Holo External Fixation is the world’s first medically validated surgical AR training experience for external fixation fracture reduction. The interactive Hololens experience provides step by step guidance for performing an external fixation fracture reduction procedure.

Digital Surgery produced this training application as part of Microsoft’s Mixed Reality Partnership programme, and in collaboration with Orthopaedics and Trauma, University College London Hospitals, who provided their invaluable surgical expertise and advice throughout the process. Download the experience HERE.

The training application has been nominated as a finalist for this year’s Auggie Awards, jointly presented by AWE, IEEE and VR First to recognize innovation and excellence in the field of VR and AR technology.

The project had to be completed within 12 weeks to fit the requirements of Microsoft’s Mixed Reality Partnership. At the start of this project the Studio pipeline did not support any integration with Unity. Setting up this pipe was my main concern for the first couple of days, to make sure the Unity developers had access to the content created by the Studio.

As the Asset Supervisor it was my job to ensure the best possible quality for the assets created. The Hololens has very limited graphic capabilities, the maximum amount of triangles on screen was only 50k. Working with the rest of the team we build the experience in a way that only a limited amount of assets had to be on screen at the same time. With this information I calculated a polygon budget for each of the assets. The modelling and lookdev team had limited experience working in a real-time environment, guidance was provided on how to optimize the models ( keeping in mind the silhouette and the proximity to the user ), optimize UVs and technical support on how to work with lighting and shaders in Unity.