A Most Illuminating Experience

Having grown up in Indiana, the flat, sprawling landscape of orderly squares looks familiar as my plane descends through gray midwestern skies and touches down in Cleveland. I’m here to meet the creative engine behind the Interactive Commons at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU), a leading light in global medical research—founders Dr. Mark Griswold and his studio lead Erin Henninger.

I’m here to get a glimpse of the future of education.

Next to the uncanny metallic monolith of CWRU’s Gehry building, stairs lead down to a chevron-shaped lab where the Interactive Commons team has quietly been revolutionizing the way students learn human anatomy.

NBC News described it as “democratizing what has been an elite understanding of the human body.”

A bold claim, and one that I’m eager to experience for myself.

The only time I’ve seen a cadaver was decades ago when a friend in med school introduced me to his “final project” at the University of Chicago. When he lifted the lid, the shock of seeing a human corpse made me see sparkles and I would have gone down if it hadn’t been for the wall behind me.

So as Erin hands me a HoloLens headset, maybe I’m a tad concerned.

I put the device on my head… and suddenly there is a skeleton in the room.

I look it up and down, then at Erin for instruction; she simply points at the glimmering hologram, which feels as anchored in place as my grinning CEO Mark Day, also wearing a headset.

As a kid Mark saw Star Wars in the theater, and when R2D2 projected the hologram of Princess Leia, it changed his life. “I knew I wanted to make that happen,” he said.

"Help me transform medical education, Obi-Wan."

Fast forward to Mark running the global HoloLens business for Microsoft, introducing a transformative technology that will eventually be as ubiquitous as smart phones—just ask Satya Nadella, Tim Cook, or anyone who has witnessed Mixed Reality in action.

“This changes everything,” I gasp.

Which, it turns out, is close to what Professor Griswold said when Microsoft offered him an early glimpse of the technology back in 2014. Working with a baller team of animators, developers, and anatomists—including the irrepressible Sue Wish-Baratz, CWRU’s eminent anatomy ninja—Griswold created the HoloAnatomy® platform.

“Paradigm shift” is an abused phrase, but this is a true sea change.

Initial research reveals that students are learning anatomy twice as fast and remembering material much longer with HoloAnatomy software. And schools are saving “hundreds of thousands of dollars” on sourcing and storing cadavers.

“This is just the beginning,” Mark says, and leans in to examine the filter-like structures that look like little party hats inside the kidneys.

CWRU also recently released HoloAnatomy Neuro Suite, which uses Mixed Reality to visualize the brain and neural activity, revealing the mysteries of our command center. Next up will be Pathology, Physiology, and Dentistry.

I “air tap” on the menu hovering near my wrist and the skeleton is suddenly wreathed in colorful constellations of blood vessels. Another tap and musculature appears, every intricate, interwoven muscle there to explore.

I lean in for a closer look at the left clavicle—I’ve broken mine four times (bike, skateboard, bike, yard sale on the ski slope) and finally “get” what that titanium bracket has been doing, holding my beleaguered collarbone together.

The wonder I’m feeling must be all over my face, because Mark laughs and says, “Right?”

A few months ago, Mark invited me to run communications for his nascent company AlensiaXR, formed to extend these applications to students around the world. “What do you think of the name?” he asked me.

I said it sounds like a Hogwarts spell…. “ALENSIA,” you say with a wave of your wand and like magic: the corpus appears and can be examined every which way. Just mind-bending.

Though my mind fully accepts this hologram, as easily as it accepts that chair sitting there.

Professors report that creating 3D interactive coursework is as simple as making a PowerPoint presentation. And of course students—digital natives—take to it immediately.*

Now that I’ve experienced both Virtual (VR) and Mixed Reality (MR), I’m convinced that the future is Mixed, so to speak. VR feels like being trapped in an infantile Matrix. I found it discombobulating and was unnerved by the fact that it completely dissociates you from everything around—people, place, presence.

And from the macro perspective, perhaps that's humanity's prime problem: We’ve lost touch with where we are in the world.

With MR you still feel entirely in the room, making eye contact with the people you’ve chosen to spend time with. It’s a shared experience, engendering real connection and a shared sense of wonder—at both the marvel of the learning platform and the miracle of the human body.

The technology curve is teetering over us like the wave from Interstellar; faux-sentient chatbots professing love and quantum computing doing god knows what. Some formidable minds claim we’re living in a holographic universe, which may be why this HoloAnatomy experience is so inevitable.

It feels natural to stand here in this room with Mark and Erin and a skeleton, which is now, once and for all, out of the analog closet.

* To see for myself, I’ll return to the home of Lebron James to attend Professor Wish-Baratz’s class later this month. Stay tuned—I’ll report back.…