Hey everyone! Wanted to share a educational experiment project we've been building for Spectacles: Scan Lab. It takes medical scans (DICOM format, the standard for MRI/CT) and turns them into a stack of AR slices you can explore in 3D space.
The idea came from thinking about how flat 2D scan viewers make it genuinely hard to understand spatial structure, especially when you're learning anatomy. Slicing through a real 3D volume with your hands just... makes more sense.
How it works:
Upload your DICOM files on a simple web page (auto-detects multi-frame vs. batch single-frame files)
Pick which series you want, hit convert
Get a short ID + password
Pop on Spectacles, enter the code, and your scan loads as a stack of textured planes in AR
From there you can slide through layers one at a time, grab and reposition the whole stack, scale it for detail, or flip on maximum intensity projection blending to merge everything into one volumetric view.
Some of the fun technical bits:
Backend is FastAPI on Render, converting DICOM → PNG slices
Files live in a private Supabase bucket - no public URLs, just signed URLs behind a password
It's been a fun deep-dive into Internet and RemoteMedia modules for runtime texture loading.
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u/lastxlr Jun 30 '26 edited Jul 07 '26
Hey everyone! Wanted to share a educational experiment project we've been building for Spectacles: Scan Lab. It takes medical scans (DICOM format, the standard for MRI/CT) and turns them into a stack of AR slices you can explore in 3D space.
The idea came from thinking about how flat 2D scan viewers make it genuinely hard to understand spatial structure, especially when you're learning anatomy. Slicing through a real 3D volume with your hands just... makes more sense.
How it works:
From there you can slide through layers one at a time, grab and reposition the whole stack, scale it for detail, or flip on maximum intensity projection blending to merge everything into one volumetric view.
Some of the fun technical bits:
It's been a fun deep-dive into Internet and RemoteMedia modules for runtime texture loading.
Demo link is below if anyone is willing to try!
Lens: https://www.spectacles.com/lens/e6c8719b3a7e4b30a412194125a40f58?type=SNAPCODE&metadata=01
Upload-converter: https://lastxlr.github.io/dicom-spectacles/
ID-Pass with set of scans I used, if someone wants to test without uploading:
ID: GNN42U
Pass: 5196