes and less with your hands.

And I think it's also interesting that most of these devices are designed for

a natural interaction so that you can just turn around and those kinds of things.

But the examples that you gave,

like at the dentist,

you need to work within the constraints that you're given.

And so, this is actually new potential for new devices. This is great.

So, Mark, I would like to switch over to you.

So, from landscape architecture,

what do you think is the future there?

Is there a question of scale,

scope, new devices, new technologies?

And then, also, what are shortcomings and maybe concerns you do have for AR and VR?

Yeah. I touched on it before.

And I think the transition from people kind of passively

consuming the content to creating it themselves,

we're developing a video game-based project,

where people can actually interactively design their landscapes.

And they get a bunch of metrics,

and they can walk around in the landscape with the headset

on and really figure out what they want,

then go back, see how much it's going to cost,

how it's going to perform in terms of the ecological value.

And they have control over that.

One of the issues we run into with landscape architecture,

in particular, is being tethered to a computer.

If we want to go to a site,

look at an existing site,

and say, you going to look at the future of this particular piece of land,

what we're doing right now is bringing a bunch of

computers out to a site, either a generator,

a bunch of extension cords to get people who are really experiencing that environment

to be able to go into either an augmented or virtual reality experience of it.

So I think even Oculus just announcing

a mobile sort of platform this year is going to have

a huge impact on different professions and

fields that are not kind of isolated to an interior space.

I think that'll have a huge impact.

And some of the barriers that we encounter right now is

that a lot of our students are not coming from a computational background.

Our students are great in a variety of ways,

but they're just not computer scientists.

I think what's starting to happen is that you see in curriculum in grade school,

programming and computation is being introduced earlier.

My daughter is already doing that right now.

So, by the time that that generation gets to university,

I think they're going to be a lot more comfortable with some of

the more customization coding side of things.

And I think that's a huge opportunity in the future,

and that's only five, 10 years away.

Yeah. So I think that some of the potential for abuse of the medium is

really misusing it in terms of representation.

So you can imagine that a developer has a project that they really want to get built,

they really want to sell, and they use VR or

augmented reality to kind of distort the reality of that project.

Right now, a consumer wouldn't really have a way to

verify how accurate or realistic that depiction is.

So I think that kind of necessitates a code of ethics or

a code of conduct in different domains for different uses of the technology,

and that just really doesn't exist right now.

That's a great point, Mark.

So, Michelle and Ted,

we can talk more about how you see it across disciplines.

But just this code of conduct, ethics, I mean,

how do you see it and what kind of agreement could be achieved?

What are the challenges that you see there, Ted or Michelle?

Yeah, I think that whole idea that you

mentioned in terms of code of ethics or a code of conduct,

we struggle with that on the nursing side when we think about evaluating performance.

And so, let's say that we were going to use some sort of

a virtual environment or

virtual reality product to evaluate nurse performance or physician performance.

We would need some sort of check and balance in the system to make sure that there

was some sort of validity check to say if we're going to use

this as kind of like the gold standard to evaluate a nurse's performance,

like how well she did in that scenario,

to give a grade,

or for like a high stakes testing to say whether or not you passed a course,

as to whether or not you could perform well enough in that scenario.

That would be something that we would have to think about.

So that's how we could see that impacting our area.

Because right now, there are some simulations out there.

They're not necessarily immersive VR but they are screen-based VR that we use,

and they evaluate performance.

But it's like, who's writing them and who decides that this is correct?

I mean, they say that they're based on standards, but whose standards?

So that's the problem.

So Ted, again, drawing from your experience from different projects, and also,

definitely technical experience that you have working with all of these technologies,

so what do you think is necessary to improve some of these things that we touched on?

What is the future of our AR, MR?

And what are the concerns that you have?

Well, I'd like to start with some thoughts about

technology's impact on culture, generally.

So, we're in a sort of ironic point in time now where social media,

nobody actually looks at anybody anymore.

They're all sitting there with their phones doing social media.

They've got their earphones on listening to their music.

And it's only a matter of time before we're all

walking around like this with our earphones and our

iPhone's and connected to people

on the other side of the planet but not the person in the bus seat next to us.

And now, fake news has entered the lexicon.

But I see things as a continuum.

I don't see it as a sharp cliff that we're approaching or anything.

I think fake news is probably as old as the language and as old as the printing press.

There's always been fake news.

And it used to be said that cameras don't lie,

but cameras have always lied.

A picture is never quite the way we see things.

Photos used to be black and white for years before we got color.

Things like white balance and red eye reduction,

and whether you're using a zoom lens or a wide angle,

all of these things affect your sense of perspective.

So now, we're in an age where

we're getting more and more convincing with these synthesized images.

And so, the educated population needs to understand this technology.

They need to understand what it is, how it's made,

what does it mean, because it's extremely useful,

extremely powerful, but it can be abused.

And so, we need people with discernment to

be able to look at the stuff and know whether to believe it or not.

On the one hand,

you've got gullible people that believe anything that's on the computer,

if it's pictures don't lie and computers don't lie.

But on the other hand, we now have people that don't believe anything.

The Flat Earthers recently had a conference.

They don't believe any of

the photographs from NASA because they've all been doctored in some way.

And so, the world isn't round,

it's flat because I can't find a picture on NASA that hasn't been somehow modified.

They changed the colors,

and therefore, the Earth is not round.

So, both extremes are bad.

We need an educated population that understands the technology,

understands how images are generated,

how sounds are generated,

what do they mean, how do we discern what to believe and what not to believe,

and how to use it for the best.

So Ted, in the Dutch center,

you always seem to have the latest technology and the latest devices.

And the trends that you see and the plans that you're making,

are you afraid that at some stage,

virtual reality is so good we can't actually

not tell the difference to real reality anymore?

Is that the biggest concern you have?

Well, I hope we never get to that point.

But I mean, the virtual reality cave takes its name from The Allegory of Plato's Cave and

his whole philosophical discussion of how do we know what's real.

I mean it gets into epistemology and the philosophy of science.

How do you know what you know?

And how do you know that that's real?

Plato's Cave, he envisions people in a cave and they're chained there

their whole lives and all they see is shadows moving on

the wall and their whole sense of reality is based on these shadows that they see.

And then one day, they're unchained and they turn around and

this whole world they never knew existed,

and they can't make any sense of it.

I hope we don't get there.

People get addicted to things, and so,

there probably will be people addicted to VR and MR,

and just being walled off in their imaginary worlds.

Again, that's not anything new.

People have been playing video games at the basement for decades now. It's a continuum.

It's all a continuum in my mind,

and it comes down to education, I think.

I think it's important for universities to be engaging in

this stuff and exposing their students to it as much as possible.

Yeah, thanks. These are really some great points.

And also, making us aware of some of the challenges.

And the better the technology gets,

the harder it will be to actually tell what is real and what is not.

And then, Michelle, in your specific area of

simulation and the aspects that you've talked about like,

is it good enough if I can do well in the simulation as opposed to real life,

and performing in the clinical environment?

And then, Mark, the points that you made about creating.

We can create beautiful buildings virtually but can

we match those actually architecture in the real life?

So, thank you for joining me for this really interesting discussion today.

Thank you for having us.

Thank you.

And also, thank you for tuning in and watching the experts here with

the University of Michigan discussing

the future AR and also the challenges that are there.

Panel - Future of Augmented Reality (Part 2)

Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, and Mixed Reality: Opportunities and Issues Teach-Out

Meet the Instructors