Is that a heart on your table?

3D NEWS> 3D TECHNOLOGY

Last night scientists, politicians and academics performed an augmented reality digital dissection on their table mats during the Lush Prize Awards.

Lush Cosmetics has gone from a single store in Poole in 1994 to over 830 stores in 51 countries in 12 years. Last night was the glitsy inaugural Lush Prize Awards which recognized achievements towards replacing animal testing with alternatives. 

For part of the occasion, 3D creative technology company Inition developed an augmented reality application where guests could pick up an iPad on each table and, through the display, see a foot, heart and set of lungs hover above their placemat. The more curious then could ‘explode’ each anatomically correct organ into different parts or dissect the organs manually. The heart even had a severed artery dropping blood onto the table!

Design practice Something & Son designed a bespoke graph paper canopy, with projections and a stage.  Also on show was an augmented reality life-sized transparent body, which looked not too dissimilar to the scene in Verhoeven’s Hollow Man when Kevin Bacon’s character starts to disappear. The nervous system, bones and tendons could all be seen through the ery blue figure.

As processing power increases, virtual presentation and simulation is rapidly becoming a viable alternative to animal testing and the augmented reality digital dissection enforced the notion in an entertaining way.  

There are an increasing range of technological alternatives to testing on animals from the fields of biotechnology, hi-res scanning, and computer science and the application is sure to get people talking about what the future holds.

For more information about the Lush animal testing campaign visit www.lushprize.org

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