Reading the following headlines…
“Digital Mirror Reveals Organs Under Your Skin”
“The Mirror that Shows Your Insides”
“Digital Mirror Allows People to See Their Organs“
…one gets the impression that it’s possible to peer into a “mirror” and gaze at their own internal organs. It sounds like a really cool concept, except that the “digital mirror”, a 3-D installation at the Museum of Arts and Crafts in Paris, doesn’t reveal anything inside of the viewer’s own body. Instead, according to New Scientist, the viewers unknowingly are “shown pre-recorded data of other individuals of the same sex” that are “animated with the help of graphical processing units.”
Xavier Maître, a medical imaging researcher at the University of Paris-South, and his collaborators, created the installation “to explore philosophical questions about how we relate to our body”; however, future applications of augmented reality could help medicine in a myriad of ways, including:
- helping people explore a particular part of their own body.
- preparing patients for an upcoming operation.
- helping educate patients in new ways.
- projecting slices of medical imagery directly onto a person’s body.
- animating MRI data to pinpoint joint problems and predict how the body will deteriorate.
Today, you can’t look into a “digital mirror” and see your own internal organs. But researchers are currently working on making the aforementioned headlines a future reality.