A virtual interactive training application for supporting service technicians in the field of high voltage equipment

The demands on professional qualification and training courses have changed in recent years. A high variety of products and shortened product lifecycles require the training to be very flexible. The trend goes to training on the job and shortened time for face-to-face training sessions in favour of self-learning phases. Following the concept of active learning, interactive 3-D training additionally facilitates flexible, time-independent and user-adapted training irrespective of the availability of a machine or piece of technical equipment. An interactive 3-D-training application is utilized to design interactive training lessons in different fields of application, e.g. mechanical and plant engineering, shipbuilding and power engineering(1,2,3). The paper at hand presents the didactic concepts on which it is based and gives an introduction on how these concepts are transferred to virtual interactive learning environments. Besides it addresses the role of expert knowledge in complex processes. This paper focuses to the domain of high voltage equipment whereas most requirements are valid and therefore transferable to other domains as well. As the tasks within maintenance processes are very complex it is not sufficient only to show the solution to the trainees and to ask them to imitate what they have seen. In fact, complex tasks require decision making skills that can only be gained within the working process. In case the real machine is not available for learning, it is necessary to create similar conditions (in a virtual world) under which knowledge can be experienced(4).