UAS Technikum team at EdMedia World Conference: XR integration in higher education

The team, supported by MA23 of the City of Vienna, organized an insightful workshop at the conference entitled “Digital Shadows and Digital Twins as Exercise for Integrating XR in Higher Education”.

This explores the use of Digital Shadows and Digital Twins in engineering education and proposes approaches to extend their use to other disciplines. The workshop was attended by numerous participants from South Africa, USA, Australia and Austria and led by José Garcia and Sebastian Rauh, two staff members of UAS Technikum Wien. The participants were engaged and active in the workshop, expressing their great interest in the use of Digital Shadows and Digital Twins in learning.

Recommendations for the design and implementation of XR experiences

XR technologies are often still referred to as new technology, even though they have been around for three decades. There are numerous recommendations for the design and implementation of XR experiences in the academic literature. In general, these works assume expertise and experience in XR. There is an implicit question of how end users* who are not experts, researchers, or developers should use XR for their needs, in this case for education. A common approach in the XR literature is for a group with some experience in developing XR applications, either as a research direction or to solve a particular problem, to involve educators to develop an application that provides an XR-based approach to education in that particular domain.


Another interesting question is whether a research group specializing in XR development is necessary to enable the integration of XR in an institution. To this end, a project on the integration of XR technologies in higher education was launched at UAS Technikum Wien in September 2021. It explored challenges for integration in higher education, common difficulties faced by stakeholders, and available content in the areas of technology. For the use of Digital Shadows and Digital Twins in engineering education, this proposes an approach to extend their use to other disciplines.

Jose Garcia leads the project funded by MA 23 of the City of Vienna

Dr. Jose Garcia Estrada leads the project “Integration of Virtual Technologies in Learning and Laboratory Experiences” funded by MA 23 of the City of Vienna at the University of Applied Sciences Technikum Wien. He received his PhD in computer science from the University of Hull in the United Kingdom. His research interests include the adoption of immersive technologies in higher education, human-machine interaction in mixed reality, and emerging technologies in higher education and industrial training.

Garcia began his research in immersive technologies at the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research in Darmstadt, Germany. After completing his PhD, he conducted research at the University of Portsmouth in the School of Creative Technologies and the School of Computing in the United Kingdom. Garcia then investigated at the Department of Education and Lifelong Learning at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim, Norway.

Sebastian Rauh’s research interests: Digital Shadows, Digital Twins, MR and AR in education

Sebastian Rauh, MSc is another member of UAS Technikum Wien staff involved in the project. He is a researcher and lecturer in the Department of Industrial Engineering. Rauh conducted his doctoral research at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Sweden in the field of MR assistance systems in industry. He was a research associate at Heilbronn University in Germany. His research interests include Digital Shadows and Digital Twins, MR and AR in education.

More information about the project:

Integration of Virtual Systems in Teaching and Laboratory Exercises (InviS)

(Project-Number: MA23 – Call 29-11)