Università del Salento — AVR Lab
Extended Reality & Human
Computer Interaction
VR, AR and Mixed Reality for Medicine, Cultural Heritage and Education
Research overview
| Application field | Health, Medicine, Surgery, Rehabilitation, Cultural Heritage, Education |
| Technology | Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality, Touchless interaction, Haptic devices |
| Activity | Simulation, Interaction, Visualization |
Keywords
Operation of the proposed solution
Surgical guidance & diagnosis
Virtual and Augmented Reality technologies support surgeons in diagnosis, preoperative planning and intraoperative phases of minimally invasive surgery. Touchless interaction enables intuitive access to patient data in aseptic environments such as the operating theatre, avoiding any contact with devices by medical staff.
Paediatric ADHD treatment via serious games
Virtual, augmented and mixed reality environments are used for treating children with ADHD through game-oriented activities, leveraging the serious games paradigm to make therapeutic sessions engaging and motivating.
Motor rehabilitation with touchless devices
Software applications based on mixed reality and serious games monitor and rehabilitate patients with motor problems, using touchless devices to detect postures and arm and hand movements in real time.
Cultural Heritage — immersive VR navigation
Virtual Reality recreates historic sites for educational purposes and visitor centres, opening up places normally inaccessible to the public by providing realistic computer-generated navigation and a strong sense of presence.
Spatial Augmented Reality & video mapping
Spatial AR (video mapping) turns buildings into display surfaces for video projection, using audio-visual language to narrate a building’s story through animations and sounds — creating an unrepeatable experience that emotionally engages the public.
Open challenges
- 1 Guiding the surgeon during an operation by providing “X-Ray” vision of the patient’s internal anatomy, enriched in real time with contextually relevant information
- 2 Reducing the surgeon’s mental workload when reconstructing 3D anatomy from CT images, by designing systems that make interaction as natural and intuitive as possible
- 3 Making rehabilitation activities enjoyable by transforming them into game activities according to the serious games paradigm
- 4 Using augmented visualization to create a bridge between ancient cultures and modern users
- 5 Exploiting the serious games paradigm to make the study and promotion of cultural heritage enjoyable
- 6 Using video mapping to enable a creative process that emotionally engages the public in an unrepeatable experience
Selected bibliography
Video