The jobs of the future are going to increasingly require people familiar with XR technologies, but developing those skills now can be a challenge, when the tech is so new and expensive. Rahel Demant from VR First explains how last year's headsets can help develop tomorrow's innovators.

Julie: Welcome to the XR for

Learning podcast. I am your host, Julie Smithson. And today we have

on the call Rahel Demant from VR First. Rahel worked in Deloitte's

Transaction Advisory Division. After a consulting job in Canada, the

US and Costa Rica, she founded an event marketing agency organizing

events across Germany in the arts. Fascinated by the power and

possibilities of emerging tech, she joined VR First as CEO in 2016.

She and her co-founder Ferhan Özkan have led the program to a

network of thousands of developers in order to support the diversity

of the tech scene. She has initiated the Women XR Laureate

Breakthrough Oggi Award; her mission to democratize VR and AR

development worldwide through VR First, various support programs, and

online competitions. The newest program is the XR Boot Camp. Welcome,

Rahel.

Rahel: Thank you for the

invitation, Julie. And thanks for also being on our advisory board.

Julie: Yeah. It's an exciting

time. Thank you so much for asking me to be a part of the XR boot

camp. I think there's some great people that are coming together to

discuss upskilling and how this industry is changing so much. So tell

me a little bit more about VR First, and what you're doing, and how

you got to where you are today.

Rahel: So basically what we've

seen three and four years ago was that the equipment for virtual

reality and augmented reality was super expensive and there was a

high demand from the industry to actually move forward and to

actually develop more applications, more games, more serious games.

And the problem was that the developers were not there, because

universities were just not able to equip them with the knowledge, and

also the headsets and gaming PCs, which you needed at that time. So

the computer, which costs $3000, and a headset would maybe cost even

$1000 to $2000. So equipping a university lab for all the students

that wanted to learn was way too much and not affordable for anyone.

So we decided to establish a non-for-profit approach, and to donate

hundreds of headsets and computers to labs all around the world. Up

to date, we have supported 52 universities and science parks with the

establishment of VR/AR labs, so that they can better equip students

with the resources and knowledge to actually learn VR and AR

development, and to get the whole industry further as a movement.

So we've established partnerships based

on Oculus/Facebook, Intel, AMD, with HTC, with all hardware

manufacturers -- and also software companies -- to basically get some

knowledge out there and to make it affordable. And what we were

seeing is that there's still, even though there's a lot more of

higher education now on the market, there is still a lot of demand

from the industry to hire more talent, to hire more VR and AR experts

into their companies. So I decided to instead of having these 3-6

years programs at universities, to really establish a very short,

focused, and industry-based program which is XR bootcamps. When you

join XR Bootcamp, you're joining a three months full-time or six

months part-time program where you can really learn VR/AR

development, everything that's basically demanded by the industry. So

we have a really great advisory board -- including you, ha ha --

coming from all kinds of companies.

So, for example, we have HTC. We have

Magic Leap. We have Audio Bear. We have all advisers from different

industry companies which really need to hire VR/AR developers. And

they actually advised us on what to put into the curriculum, which i