Metaverse. What could it mean for telesurgery?
Zuckerberg is betting on the Metaverse and how we all will be enticed to work in a virtual world on a daily basis. For starters, there are contrarian proofs that you can already notice in the corporate world today, for example — people preferring WFH over going into the office, albeit missing on free coffee, amazing ambience and even free food in some cases. The other proof would be the big shift in the productivity mindset, wherein people, including the senior executives, believe that WFH productivity is superior to in-office work and rids you of many shackling situations, like dressing up, going away from your kids, driving and figuring out lunch times.
Amid all of these contrarian beliefs and mistrust and assuagement against Mark’s envisioned Metaverse, I believe the drive to deliver a fully functional Metaverse will motivate us to improve the VR and the network technology drastically that, by the end of its evolution, we will be able to use it for better — more practical things like Remote Tele surgeries.
What is the Metaverse, you ask?
It’s interesting to note that the concept of the Metaverse has been around for a long time and has been popularized in various science fiction works and other media. The term “Metaverse” was coined by science fiction author Neal Stephenson in his 1992 novel Snow Crash, which described a virtual world where users could interact with each other and with virtual objects and environments.
Since then, the Metaverse concept has evolved and gained more attention as technology has advanced and virtual and augmented reality have become more prevalent. Some people see the Metaverse as a potential future platform for social interaction, entertainment, education, and work. In contrast, others are more sceptical about its potential and its challenges.
If I were to document and formalize the words Mark uttered during the very first Metaverse commercial/hype session, it would go like this:
“The Metaverse is a virtual shared space created by the convergence of virtually enhanced physical reality and physically persistent virtual space, including the sum of all virtual worlds, augmented reality, and the internet. It is a shared space, created by the convergence of virtually enhanced physical reality and physically persistent virtual space, including the sum of all virtual worlds, augmented reality, and the internet. The term “Metaverse” is often used to describe the concept of a collective virtual shared space, which is created by the convergence of virtually enhanced physical reality and physically persistent virtual space, including the sum of all virtual worlds, augmented reality, and the internet.”
Hot take:
Performing surgery remotely has been one of the hot topics in the Bio-Technology domain for years. There are a lot of limitations that hinder progress in this area, a few of which are tackling the latency associated with the network, bandwidth and implementation of high-performance distributed computing across a network. It has not been implemented yet because of the quality of the network infrastructure that it demands. Significant improvements in this field cover a lot of applications, such as providing medical support and surgeries remotely to soldiers at the war front.
Never mind, let's not digress; instead, let's come back to what's important for telesurgeries to take place. One of the main factors in telesurgery is the experience of doing surgery. It is of utmost importance to have an immersive experience as it improves the accuracy and the whole surgical experience, eventually improving the result. Virtual Reality has revolutionized the simulation world and can be considered a prime solution for a rich surgical experience. Training surgeons is one of the major parts of the process; using simulators for this pro- cess would cost a fortune. Virtual reality headsets solve this problem and additionally provide us with portability and ease of use. However, Virtual reality is a computation-intensive application with a large network bandwidth.
How can Virtual reality (VR) contribute, you ask? Well, a rich viewing experience involves having high spontaneity, i.e. very less response time, as the surgeon must see the actions in real-time with the robotic equipment on the other side. Also, surgery involves the participation of many people, including surgeons and medical nurses, that assist them, thus making this a team effort. This encourages having many people working continuously on one thing, thus making the problem more complex. There has to be synchronization between all involved individuals, which can be done if there is a very fast virtual experience. Such speeds can only be attained if the network bandwidth is high enough to allow real-time noise-less Virtual reality streaming.
The concept of telesurgery has been in research and semi-practical existence for a long time. The feasibility of such a process with zero error expectation is only possible if improved methods using 6G network communication technology and advanced virtual reality data streaming are employed. The billions of dollars poured into the Metaverse will fuel the growth of the surrounding technology required to run the Metaverse at scale. And maybe, this growth and evolution can help improve the lives of the researchers trying to prove that telesurgery is possible.
My take on this is — an immense amount of advancements in the field of AR/VR will occur with the advent of 6G and the hype around Metaverse, and thus the concept of remote surgery will see new improvements and embellishments. Important factors such as safety percentage and latency will be improved significantly, and a wider scope of experimentation will be possible.
