Maryland Blended Reality Center

SIGGRAPH 2020

The Maryland Blended Reality Center joins computing experts from the University of Maryland, College Park, with physicians and clinicians from the University of Maryland, Baltimore. The center—launched in 2017 and initially funded by The University of Maryland Strategic Partnership: MPowering the State—is advancing visual computing and immersive media that is used in health care, education, the visual and performing arts, and more. The center’s main research focus involves medical and health care applications, such as: critical care patient diagnostic tools that allow health care providers to interact more directly with patients; non-opioid pain management through immersive environments that show promise in distracting patients from pain; next-generation medical education tools using interactive blended reality modules to teach human anatomy dissection; immersive technology also is helping to train police to identify and combat implicit bias that affects their interactions with the public. MBRC researchers have been awarded significant external funding to expand this work.