3D VOR, the Virtual Operating Room: a serious game on surgical teams

3D VOR targets healthcare defects inside the operating room that come from communication failures among the surgeon, the nursing staff, the anesthetists and the patient. The operating room is one of the most frequent targets of malpractice suits, and communication and anticipation are central to patient safety during and after an intervention.

The game offers multi-professional in-service training to everyone in the room. It centers on how communication between surgeon, nurses and anesthetists affects crisis prevention and risk management, including control procedures and the patient checklist.

Four virtual operations were chosen on purpose and reenacted with care, such as routine against infrequent and benign against vital. Through them the game explores the many reasons a failure can trace back to bad communication, and learners then work through why an incident would result from ineffective communication or a conflict. A debriefing built like a mortality and morbidity conference lets learners see together why an incident happened.

3D VOR was a collaborative research project selected in the 12th call of the French Single Inter-Ministry Fund (FUI). The fund backs R&D projects accredited by competitiveness clusters, and the projects must guarantee economic benefits for the country as a whole. It helps develop products and services with high innovation content that are likely to reach the market within five years, and it has about 130 million euros available per year for two calls for proposals.

KTM Advance and Novamotion worked with research partners in artificial intelligence (IRIT), ergonomics (CCLE), didactics (EFTS), healthcare (Toulouse University Hospital) and the Serious Game Research Network at Champollion University. The first working single-player prototype was released in August 2014, and a multiplayer prototype with artificial intelligence was expected for early 2015.

The project's own pages no longer answer in November 2026. The project address 3dvor.univ-jfc.fr forwards to a blog address at the university that refuses connections, and the KTM Advance website does not load either. No finished or released version of the game is documented on a page found.

The fund and the partners listed above are matters of record from the project's period. Whether a commercial product followed from the prototypes is not confirmed.