Most people in orthopedics are still working with physical products - implants, instruments sets, disposables, robots, etc. But like it or not, we are moving from hardware-centric solutions into software-centric solutions. There will always be physical products in orthopedics, but they will become less relevant each year. Software products will become the differentiator with the high margins, as the physical products will become commodities with low margins.
This article is a primer for two specific areas of software technology - Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR).
Both VR and AR technologies have tremendous opportunities in orthopedics. However they are completely different technologies with different advantages. Let's compare and contrast.
VR
Think of VR as a fake world.
VR completely shuts out reality and puts the user into another world.
I believe that VR is best suited for training applications - surgical procedure training, employee product training, assembly training, nurse product training, anything that involves complex step-by-step procedural learning.
VR has huge advantages in training.
1) VR is scalable. You can train one, 100, or 10,000 people i...
