Technologie: Virtual Reality

While virtual reality can facilitate hands-on learning, its development faces barriers, including high costs and time demands and scalability challenges. This article presents two case studies that illustrate strategies for overcoming such barriers when training the next generation of skilled workers in environmental technologies. By examining approaches for streamlining development and increasing content relevance and scalability, we highlight lessons learned for future practice. We conclude by envisioning a future in which educational institutions can flexibly and cost-effectively prototype virtual reality in learning contexts, ensuring alignment with curricular goals and learners’ needs.

The rapid advancement of immersive technologies has created new opportunities to transform human-machine collaboration in industry. This paper presents an immersive platform with a digital twin that combines both physical and cognitive characteristics of human dynamics. By integrating multimodal sensing, human biomechanics, and cognitive state into digital twin technology, the proposed system enhances operational safety and ensures better ergonomics. The main argument is that human digital twins are not only desirable but essential for next-generation industrial systems. We discuss the limitations of existing human modeling approaches, outline the conceptual foundations of human digital twins, and demonstrate their industrial relevance across safety, productivity, ergonomics and sustainability.

In recent years, the decreasing cost and improved usability of immersive hardware and software have made extended reality (XR) increasingly attractive for industrial applications. Stand-alone systems with inside-out tracking and camera-based pass-through enable accessible mixed reality (MR) solutions. At the same time, emerging no-code software platforms allow engineers to create XR environments without programming expertise, broadening adoption across production settings. This paper explores key industrial application areas of immersive technologies through selected commercially available XR software solutions for product and process training, spatial instructions and guides, collaborative design review, and assembly and production planning.

This paper deals with the concept of the Industrial Metaverse and its potential impact on the manufacturing industry. First, the possibilities of the Industrial Metaverse are explained in general and then possible resulting functionalities for production technology along the life cycle are presented. For the two topics "Synthetic Data Generation" and "Virtual Qualification" the implications of the Industrial Metaverse are considered more concretely.