MaKami College Research in Japan Part 2: 3D Cameras, Healthcare Settings and Valentine’s Day

This blog is the second in our series following MaKami’s Mixed Reality Researcher Mehrad Faridan as he takes his research to the next level at the University of Tokyo. You can read the first blog in this series here: MaKami College Takes Mixed Reality Research to Japan.

Now somewhat settled in Japan, MaKami College’s Mixed Reality Developer Mehrad Faridan has been busy kicking off the first stages of his research.

“We are actually working on two research projects,” says Faridan  “One is exploring how many possible surrogates a remote instructor could effectively ‘control’ at once, and the other is meant to explore how we can enable remote interactions between participants using 3D depth cameras like the Azure Kinect by Microsoft.”

Faridan is currently focused on the latter. “Right now I just want to see how feasible it even is,” he admits. “There is previous research where researchers explored using the kinects to enable remote interactions within physical rooms, but their use cases were incredibly trivial.”

If possible, the technology could be used in various educational formats to help instructors guide students while in different locations.

Recently, Faridan took a trip to the University of Tokyo’s hospital clinical simulation centre with his research partner Takashige and his new co-researcher Takafumi, who was a physician for the past 10 years and is now working on getting his PhD at the university.

“Takafumi suggested we go see what they are working on there, because those use cases may be applicable to our research,” says Faridan, who learned about extracting blood samples, intubation and transferring patients from a hospital bed and wheelchair.

Since then, Faridan has spent the past few weeks putting together a small prototype using the kinects and getting some light feedback from Takafumi. “It’s still very buggy and I need to work on it another week or so, but it’s been fun starting to explore it.”

Researchers from the University of Stockholm and the University of Osaka also came for a visit this month, and Faridan presented some of his mixed reality education research to them before sharing a late dinner.

Keep your eye out here on our website or on our social media channels @makamicollege for the next in our series as we follow our researcher throughout his work and travels in Japan!