VR Head Transplant

In 2017 a team of international surgeons announced their plan to successfully complete the world's first human head transplant. The plan was to take a brain dead organ donor, donating their body, and a terminally ill or paraplegic patient to volunteer their head. A modern day Frankenstein. The problem was that they had no way to rehabilitate the patient in his new body. No one had ever tried to do such a procedure. That's where Inventum Bioengineering and I came into the picture. We created a virtual reality protocol to rehabilitate the patient in an immersive 3D environment with haptic feedback to incentivize limb movement, adjust to the new mobility of the new body, and stimulate bodily functions.

a teaser trailer for a medical protocol?

With a PR push looming in 2017 we decided to create a short video to show how our VR protocol would work with the patient. Up until that point no one had a clue VR would be used with the patient or how it was to be implemented considering the patient would be immobile. This video and subsequent images were shown across Discovery, Huffpost, Gizmodo, and other publications. Below you can see a timelapse of the process creating the teaser. From camera staging, to animation, lighting, and dialing in the right materials, a lot of thought and extreme attention to detail goes into every shot.

the publication

You can read more about our VR protocol here

The future

As of January 2019 the project is pending clearance from multiple governments from all teams involved.