Vicarious Surgical VR
A digital twin of the innovative robotic platform from Vicarious Surgical Incorporated
ROLES
Director of Gameplay
UX & Instructional Designer
Director of Animation
User Interface Designer
Agile Product Owner
DELIVERABLES
User journey and story maps
FLS game design
Instructional design & copy
3D models
UI components
YEAR
2023
Vicarious Surgical Inc. needed a simulation harnessing soft-body and rope physics, alongside inverse kinematics, to convince surgeons about the superior benefits of their new platform.
The user sits at the surgeon console to engage in a peg and hoop exercise.
Our experience in 'hyper-training' and gamification allowed us to have some fun reimagining conventional laparoscopic trainers to better suit an interactive digital medium.
This project was a significant challenge. I had to coordinate many technically complex tasks and manage a web of dependencies as Product Owner, alongside the significant contributions I made as Design Lead. For FundamentalVR, many innovations would be showcased for the first time in this simulation, not least the use of soft-body and rope physics to simulate stitching tasks that the robot can perform in the real-world.
The user journey was inspired by the experience of buying a car.
Beginning with a walk-around of the product platform to build excitement and anticipation, it takes a little while for the user to be sat in the 'driver's seat' to operate the robot.
We integrated both first- and third-party proprietary software from many sources to build the experience. The soft-body physics used for the deformable abdominal cavity were so cutting-edge that my development team worked in parallel with the R&D department to synchronise our roadmaps and share resources.
Performance optimisation was a constant concern—even on high-spec target hardware—given the confluence of multiple physics engines, hi-fidelity graphics and multiple cameras running all at once.
The robot from Vicarious Surgical, seen here in an opening narrative segment staged for dramatic impact.
Case Study: Vicarious Surgical VR (2023)
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