How Project Ember is transforming burn care training through mixed reality

Note: This article contains medical images and videos that may be uncomfortable for some.

Every surgeon remembers the first time they treated a serious burn.

The pressure to make the right assessment is immense. Every decision, from identifying burn depth to determining the next course of treatment, can directly influence a patient's recovery. Yet opportunities to practice these skills are surprisingly limited. Traditional burn training relies on highly specialized physical mannequins fitted with prosthetic wounds that are expensive to produce, difficult to customize, and unable to represent the diversity of patients clinicians will encounter throughout their careers.

For many trainees, that means learning from a narrow range of scenarios before facing the complexity of real patients.

Project Ember, a clinician-led programme from Buckinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust, is changing that.

Recognized as one of the 2026 Unity for Humanity Awards and Grant Winner, Project Ember is an innovative mixed reality training platform that enables surgeons to practice assessing realistic digital burns overlaid onto physical mannequins. Developed through a collaboration between clinicians, engineers, designers, and innovation specialists, the platform replaces costly physical prosthetics with dynamic digital simulations, making high-quality burn training more accessible, scalable, and representative of the patients surgeons treat every day.

Rethinking how surgeons learn

Burn injuries are among the most challenging conditions to assess accurately. Every patient presents differently, with factors such as burn depth, location, age, skin tone, and cause all influencing diagnosis and treatment.

Traditional training methods struggle to reflect that diversity.

Physical training mannequins can cost well over £100,000, while creating realistic prosthetic burns often requires significant time and specialist expertise. Even then, each mannequin typically represents only a single scenario, limiting the range of experiences available to trainees.

Project Ember takes a fundamentally different approach.

Using mixed reality, instructors can instantly generate realistic burn injuries that appear directly on a physical mannequin. Instead of relying on fixed prosthetics, educators can create virtually unlimited combinations of burn severity, size, location, cause, age, and skin tone, allowing every training session to present a new clinical challenge.

Training for the patients surgeons will actually treat

One of Project Ember's most significant innovations is its focus on equitable care.

The platform is the first medical training solution to incorporate a dynamic skin-tone engine, enabling burns to be visualized across a broad spectrum of skin tones. This addresses a longstanding challenge in medical education, where training resources have historically underrepresented the diversity of real-world patients.

By exposing clinicians to a wider range of presentations before they encounter them in practice, Project Ember helps reduce diagnostic bias while building greater confidence in treating every patient, regardless of skin tone. It's a powerful example of how thoughtful technology design can improve both medical education and patient outcomes.

Bringing mixed reality to medical education with Unity

Creating an experience that seamlessly blends physical and digital worlds requires a platform capable of delivering precise, responsive real-time 3D experiences.

Unity provides the foundation that makes Project Ember possible.

Using Unity, the team created a mixed reality application that:

• accurately overlays dynamic digital burns onto physical mannequins
• allows trainees to move naturally around the patient
• maintains realistic alignment between the virtual injuries and the real-world model

This level of immersion allows surgeons to assess wounds from multiple angles, interact naturally with the mannequin, and practice in a way that closely mirrors real clinical environments.

The flexibility of Unity also enables rapid iteration. As clinicians provide feedback, the development team can quickly refine scenarios, introduce new injury types, and expand the range of educational experiences without the cost and complexity of manufacturing new physical training aids.

For educators, that means more realistic simulations. For healthcare providers, it means a scalable platform that can evolve alongside clinical best practices.

Making world-class training more accessible

Project Ember demonstrates that innovation isn't only about creating new technology; it's about removing barriers.

By replacing expensive physical props with digital simulations, the platform dramatically reduces the cost of delivering high-quality burn education. Training centres no longer need extensive collections of specialized mannequins to expose learners to a wide variety of cases. Instead, a single mixed reality platform can deliver countless scenarios, making advanced training more accessible for hospitals, universities, and healthcare systems.

The result is more opportunities for clinicians to practise, build confidence, and refine their decision-making before treating patients in real life.

Ultimately, better training leads to better care.

Accelerating the future of surgical education

Support through the Unity for Humanity grant program will help Project Ember continue expanding its impact.

The funding will enable the team to further develop the platform, broaden its library of training scenarios, and continue validating how mixed reality can improve surgical education while making world-class training more accessible and affordable.

As the platform evolves, the long-term vision is to help democratize burn care education, giving more clinicians around the world access to immersive, evidence-based learning experiences regardless of geography or resources.

Project Ember reflects the core mission of Unity for Humanity: using real-time 3D technology to solve meaningful global challenges.

By combining mixed reality, accessible design, and clinical expertise, the team is proving that immersive technology can do more than improve training. It can help create a future where every surgeon has the opportunity to practise on a richer, more diverse range of patients before caring for one.

Because when clinicians gain confidence before entering the operating room, patients everywhere stand to benefit.