Applications of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) have been around since at least the early 1990s. Numerous early applications, including a VR-based surgical planning process using hardware developed by NASA, often had to do with helping doctors visualize complex anatomy with the aim of facilitating surgical planning and training.

We’re all now aware of the recent emergence of modern VR and AR iterations, facilitated by a succession of technological breakthroughs in tracking systems, small displays, and computing capability. The medical community is quickly adopting this new transformative tech. With over 12,000 publications using common search terms for VR/AR applications in healthcare and a projected global healthcare market of $5.1 billion by 2025, it’s worth it to better understand the roles these technology can play in the medical field.

Breaking down the roles

Modern healthcare applications include medical education, surgical planning, facilitating communications, therapeutic interventions, and more. With such a diverse set of applications under the umbrella of healthcare or medicine, it’s useful to categorize the different uses to better understand what people mean when they say “VR/AR in healthcare.”

Luckily there’s a single variable that does a good job of teasing out the different roles for VR and how those roles are distinct. That variable is how involved the patient is in the given process under consideration; their proximity in the process to a given intervention.