Master thesis: Simulation of Muscle Activity for an Augmented Reality Magic Mirror

Thesis by:
Advisor: Nassir Navab
Supervision by: Ma Meng
Due date: now

We have previously shown an augmented reality (AR) magic mirror. We create the illusion that a user standing in front of the system can look inside the own body. The video of this system received a lot of attention and has been seen over 200.000 time on Youtube. We now want to build a system for education of human anatomy using augmented reality visualization.

We want to use the system to visualize muscle activity. The user is standing in front of the system and while moving she can see muscle activity. Real-time simulation of muscle activity is not possible using current technology. Instead of providing a full simulation of muscle activity for arbitrary poses, we will define poses which are of interest in a certain, defined context. The user will be asked to perform a motion where the user is instructed to use e.g. a certain twist of the arm. Muscle activity for this motion will be pre-computed using software like OpenSim. So e.g. a patient or a medical doctor who has to learn how to perform a certain rehabilitation exercise would stand in front of the magic mirror, is instructed to perform a movement, and can see the related muscle movement on the own body.

In addition to the modeling and simulation, the main challenge will be to use the simulated muscle activity for augmented reality visualization. This does not only involve rendering the current position of muscles, but also additional information such as the amount of muscle tension has to be visualized. Different visualization techniques such as heat-maps, methods known from flow visualization and virtual lenses to magnify important regions will be implemented and tested.