· Arjun Rai Gupta · Events · 3 min read
XR2ACH at Didacta 2026: Insights into the Future of Vocational Education
The XR2ACH team hosted a live workshop at Didacta 2026 in Cologne, gathered valuable feedback, and explored the current education landscape — including a market gap in mobile device management for VR hardware.
In March 2026, the InnoVET PLUS XR2ACH team had the great opportunity to host a live workshop in the “Vocational Education Workshop” area at Didacta in Cologne. As Germany’s largest trade fair for education, Didacta has its own hall dedicated specifically to vocational education and training — the perfect venue for our project.
Live Workshop: Extended Reality in Practice
Wilhelm Gerner (XR Development Lead, Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences) and Arjun Rai Gupta (Project & Cluster Manager, Virtual Dimension Center) were on-site to give visitors a comprehensive overview of the project. Interested visitors had the opportunity to try out our simulation and CAD visualization modules themselves.
In the process, we gathered valuable feedback from a very diverse audience. Participants came from a wide range of backgrounds: from housing associations dealing intensively with training HVAC specialists for modern, heat-pump-equipped buildings, to experts in learning technologies from various research institutes.
Looking Beyond Our Own Field: Market Gap Confirmed
Besides running our own workshop, the team used the fair to explore the current education landscape and the offerings of various providers. We had the chance to try out numerous other VR products for vocational education across different industries and to exchange ideas with adjacent companies from the heat pump sector.
These varied impressions were extremely insightful: they not only fully confirmed our own product design, but also clearly showed us that the XR2ACH project addresses exactly the market gap that still exists in technical vocational education. It was also fascinating to observe which digitalization approaches are being pursued in other branches of education, and how these can serve as inspiration for technical vocational institutions — especially the guild-affiliated technical schools that are our primary end users.
The Challenge: Mobile Device Management (MDM) for VR
Another important learning from the fair concerned device management. The team found that mobile device management (MDM) for classic devices such as smartphones and tablets has now reached a very high level of maturity. It is impressive to see how successfully German companies offer globally competitive software solutions in this field that comply with strict EU and German data protection regulations (GDPR).
For the widespread and successful rollout of VR training in education, a functioning MDM setup is an absolutely key factor. However, VR headsets require specialized MDM software. Here, at the fair, we noticed that there is still a clear gap in the market for specialized, EU-compliant providers for managing virtual reality hardware — an issue that will need to be resolved for the broad adoption of these technologies in the future.
