Simulation: TED Talk ... The Next Big Thing? ... Augmented Reality, Is It Ready for Primetime? Medicine?

Colleagues,

Augmented Reality is purported to be "The Next Big Thing". Check out this video and think about how these advanced visualization tools might be applied in medicine ...

In a demo that drew gasps at TED2010, Blaise Aguera y Arcas demos new augmented-reality mapping technology from Microsoft.

About Blaise Aguera y Arcas

Blaise Aguera y Arcas' background is as multidimensional as the visions he helps create. In the 1990s, he authored patents on both video compression and 3D visualization techniques ...

He also created Seadragon (acquired by Microsoft in 2006), the visualization technology that gives Photosynth its amazingly smooth digital rendering and zoom capabilities. Photosynth itself is a vastly powerful piece of software capable of taking a wide variety of images, analyzing them for similarities, and grafting them together into an interactive three-dimensional space. This seamless patchwork of images can be viewed via multiple angles and magnifications, allowing us to look around corners or "fly" in for a (much) closer look. Simply put, it could utterly transform the way we experience digital images.

He's now the architect of Bing Maps at Microsoft, where he leads a team of researchers and engineers with strengths in social media, computer vision and graphics.