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VR surgical training: how it works and what it costs

This guide is written for whoever has to commission a VR surgical training module rather than for whoever will wear the headset. The questions it answers are the ones that come up in that meeting: what it can teach, who has to sign the content, what drives the price and what the hardware decision commits you to.

The protocol comes before the art

The first deliverable is not a render. It is a document, written by a clinician, that states the correct sequence, the acceptable variations, the failure states and the criterion for passing.

Everything downstream is an implementation of that document. Projects that skip it end up rewriting the logic after the assets are finished, which is the single most expensive thing that can happen to a build of this kind.

What actually drives the budget

Number of decision points. Not minutes, not polygons. Every branch is content that has to be modelled, written, built and validated — a module with twelve branches is not twice a module with six.

How much anatomy is new. Reusing assets from an existing animation changes the figure materially, which is why the 3D medical animation and the simulator are worth planning together.

Platform count. Headset, desktop and web are three builds with one codebase, not one build. It is feasible, but it is not free.

What to measure, and what to promise

Honest metrics: completion, errors per step, attempts to pass, time on task, and improvement across repeated sessions. A module that records those gives a training department something it can actually report.

Dishonest metrics: operating-room outcomes attributed to a single module. That claim needs a study, not a simulator, and making it in a sales deck is how a good product loses credibility with the only audience that matters.

PROJECTS

• Corsa
• Bionet

RELEVANT SOLUTIONS