VR Surgery Simulator

by

VR Surgery Simulator
Group Members: Josh Tabor, Haixiang Liu, Dustin Irving

movie-still

 

Project Description: This project is a VR Surgery Simulator. We want this to be a tool (or at least a beta version of a tool) that med students can use to practice plastic surgery. The lab Haixiang works at developed a skin simulation that realistically simulate skin dynamics. We want to use this in our simulator to teach med students (and other people) how skin behaves in different situations. We can then show them different cuts and how each can be used to pull skin in different ways.
We want users to experience two things. The first is how skin behaves when it is cut. The second is how to fold skin and suture it back together. We also want this experience to be able to be observed by a teacher or another surgeon, so that they can coach the student on how to better do different things. The teacher will use an android smartphone so they can see what the student is doing in VR, while still being able to write things down and control the simulation.
We’d like the user to take away some surgery skill from this simulator, or at least an idea of what surgery is like and how skin during surgery reacts.

Equipment: HTC Vive, Android Smartphone, Tracking Tags (We have all of these..)
What we know: The simulation works. How to deploy an Android and Vive project in Unity.

What we need know: How to get the simulation data into Unity so we can deploy it on the phone and Vive together. We also need to know how to use Homography on the Vive camera so that the Vive can locate the tracking tag and map it into Vive space. This is how the phone will also ‘know’ where Vive space is. How to send the simulation data to the phone and Vive host over the network. We also need to figure out how to do the surgery in the Virtual environment. (So how to do cuts and stitches).

First Steps: Write a network interface for the simulation. We have to be able to do the simulation on a more powerful computer so that it doesn’t take forever. We’ll have to stream the simulation over the network.