Virtual and Augmented Reality were the stars of this year’s edition of Bakutel, Azerbaijan’s International Telecommunication and Information Technologies Exhibition.

One of the trends this year was the combination of the two technologies for applications in fields ranging from art to medicine.

One stand featured connected surgical glasses help surgeons better visualize the features of a patient’s face during an operation.

“The general concept of this project is to combine the virtual anatomy of each patient with the real anatomy of the patient who will be operated. During surgery, if you are wearing these glasses, you can see the internal anatomy of the patient – it’s like looking through the skin of the face, you can see the facial skeleton, the muscles, the nerves, the vessels and so on.“

Ismayil Ferzeliyev, doctor, Azerbaijan Medical University

Virtual Reality is still a key element in the gaming world, but the field of application of this technology is growing fast.

“This platform that you see is not only for gaming. A lot of countries use it in medicine. Our company has started to develop some platforms especially for medicine, for trainings – for example fire trainings.“

Aygun Hasanova, spokeswoman, Phobia VR

Bakutel is a unique platform for professionals in the ICT field to meet. This edition brought together more than 190 companies from 20 countries.

It’s an opportunity for start-ups to present their projects to potential investors, like the ‘Wand’ smartpen.

“‘Wand’ is an electronic device that sends every scratch you made on the paper via bluetooth to your smartphone’s application. After you have written on the paper the ink evaporates after 30 minutes but during this time your data has been safely saved on our servers in our software application.“

Elchin Aghazade, ‘Wand’ project manager

According to a 2016 World Bank study, ICT has strong growth potential in Azerbaijan, which is faced with the challenge of diversifying its economy away from energy resources to create new sources of growth.

“ICT development is one of the top priorities for our country. We are planning to continue the policy of diversification of our economy and, in this respect, development of ICT is very important.“

Ilham Aliyev, President of Azerbaijan

Priorities include liberalising the telecommunications market, boosting start-up funding, and expanding e-services.