> I think VR has a future, but I don’t think it has a broad workplace future. Medicine? Absolutely! Gaming? Sure! Office work? Ehhh

I actually think office work is more practical than medicine in VR. While I agree that office work in VR is less than ideal, I think medicine is even less ideal. How does a doctor diagnose and treat a broken foot in VR..? How does a person accomplish physical therapy in VR? How is an X-ray taken in VR..? How does the doctor take vitals for a physical in VR..?

I don’t think VR will be a component of patient encounters, at least not directly. My thinking on VR in medicine is more AR than VR if we’re to differentiate, and I see it being used mainly in scenarios where visual inspection is more difficult or currently limited.

For example, giving diagnosticians and clinicians a much more economically viable COTS solution to reviewing minutely detailed scans of internal organs. Being able to use imaging data to go “inside” a patient to practice an uncommon, experimental, or otherwise high risk operation for instance.

That’s fair, I’m not trying to be argumentative, normally I would agree with you on the AR applications of medicine. However, given the debut of ChatGPT this year, I really do wonder if AGI will be doing the kinds of analysis you’re talking about before AR is at the level of being able to do it with a human.

:) I didn’t read your comment as argumentative. I hope I didn’t come off that way.

That’s an astute point! I hadn’t considered that there may be a bit of a race between AR/VR and AI/ML in medicine.

Ideally the strengths of both technologies would be incorporated into well defined products eventually.

As long as we are damn careful to properly label, review, and check AI generated medical information.

> :) I didn’t read your comment as argumentative. I hope I didn’t come off that way.

:) I didn’t read your comments as argumentative either, this is actually a great conversation, thanks!

> That’s an astute point! I hadn’t considered that there may be a bit of a race between AR/VR and AI/ML in medicine.

Thank you, it’s a new idea I’ve been thinking on.

> Ideally the strengths of both technologies would be incorporated into well defined products eventually.

I couldn’t agree more. I feel like there must be some fusion of VR/AR/LLM technologies that I’m missing.