New Anatomy VR App Lets You Look Inside Your Own Body

Take a Look at Yourself

Most people feel confident that they know a fair amount about their own body, in terms of general health and what they look like from the outside. However, most of us haven't taken a look inside—literally speaking. Ed Barton and his UK-based startup Curiscope is hoping to change that with a unique blend of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR). Using an anatomy VR app and the company's Virtuali-Tee, a t-shirt, they are allowing people to see inside of their own chest cavities.

Barton explained to Wired: "We use a mix of VR and AR to see inside the anatomy...With positionally tracked AR, you can position VR experiences physically within your environment."

 

Barton and Curiscope co-founder Ben Kidd have so far raised almost $1 million in seed funding from LocalGlobe, and they've already sold almost 3,000 of the Virtuali-Tees.

High Tech T-Shirt

Barton told Wired that, using positional tracking, "we have a blurring of physical and digital items, and an experience more tightly connected to reality." He continued, "With the Virtuali-Tee, AR is your interface and VR is used to transport you somewhere else. The technologies should be merging."

This technology works using a highly-stylized QR code printed onto the front of the t-shirt. When you scan the code with the corresponding app, you can explore throughout the chest cavity, including the heart and lungs.

AR technology hit the mainstream with the release of Pokémon Go, but its applications have shown that it can reach far beyond games. From smartphone usage to vehicle blueprint design, AR is quickly developing. The combination of both AR and VR could not only make the Virtuali-Tee device fully immersive, but also lead to a whole host of other technologies that combine AR and VR.

This t-shirt, specifically, could be a fantastic tool for the curious. It can be used for educational purposes, allowing anatomy and biology to be a fun experience that students can really wrap their minds around. Even outside of a formal educational setting, this device could allow us to better connect with our own biology. Virtuali-Tee could help people to better understand their own inner workings, and how the things we do every day—from what we eat to how we exercise—might affect our health.