Hello everyone and welcome to ZD Tech, ZDNet’s daily editorial podcast. My name is Guillaume Serries and today I explain to you how Cisco plans to replace doctors and nurses with… holograms.
You are certainly familiar with Webex, Cisco’s video conferencing tool, widely used in business. Like Meet, Zoom or Teams, the use of these tools has simply exploded during the confinements of the past two years.
But now the American giant Cisco is now betting on Webex Hologram. Introduced last October, Webex Hologram is a service that brings augmented reality to its collaboration platform.
It is therefore out of the question to spoil such a technical feat with an 8-inch screen.
Last year, Facebook launched its own mixed reality collaboration initiative. The product is called Oculus Horizon Workrooms. But Facebook presents participants as avatars, not photorealistic holograms.
For Cisco, the first cases of use of this technology would be to be found in the field of health. The idea? Make certain experiences more immersive.
Cisco assumes that many teleconsultations between doctors and patients during the confinement were carried out with video platforms like Webex. And at the same time, doctors were also communicating with each other virtually using these tools.
Therefore, why not rely on holograms and no longer on screens to communicate better? Because no, Cisco holograms do not appear on your computer or smartphone screens.
It is therefore out of the question to spoil such a technical feat with an eight-inch screen. Because the company has set up holograms that react in real time. Webex Hologram therefore uses augmented reality headsets, such as the Magic Leap and the Microsoft HoloLens.
Cisco uses a light field rendering technique
The first use case described by Cisco is that of distance learning. Concretely, medical students can look at a 3D model of a part of the human body while observing simulations of a medical procedure.
Hey but wait! I’ve seen that before! It was a few years ago, during the demonstration that accompanied the first version of Microsoft’s Hololens headset! There too, a medical course was given with a 3D hologram of the human body! Yes, so Cisco is making new out of old.
But he does it better, he swears.
Cisco uses a rendering technique called light field. Enough to provide an exceptional holographic quality on shiny and reflective objects, such as the eyes for example. Why ? Because light fields make it possible to represent a given real-world point in a scene as different colors when viewed from different angles. Volumetric video, a competing technique, limits virtual representation to the same color.
To achieve this feat, under the hood, Cisco Hologram houses a rendering technique hosted and powered partially in the cloud. The hologram is thus partly rendered in the cloud, and the final adjustments are calculated with the processor of the augmented reality headset.
It is this technique that makes it possible to optimize the computing power by offloading the headsets from most of the calculation. Enough to circumvent the technical limits of current helmets, all with a 4G wireless connection. Of course, Cisco compression algorithms – historical network specialist – are also involved.
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