TrainVR Pro: From Emergency Response Training to a Flexible XR Learning Platform

Building a training platform that can adapt to the organization—not the other way around

I originally built TrainVR Pro around a fairly specific problem: how can we give emergency responders meaningful practice while releasing people, equipment and instructors to fight increasingly frequent floods and wildfires?

https://youtu.be/5BZhsPWt_dE?si=242ArWmNg9wbEE2n

Floods, fires, collapsed buildings and other emergency scenarios are interesting candidates for immersive training. A virtual environment can be reset and repeated. Scenarios can be changed. Students can practice at their own pace. Instructors ca adapt lessons to their student cohorts.

That was the starting point for TrainVR Pro.

What has surprised me is how quickly the underlying technology has proven useful beyond emergency response. I’m now seeing interest from defence organizations, aerospace planners and from people developing 3D educational content, while conversations around healthcare, laboratory training, sales and real estate are opening up another important possibility: TrainVR Pro may be less about one category of training and more about providing a flexible framework for delivering interactive 3D knowledge.

https://youtu.be/GvmRoVDKG-o?si=hb1haHz7aBdVhGH_

Defence: What works?

The interest from defence gets to the most practical matters of virtual training with a vital pragmatic question: what works in virtual training to protect the lives of defenders?

Defence training has many of the same requirements as emergency response: complex environments, procedural knowledge, decision-making under pressure, potentially incomplete information, immense risk, teamwork and scenarios that can be expensive or impractical to repeat physically.

The virtual environment can provide a controlled place to rehearse procedures, explore situations and repeat scenarios without consuming the same level of physical resources and limiting risks to students.

However, this is also mostly unproven ground. To date most projects have developed technology or 'solutions' before consulting professionals.

I take a different tact: I provide the toolkit, defence professionals test what works - then we develop the technology to their needs.

Speed and Flexibility

Speed and flexibility matter. The days of years-long- or even months long development cycles are over. With my system, experts can write one then instantly A/B environments, events, and content in different systems, using whatever's at hand: laptops, phones, tablets, desktop or VR headsets to test different environments, different teams, different events, different roles and different outcomes.

https://youtu.be/p5i6S7vv21o?si=yiNrHbkRUWmH8q6Y

This flexibility makes TrainVR Pro particularly valuable for organizations that need people to be prepared for complex, difficult situations they cannot simply practice every day.

https://youtu.be/U-i8G3OpriI?si=HBlE1s-VfbS3amDD

360 Video Integration

I’ve also integrated 360° video into TrainVR Pro because many professional trainers already have valuable immersive video content. Rather than replacing that investment, we can bring it into the platform and add a conversational AI avatar that can respond to learners as they watch. Existing 360° footage can be combined with text-based lesson content and a configurable avatar, allowing learners to ask questions, receive explanations and interact with the material rather than simply watching it. This gives organizations a practical way to extend existing video libraries into more interactive training without having to recreate their content from scratch.

https://youtu.be/XiPsYHRZbZI?si=3uFU0baRQ7F6Ngw0

Healthcare Has Been Part of My Work for Decades

Earlier in my career, I created interactive visualizations dealing with the heart and lungs, brain structures and fetal development. I later worked with BC Health, and subsequently became involved in patient-privacy-conscious application development completing an application for ChartSpan in the USA.

That experience has stayed with me because healthcare presents a very different kind of training challenge. The information is complex, visual and procedural, but access to real-world training environments can be limited by cost, equipment, scheduling, patient safety and privacy. Standards for family practioners and specialists is very high. Patient comprehension is vital to making approriate choices.

TrainVR provides support to healthcare's training and informational requirements.

The idea is not to replace clinical education. It is to give practitioners a practical way to turn their knowledge into structured, interactive learning experiences.

Laboratories and Technical Training

Laboratory training is another strong fit.

A virtual laboratory can provide equipment familiarization, procedural walkthroughs, safety instruction and scenario-based learning before a student ever touches the real equipment.

This can free up equipment, reduce supervision requirements and allow students to repeat difficult procedures without consuming laboratory resources, keeping actual lab operation lean.

The Platform Has Become More Flexible

The first version of TrainVR was developed as a purpose-built training system. We built the core technology, lesson scripting, environments, avatars, scenario logic, feature switching and content delivery around the requirements of immersive emergency training.

That Version 1 foundation was important because it proved the model.

But as the number of possible applications grew, I realized we needed to make the platform much more adaptable.

For Version 2, I began using agentic development systems to help restructure and extend the software architecture. Instead of hard-coding every experience around one type of lesson, we can increasingly configure the roles, inputs, lesson structures, environments and behaviours to suit the organization using the platform.

Instructor-facing lesson input and student or patient roles can now be adjusted on the server side as needed in hours, not weeks.

That changes the economics of customization.

https://youtu.be/8KEqMtvgiq0?si=NPaE4mAajeXJiPjR

Reuse the Content. Change the Experience.

A major advantage of my platform is that the underlying 3D content can be reused.

A facility created for one training scenario can become part of another. A character can become an instructor, customer, patient, employee or role-playing participant. Environments can be modified rather than rebuilt. Features can be switched on or off depending on the lesson. Content can be intantly switched from one delivery stream to another.

We can also incorporate existing educational material: instructor videos, text, slide decks, websites and other source content.

The objective is to make the transition from existing curriculum to interactive XR as efficient as possible for experts dedicated to knowledge and professional standards, not to technology.

This is important because I don't think organizations should have to throw away everything they already have just because they want to adopt XR.

TrainVR is intended to be an on-ramp, not a replacement for everything that came before it.

One Platform, Many Ways to Deliver It

TrainVR is also not tied to one piece of hardware.

The same experience can be streamed through VR, desktop, tablet or mobile-oriented interfaces, online or offline. That means an organization can introduce immersive training without necessarily buying a headset for every learner.

A student might explore a scenario in VR.

Another might access it through a desktop browser.

An instructor might review the same lesson from a laptop.

The content and underlying lesson logic remain connected.

That makes deployment considerably more flexible, particularly for organizations with distributed teams or mixed hardware.

Sales and Real Estate

The same capabilities that make TrainVR useful for training also make it useful for sales and real estate.

A prospective customer could walk through a facility that doesn't exist yet. A developer could demonstrate a property before construction is complete. A sales team could bring a customer into a virtual product environment rather than relying entirely on photographs, drawings and presentations.

And unlike a conventional rendered video, an interactive environment allows the customer to choose where to look and what to explore.

That opens the door to a different kind of sales conversation.

Instead of telling someone what a product or property will be like, let them experience it.

The Business Case: More Practice, Less Overhead

For me, the business case for TrainVR Pro is ultimately about efficiency.

Live training schedules people, equipment, facilities, travel time and instructor hours. Some training exercises also require significant preparation and coordination before a student can even begin.

XR doesn't eliminate those requirements entirely, but it can move a significant amount of preparation and repetition into a reusable digital environment.

Students can practice more frequently.

Scenarios can be repeated without rebuilding the exercise.

Instructors can spend less time delivering the same introductory material and more time addressing the areas where learners actually need help.

Organizations can reuse environments and content across multiple lessons.

And when a new requirement appears, we can adapt the system rather than rebuild the entire platform.

Where I'm Taking TrainVR

What began as an emergency-response training platform is becoming something broader: a flexible framework for creating interactive professional education and experiences.

Defence, healthcare, laboratories, industrial training and 3D education are obvious opportunities. Sales, real estate, demonstrations and other customer-facing applications are equally interesting.

The technology underneath is increasingly configurable. Agentic development is helping me customize the platform faster, changing roles, inputs and behaviours to suit the needs of each application.

That is where I see the real opportunity.

I don't want to sell organizations a generic virtual training experience.

I want to give them a way to take what they already know—their procedures, curriculum, expertise, facilities, presentations and people—and turn it into interactive experiences quickly.

The promise of TrainVR Pro is therefore fairly simple:

More practice. Less logistical overhead. Reusable content. Faster customization. Multiple delivery platforms. And training that can adapt to the people who are actually using it.