IEEE VR ’24 in Orlando
It was a wonderful week in Orlando, attending the IEEE VR Conference from 3/16 to 3/21. I presented a workshop paper, Did I Do Well? Personalized Assessment of Trainees’ Performance in Augmented Reality-assisted Neurosurgical Training [Link]. My undergraduate student, Tiffany and I presented our demo together for the first three days of the conference, having more than 77+ conference attendees performing an AR-assisted EVD and recording their EVD performance on our leaderboard. It was a great pleasure to push the visibility of our AR-assisted Neurosurgery work to other researchers and an amazing experience to get to talk to other exciting and accomplished AR/VR/XR researchers at the conference.
Apple Vision Pro
Our lab was one of the first to get hands on the new Apple Vision Pro on Duke campus. It is truly amazing to see the immersive experience Vision Pro brings in person and we are all excited about the new developments we will be working on with the device! The grand opening of our Vision Pro was filmed and shared on Duke Pratt School of Engineering’s LinkedIn post and you can also find a TikTok post made by Professor Aaron Dinin from his visit to our lab.
NeuroLens’ Demo at NSF Meetings
Our NeuroLens project has gained a tremendous amount of publicity in the last two months, presented as a demo at NSF’s congressional showcase at Capitol Hill as a part of NSF Athena AI Institute (left picture), and also at NSF Computing Systems Research (CSR) PI meeting (right picture). In the left picture below, NSF Director Sethuraman Panchanathan is placing a catheter to the brain ventricular system using our AR guidance system, wearing a Microsoft HoloLens 2 (LinkedIn posts about this demo can be found here: NSF’s Post , Dr. Gorlatova’s Post). Very grateful for the opportunity to present our system to a diverse audience at those meetings!
Completion of Bosch Internship
I’ve completed my 14 weeks research internship at Bosch (Pittsburgh, PA) last week. During my internship, I worked on developing an ontology-based digital twin for industrial augmented reality applications. This was a great opportunity and I’m thankful for mentorship received from the RDS team at Bosch.
Duke Eye Center VISION Magazine
Our work in AR Retinal Laser Therapy is featured in Duke Eye Center’s 2023 VISION Magazine. This is a great opportunity to increase the visibility of our work to the ophthalmology community.
Research Talks
In the past two weeks, I have given research talks about Augmented Reality in Surgical Applications at the WiSE lab, Prof. Anthony Rowe’s group at CMU (6/15), and Duke’s REU seminar (6/21). The talk covered the development of AR-assisted surgical guidance systems for applications in neurosurgery and ophthalmology.
Demo Presentation at IPSN ’23 Co-located with CPS-IoT Week
The demo for Edge-based Augmented Reality Guidance System for Retinal Laser Therapy was presented at IPSN ’23 (co-located with CPS-IoT Week) in San Antonio, Tx. Participants were able to wear our custom ophthalmoscope-integrated AR headset and navigate the retina phantom model with contextual guidance in AR. We had many attendees showing their interest in our work. This news is also featured as a news article on Duke Eye Center’s webpage, https://dukeeyecenter.duke.edu/news/duke-phd-student-presents-research-utilizing-ar-guidance-system-retinal-laser-therapy.
Poster Presentation at ARVO Annual Meeting ’23
Our work on Augmented Reality for Retinal Laser Therapy was presented during the poster session at ARVO Annual Meeting in New Orleans, LA. We showcased the custom AR headset integrated with the binocular indirect ophthalmoscope and let other ARVO attendees try out our AR app to see the retinal landmark hologram in the view of the ophthalmoscope lens. We are grateful that we received a big interest from both engineers and doctors at ARVO.
Bosch Research Internship
I will be joining Bosch Research and Technology Center in Pittsburgh, PA as a PhD research intern to work with the Reliable Distributed Systems group this summer. The group collaborates with Professor Anthony Rowe‘s group at Carnegie Mellon University. I will be working on developing an edge-cloud system infrastructure and applying the architecture to run on Bosch embedded hardware systems that incorporate an AR/VR digital representation and user interface.
Workshop Presentation at IEEE VR ’23
A pilot study of the investigation of thermal perception and emotional response in Augmented Reality (AR) using digital biomarkers was virtually presented at the XR for Healthcare and Wellbeing workshop, co-located with IEEE VR 2023. This work is along the line of our goal in enhancing dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) skill exercises with AR. The team will continue analyzing the physiological data collected during the pilot user study, and developing more realistic AR settings in manipulating users’ thermal perceptions for the future user study. The paper can be found here: [Paper]