Before a pilot flies you to Cancún, they’ve logged hours in a simulator crashing planes that don’t exist. Surgical training has had a harder time getting there, and residents often get thin hands-on practice before working on living patients. Niklas Andreasen, a graduate of Sweden’s Umeå Institute of Design, set out to fix that with MX Surgical, a mixed reality training kit he developed with Logitech. It pairs replica surgical instruments with a headset, so trainees can rehearse procedures anywhere they can open a case. Call it a flight sim for scalpels, and a lot more portable than the six-figure simulator rigs some hospitals bolt to the floor.
Andreasen grouped surgical tools into three mechanical families (ring-handled scissors and clamps, forceps, and pen-grip instruments), then designed one reconfigurable controller for each. Sensors and adjustable resistance mechanics inside recreate how each tool pushes back in your hand, and layered pads give you something to actually cut into. The headset handles the anatomy, while a companion platform scores you on precision, force, and timing like a very strict video game. It’s a concept for now, with no pricing or launch plans. Even so, it has already picked up Emerging Product Designer of the Year at the 2026 European Product Design Awards, three Core77 student wins, and a nomination for Red Dot’s Peter Zec Prize.
Designer: Niklas Andreasen (Umeå Institute of Design, in collaboration with Logitech)
Three Controllers, One Entire Instrument Tray
A real surgical tray can hold dozens of instruments, and building a replica of each one would turn the kit into a hardware store. Andreasen sidestepped that by mapping what instruments have in common mechanically. Scissors, needle holders, and clamps all pivot on a ring-handled scissor action. Forceps pinch, and scalpels and probes ride in a pen grip. Each MX Surgical controller covers one of those families, tuning its spring tension and range of motion in real time so the same body can feel like a fine dissecting scissor one minute and a stiff clamp the next.
Logitech has spent over four decades shaping mice, keyboards, and controllers around human hands, and the collaboration shows. The kit wears the MX family’s soft radii and matte warm grays, so anyone who owns Logitech’s MX Ink stylus for Meta Quest will feel right at home. Three mentors from Logitech, Nick Jinkinson, Andreas Connellan, and Aidan Kehoe, guided the project. The cutaway renders show a rotary mechanism tucked right at the pivot, where the resistance needs to happen, inside ring handles your fingers already know from the real tool. Compare that with FundamentalXR, a leading haptic surgical platform that has traditionally relied on desk-mounted haptic arms.
Layered Pads Handle the Feel, the Headset Handles the Gore
Haptics can only fake so much, so MX Surgical gives your hands something physical to work on. Layered training pads stand in for tissue at different depths, and they slot into a die-cut tray inside the case. As you work through a procedure, the mixed reality overlay progressively reveals deeper layers of anatomy and shifts to match what you’re doing. Hospitals and universities can stock a material library of swappable pads and components, tailoring the kit to a specialty or a specific case. Residents without a headset aren’t stuck either, because a simpler screen-based version handles the visual side.
This hybrid approach borrows from both ends of current surgical training. On one end are cheap suturing pads that residents practice stitches on at home, which feel real but teach nothing about context. On the other end are VR simulations that show you an entire operating room but feel like waving a remote around. MX Surgical splits the job, letting the pad handle touch and the headset handle everything you need to see. The whole thing packs into a slim carry case, which makes it something you can take home, practice with at 11pm, and toss in a bag for your next rotation.
A Scorecard for Skills Surgeons Used to Pick Up by Osmosis
Every practice session gets logged by the companion platform, which tracks motor patterns, motion efficiency, accuracy, force control, and response timing. Those numbers describe the stuff a senior surgeon notices from across the room, like a hand that hesitates or grips too hard. The platform adjusts difficulty as you improve, keeps a digital anatomy atlas on hand, and lets mentors review your sessions remotely. Residents can train alone or in teams, then sit down with an attending to go through the results together. Andreasen’s own framing is that this data captures knowledge residency has always passed down person to person without ever writing it down.
That puts MX Surgical in direct conversation with William Halsted, who founded the surgical residency program at Johns Hopkins in 1890 around a simple motto: see one, do one, teach one. A century later, a design student added a fourth step, practice one, and made it look like something that belongs next to your keyboard. Andreasen built it through interviews and observation sessions with surgeons and educators in Sweden and Germany, with mentors from Logitech, Intuitive Surgical, and IDEO. In a Red Dot interview, he said he looks for ideas that “earn and defend their place.” A kit that lets a resident make their first mistake on a pad instead of a person sounds like one of those ideas.
