VR like vocational preparation

Players can navigate by gesture control, fly around curves, pause and change speed. The 3D environment reacts to the exact position of the player – and all without VR glasses!

But from the beginning

In 2019, the IHK and HwK Berlin decided to draw the attention of Berlin’s young people to dual training with a VR application in their own showroom and launched a corresponding tender. Our idea prevailed and so we were allowed to plan, build and fill a complete room in Talente Check Berlin from 2020 to May 2021. Including an anamorphosis station and interactive app.

The Dual Training Showroom is part of an entire day of career guidance at Talente Check Berlin, in which all 8th graders go through a career choice test and various stations to determine their talents in a playful way. So instead of going into all of the more than 300 training occupations individually in the 45 minutes spent in the showroom, we developed five different levels together with the customers and in regular test cycles with young people in which the world of dual training can be discovered. Goal number 1: Inspire. Goal number 2: Encourage young people to think about possible apprenticeship occupations in their everyday lives and provide them with a basis for decision-making for further career guidance.

A screen, a camera, a headset and go

The set-up is very simple, including fixed computers, yet flexible enough to adapt to the individual needs of each player. Each of the 16 young people has their own play station, where there is freedom of movement but also individual freedom for their own pace and experience. An additional station offers more space, for example for a person in a wheelchair. For people who have difficulties with headphones, subtitles can optionally be activated for each station.

After a short introductory presentation for the students by a supervisor, each student enters one of the colourful stations.

And the flight takes off.

The gesture control is explained and practised in a short tutorial, after which the players start their flight through the world of dual training.
In the five different levels – within 25 minutes – the world of dual education and its diversity becomes tangible. They have to find hidden professions, accompany an e-scooter on a journey through time in workshops, navigate through dream landscapes to graduation ceremonies, think about sustainability in construction and appreciate teamwork. It’s about surprise and fun. And about understanding that dual education professions are involved everywhere where our society should function well and is developed further – whether visibly or invisibly.

Where´s a value, there´s also a way

As a tool for the further steps in career orientation (the next station is a first internship), different values (coins) are offered for orientation, which can be individually weighed and prioritised in each decision-making process.
Everyone should be able to decide individually what value money & security, freedom & leisure, social & community, responsibility & environment play.
The coins are distributed along the route to be flown and thus show the way; there are also a few Easter Eggs with surprise effects to discover. Fun, orientation and message in one coin!

Real and Digital

Visually, a mixture of different realities is played with throughout: In the virtual game, there are films from the real, analogue world that give an insight into the activities of various training professions. In the analogue space, elements from the virtual world can be found again.
In the final anamorphosis photo, the young people place themselves in the room taped with elements from the virtual world.  Afterwards, they take a digital photo home to remember the stories they experienced later (depending on the teacher’s commitment, they also receive a real printed photo at school).

The unifying element is the personal !YOU approach with activating motivational messages and the colourful CI.

Dual

The role models are representatives within the respective story and create identification potential and closeness. In order to allow as much room for interpretation as possible for the very diverse target group, all role models in the game are represented by gender-neutral avatars without faces – who, however, perform very human body movements. Each of them leads through the respective level, gives insights into the world of dual education in cutscenes and tells his/her individual story.

For the first time, we did not have the voices recorded, but used Video-to-Voice, a tool that provides synthetic voices. This guaranteed maximum flexibility in text editing and also gave us a few laughs.

We would like to thank the IHK and HWK Berlin for the very productive and trusting cooperation, all the young people who supported us with testing and storytelling, Framefield, Video to Voice, Wolf Böse, Tape That, PIK, kubix, the Senate Department for Education, Youth and Family, the Federal Employment Agency and all those involved for their great cooperation, even in these unsteady times.