Subject

As physiotherapy education advances, using Augmented Reality (AR) technology to teach about muscles and bones becomes increasingly valuable. However, many of the current tools for the HoloLens 2 AR headset, such as the HoloAnatomy app [1] and DynamicAnatomy [2], are proprietary and expensive. This limits their accessibility for students and educators who might not have the budget for such resources.

Kind of work

Objective
The proposed research aims to develop an open source HoloLens application for the visualization of muscle and bone anatomy.

Description of Work
- Literature review
- Development of a simple application for anatomy visualization [3,4]. The user interface should allow the manipulation (rotation, translation, and zooming) of 3D muscle and bone holograms.
- Development of an advanced feature to overlay the holograms on top of a human body. This part of the thesis will rely on a pre-existing method developed by our team for tracking the motion of a person using the HoloLens 2 [5].

Framework of the Thesis

References
[1] Case Western Reserve University. (2023). HoloAnatomy® Software Suite. Interactive Commons. Retrieved from https://interactivecommons.org/what-we-do/our-projects/holoanatomy/
[2] Leiden University. (n.d.). XR: Extended Reality at Leiden University. Leiden Learning Innovation. Retrieved from https://www.leidenlearninginnovation.org/xr/ [3] Choi SY, Choi DH, Cho SH, Ahn SH, Han SH (2025). Anatomy education potential of the first digital twin of a Korean cadaver. PLoS ONE 20(3): e0305679.
[4] Shishkov, A., & Kolmanic, S. (2023). Progressive Education: Augmented Reality Visualization of Human Anatomy on Hololens 2. In HCI-SI.
[5] Zaccardi S. et al. (2025). HoloMoCap: Real-Time Clinical Motion Capture with HoloLens 2. Proc. IEEE AIxVR 2025.

Expected Student Profile

Programming experience in Python and C#/C++ is required.
Experience with Unity gaming development software is preferred.
The candidate should be interested in computer vision and augmented reality.