When it comes to virtual reality, don’t leave room for others, take action on your own – such is the content of the visit by Patrick Raab, Secretary of State at the Department of Economic Affairs, to the XR Training Center in St. Jurgen can be summed up.
Jurgen – put on VR goggles and a fake saw in your hand – and you’re no longer in the XR Training Center rooms in the tech center, but in the middle of the woods. The deer looks curiously a few meters away, and there are tree trunks in front of you, ready for posting. Quickly put on protective gloves, safety shoes and a helmet – then the first exercise begins.
Use it in the jungle, in medicine and in the police
The future of training should look something like this. It was designed in the XR Training Center at the Technology Center (TZ), which uses Extended Reality (XR) methods. In this way, the training content – not only in the forest sector, but also, for example, of potential firefighters, police officers, disaster relief workers or medical trainees – can be realistically but completely safe.
Patrick Raab, Secretary of State at the State Department for Economics, Labor and Tourism, found out how a virtual training unit in the woods could feel while visiting the XR Training Center. As he said right away, he sees one of the main challenges in dealing with virtual reality in making the technology more ubiquitous – and there is that its use in training offers tremendous opportunities. The aim is to support small and medium-sized businesses in particular by introducing new technologies and ensuring that Baden-Württemberg is seen as the “land of XR”.
Is it a major tourist destination in Baden-Württemberg?
“Our goal should be to take a critical position in these additional developments”—specifically in those areas where an individual has the opportunity to advance something, for example through existing advantages, Raab emphasized. Because international competition never sleeps. This also became apparent when language came to the topic of the Metaverse, for which Imsimity Managing Director Martin Zimmermann sees great potential in tourism. Rapp also saw the potential for virtual reality in tourism.
But the path to virtual reality is not always easy. Florigie Sola, managing director of St. George’s Evangelical Foundation Helping the Elderly, was able to report this. The company has invested a lot in creating the so-called Cyber Care Lab, an XR learning environment for budding caregivers. She is convinced: “It could not be any other way” – and now she is pleased with the positive feedback. For Sola, one thing is for sure: it was more than worth it.
Information: XR Training Center
The XR Training Center is not located in Berlin or Munich, but in St. Georgen, where XR stands for Extended Reality. The name says it all: at the XR Training Center, learning formats are developed, tested and curated in virtual reality. It was created with funding from the Ministry of Economic Affairs as part of the Digital Hub initiative.
