Given reasons such as patient safety and cost, surgical simulation has been increasingly demanded, explored, and adopted as an alternative for the traditional apprenticeship design of surgical residency programs which involve extensive operating room-based training for novice surgeons (Badash et al., 2016). Synthetic models (e.g., bench top simulators and box trainers) and virtual reality (VR) simulators had been introduced over the years in order to create an inexpensive, effective, and interactive way to train novice surgeons (Mao et al., 2021). A 2013 systematic review concluded that conventional VR-based training (i.e., computer simulation) might improve the operative performance of surgical trainees with limited prior laparoscopic experience and decrease the operating time, compared with...