This HoloLens visualisation tool enables surgeons to treat chronic heart conditions more effectively.

At this year’s Imagine Cup, Microsoft hosted dozens of student teams from across the world. They showcased an incredibly broad range of products developed to solve practical problems that ranged from getting rescue workers to disaster zones quickly to helping farmers manage the health of their livestock, improving water quality, battling fake news, and holding politicians to account.

Student teams showcased a huge variety of applications
Share on X

Microsoft's vision is to build a mixed reality ecosystem
Share on X

And given the company’s vision – which they set out at this year’s Build conference – of developing a Mixed Reality ecosystem, it’s hardly surprising that we also saw a few interesting HoloLens projects cropping up as well. One of those was developed by three Biomedical Engineering students from Xidian University in China, who came up with the idea after meeting at their school’s Innovation Lab.

Xidian University students saw the potential of Mixed Reality for diagnosing heart conditions
Share on X

The students had the opportunity during the course of their studies to work with children suffering from congenital heart disease, and found that often a child’s heart was so small that standard examination and diagnosis techniques were entirely unsuitable for them. In fact, in some cases these standard adult procedures could cause serious damage to their tiny and already fragile organs.

This of course caused many problems not only during examination, but consequently later in surgery, as surgeons were not supplied with ideal levels of information about a patient’s heart. The students therefore decided to develop a practical tool that addressed some of those issues. The result was Surgical Assistant, a Windows medical imaging processing platform that allows for both 2D and 3D visualization.

“With our platform we can localize a lesion, and observe all the details of that lesion in a non-invasive way,” explained Maoqing Yang from the Surgical Assistant Team.

Like all this year’s Imagine Cup projects, Surgical Assistant was deployed on Azure, but it additionally based its computer diagnosis and decision-making algorithms on Azure Machine Learning Studio.

Cloud-based healthcare-based virtual applications are a booming area
Share on X

Such cloud-based healthcare-based virtual applications are certainly a booming area, and disciplines like surgery in particular – which are highly visual and where building up the right skillset requires many hours of practice – are ideally suited for such solutions, which allow for realistic practice with none of the risks associated with practicing on live patients.

There are indeed a host of examples emerging of Mixed Reality applications being used to train surgeons, many of which are seizing upon the ability of the HoloLens to overlay holograms onto real-world backdrops, as well as its collaborative capabilities. Unlike in VR, the user is able to interact with colleagues and teachers (in the same room or remotely) at the same time as viewing holographic content, which is also shared so that all participants are looking at the same thing in real time.

This works to closely replicate the dynamics of an operating room, and is already yielding positive results, which will likely improve dramatically once haptic technology develops further to allow for fine-tuning of factors around touch, pressure and feel which are crucial in surgery.

The application replicates the dynamics of an operating room
Share on X

Although the Surgical Assistant team were prevented by visa issues from attending the finals at Microsoft’s Headquarters in Redmond, WA, they still worked with several senior company staff to improve and develop the structure of the product, and are optimistic about the prospects of deploying and scaling their product. They now plan on continuing to develop the product in partnership with more hospitals and deploying the tool to help may more young patients suffering from such chronic heart conditions.

“We have developed this system for over 2 years, and we have tested it in a hospital environment. Now we want to let more people know about our work and collaborate with whoever is interested to solve these problems,” concludes Yang.

This article was originally published on VRScout

A Mixed Reality Application to Heal Young Hearts via @alicebonasio https://t.co/ooSxIJfD9t pic.twitter.com/gqV190nisr

— VRScout (@VRScout) August 17, 2017

If you would like to find out how to leverage VR/AR/MR in your enterprise, Tech Trends offers Virtual Reality Consultancy

Alice Bonasio is a VR Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio and @techtrends_tech on Twitter.

The post Healing Hearts with Mixed Reality appeared first on Tech Trends.

As Donald Trump pulls out of the Paris climate change agreement, China seizes the opportunities of Renewable Energy Technology

Donald Trump pulling out of the Paris agreement might turn out to be good news for the planet
Share on X

There’s are strict etiquette rules around gift giving in China. Traditionally it’s during Chinese New Year when one exchanges generous and often extravagant gifts. It’s not uncommon for people to get large quantities of cash, for example – usually presented in red envelopes for good luck. Choosing the wrong colour gift-wrap or giving “unlucky number” money amounts can cause serious offence.

Cultural sensitivity has never been Donald Trump’s forte, however, so it’s hardly surprising he overlooked the fact that these celebrations happen in January/February (depending on the Lunar calendar). Yet considering the size of the red envelope that America just handed President Xi Jinping they’ll probably let that slide.

By pulling out of the Paris agreement Donald Trump has gifted China with the opportunity of a lifetime
Share on X

By pulling out of the Paris agreement, the US President has gifted China with the opportunity of a lifetime: To save the planet from climate change, while making lots and lots of money in the process. And the strangest twist of all isn’t that Trump has done this at the expense of the US economy, but the fact this bizarre turn of events might not turn out to be such bad news for the planet after all.

China might not be the hero Gotham expected, but it’s the hero it needs right now. Because the country which four years ago was burning almost as much coal as the rest of the world combined is now the country which has just overtaken Germany to become the world’s biggest producer of solar energy. If anybody can show us how to meet ultra-ambitious targets and pull off projects on a massive scale, they’re probably it.

By pulling out of the Paris climate agreement, US president Donald Trump has gifted China with the opportunity of a lifetime: to save the planet from climate change—and make lots and lots of money in the process. This bizarre turn of events might not turn out to be such bad news for the planet after all.

China might not be the hero Gotham expected, but it’s the hero it needs right now
Share on X

The fact that you need to invest in order to get a return is a cornerstone of successful business thinking—and therefore also a concept that Trump should both understand and embrace. Instead, the golden economic opportunity that green energy presents will likely be lost, or at least severely diminished, for America. In the new world order, leaders that don’t understand this will become as much of a fossil as the fuels they so stubbornly peddle.

Trump seems to build his policies on the premise that doing the right thing is diametrically opposed to economic growth. This may have been true in the very early days of green technology, where it was prohibitively expensive and relatively inefficient. But to make that same choice nowadays is a bit like refusing to buy a smartphone now because you once used a Motorola MicroTAC in the early ‘90s and it didn’t really do it for you. We’ve moved on since then.

Achieving true global-warming reduction goals requires significant commitment and investment, both of which China has in spades. And if any country can show us how to meet ultra-ambitious targets and pull off projects on a massive scale, it’d be China. Four years ago, China was burning almost as much coal as the rest of the world combined. But in 2017, it also overtook Germany to become the world’s biggest producer of solar energy. As Simon Chadwick of Salford University in Manchester explains, “China likes to be omnipotent and successful in everything it does”—and that attitude gets results.

Job creators, money makers

Trump dedicated a significant chunk of his Paris-agreement-leaving speech to demonizing developing countries such as China and India for their “unfair advantage” in being allowed to burn coal to their heart’s content while spending the crippling subsidies paid for by industrialized nations. It is ironic, then, that pulling out of the Paris agreement deals such a fatal blow to the very thing his supporters trusted him to safeguard: American jobs.

 The golden economic opportunity that green energy presents will likely be lost, or at least severely diminished, for America. In the US, green energy creates jobs 12 times faster than the overall economy, and these are exactly the sort of well-paying, blue-collar construction and manufacturing jobs that those voting for Trump were hoping to “get back.” The president’s decision will likely mean that green-sector jobs that could have been created in the United States may instead go to Chinese workers. Of the 8.1 million renewable-energy jobs that exist globally, 3.5 million are in China, compared to less than 1 million in the US. This latest investment by the Chinese government is expected to create a further 13 million jobs.

Evidence shows that when green-energy initiatives are well-planned and properly supported, they also do well financially
Share on X

There’s nothing soft and fuzzy about China’s green-energy strategy; like in everything they do, they mean business. With the cost of building large-scale solar plants dropping by as much as 40% since 2010, it makes economic sense for it to phase out coal burning and increase solar production capacity fivefold, adding another 1,000 major solar-power plants to its infrastructure. This is part of a broader program to invest $360 billion in renewable power by 2020.

Steven Han from securities firm Shenyin Wanguo says that as those costs continue to go down, China may actually exceed those targets. The country is looking on pace to over-deliver on the 2020 carbon-intensity commitments it set out in its last five-year economic plan, and all this without compromising their economic growth—quite the opposite, in fact.

There’s nothing soft and fuzzy about China’s green-energy strategy; like in everything they do, they mean business
Share on X

Evidence shows that when green-energy initiatives are well-planned and properly supported, they also do well financially. Take, for example, the bike scheme started back in 2008 in the city of Hangzhou in southern China. In less than a decade, the number of daily hires in the city grew from 5,000 to 315,000. That’s a cumulative 774 million rides, 96% of which were entirely free. By the end of 2010 the scheme was already breaking even, with advertising revenue coming from the posters on the bikes paying not only for the running costs, but also funding expansion. The scheme, which was awarded the Ashden Award for Sustainable Travel, became a blueprint for many of the other 400 cities across China running similar initiatives.

“The Chinese economy is already transitioning from a reliance on manufacturing to prioritizing innovation. This timing means that China can seize opportunities available in spaces like green technology,” says Samantha Deave, corporate services manager at Asia House, an independent center for commercial policy expertise based in London.

A report by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) found that China is cementing its dominance in renewables, rapidly accelerating its foreign investment in renewable energy, and supporting technologies. In 2016, there was a 60% rise in large-scale (over $1 billion) Chinese foreign investments in the sector for a combined total of $32 billion. These projects were spread across the globe and included buying power from wind and solar farms in Australia, spending $1.6 billion on a waste-to-energy development in Germany, and buying a 25% stake (worth $2.5 billion) in a Chilean lithium miner and processor, which will ensure supply of the lithium essential for electric-car batteries, for example. Tim Buckley, director of energy-finance studies at the IEEFA, says US isolationism provides China with the perfect opportunity to establish a long-term political, economic, and strategic leadership globally.

Article originally published in Quartz

Trump just helped make China great againhttps://t.co/7ZYjIh1EJO

— Quartz (@qz) June 28, 2017

For companies looking to gain a competitive edge through technology, Tech Trends offers strategic Virtual Reality and Digital Transformation Consultancy services tailored to your brand.

Alice Bonasio is a VR and Digital Transformation Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio on Twitter.

The post China Leading the World in Green Tech appeared first on Tech Trends.