XR in Veterinary Medicine: How AR and VR Are Transforming Animal Care Training

The training challenge in veterinary medicine has always been awkward to talk about openly. You can’t let a student practice surgical techniques on a live animal. But you also can’t get good at surgery without doing it. Cadavers help, but they’re expensive, in limited supply, and can’t replicate the feedback of real tissue. Models and mannequins do part of the job — they’re static and unresponsive.

XR is starting to fill that gap. Not as a replacement for clinical training — nobody seriously argues that — but as a way to build procedural confidence before a student picks up a real scalpel.

VR surgical simulation

The furthest-developed area is VR surgical simulation for small animal procedures. The Royal Veterinary College in London has been running VR simulation sessions for soft-tissue surgery since 2023, using haptic controllers and visual feedback to let students practice suturing, tissue handling, and basic laparoscopic technique on virtual patients.

The haptic feedback is genuinely the limiting factor right now. For basic suturing practice, current haptic gloves and controller setups give a reasonable impression of tissue resistance — enough to build muscle memory. For laparoscopic simulation, there are dedicated trainers with physical trocars connected to force-feedback systems, similar to what human surgical trainees use, and these transfer reasonably well to veterinary applications.

Where VR simulation is clearly useful: students can repeat procedures hundreds of times before touching a patient. They can make mistakes without consequence. They can pause, rewind, and see an annotated overlay of what they did wrong. That kind of deliberate practice at scale isn’t possible with cadavers.

AR for anatomy and clinical teaching

Augmented reality is finding a different role: helping students and practitioners understand anatomy they can’t see directly. Tools like Visible Body Veterinary and custom AR overlays developed by vet schools let you hold up a tablet or AR headset to an animal model — or, in some setups, a live sedated patient — and see organs, blood vessels, and nerve pathways overlaid in real space.

This matters most in clinical teaching settings. When a student is watching a senior vet perform an examination, they’re often trying to correlate what they’re observing with what they remember from a textbook. An AR layer that highlights relevant anatomy in real time closes that gap. A couple of UK veterinary schools have trialled this in their clinical skills labs with generally positive results — students reported better spatial understanding of anatomy than from 2D diagrams alone.

Remote specialist consultation

One genuinely practical application is AR-assisted remote consultation. Small and rural practices in the UK often can’t access specialist expertise quickly. Smart glasses — or even a basic setup using an iPad and a video call — let a generalist vet walk a specialist through a case in real time, with the specialist able to annotate what they’re seeing and direct the examination.

This isn’t exotic or expensive to set up. A hands-free display or a chest-mounted phone running something like TeamViewer Pilot gives a remote specialist a live view of the patient. For complex cases that would otherwise require a long referral journey, it’s a meaningful improvement in care access — particularly for large animal vets working in remote areas where the nearest specialist might be two hours away.

What’s still limited

Haptics for surgery remain the main bottleneck. The gap between simulated tissue resistance and the real thing is still significant for precise procedures. Most vet schools using VR simulation are clear that it’s a preparation tool, not a replacement for supervised clinical practice. Students need both — the simulation builds confidence and repetition; the real clinical environment builds judgment.

Cost is also real. High-quality VR simulation setups for surgical training can run to tens of thousands of pounds. The enterprise XR headsets that work well in clinical environments — sealed, cleanable, suitable for infection control — cost considerably more than consumer headsets. For small vet schools and practices, that’s not trivial.

The software ecosystem is also thinner than in human medicine. There are far fewer purpose-built veterinary XR applications than human surgical ones, and most vet schools are either adapting human medicine tools or building their own. That’s improving year by year, but the barrier to getting started is higher than it might look from the outside.

Where this is heading

Edinburgh’s vet school and the RVC have both indicated that XR will become a more standard part of pre-clinical training over the next few years, not just an optional extra. That’s partly about improving training quality, and partly about a practical reality: clinical placement hours are finite and in high demand. If a student arrives at their clinical year having done hundreds of simulated suturing repetitions, they’re ready to progress faster.

For veterinary practices thinking about AR for remote consultation, the technology is accessible now and doesn’t require expensive headsets. For vet schools considering simulation investment, the surgical training applications are mature enough to justify serious evaluation.

The limitations are real. But the gap between what XR simulation offers and what nothing offers is much larger than the gap between XR simulation and the ideal version of clinical training.