Big corporations are investing billions—but the technology may not play out the way they expect.
In mid-April, virtual reality passed a milestone. Using an app created by a company called Medical Realities, viewers from around the globe, each presumably with an iron constitution, witnessed a surgeon at the Royal London NHS Hospital delve into the bowels of a 70-year-old cancer patient. If that sounds like a Nova special, it was so much more. Doctors, medical students, and the merely curious experienced the operation in real time, with 360-degree control over their vantage points, as though they were actually in the operating room.