Background
The Basque Government, through its Department of Education, manages one of Europe's most advanced vocational education and training (VET) ecosystems — a coordinated network of more than 180 centers serving a regional economy built on advanced manufacturing, energy, and technical operations. Like most VET systems, the network faced limited access to physical equipment and specialised labs, difficulty scaling hands-on training across many sites, inconsistent learning experiences between institutions, and pressure to keep training aligned with real industrial environments.
As part of the Basque VET 2030 Strategy, the government launched a long-term plan to digitally transform vocational training around three goals: a collaborative training ecosystem across centers, shared content and knowledge between teachers, and immersive, simulation-based learning aligned with industry needs.
The deployment
Backed by the Basque Government since 2021 and coordinated by Tknika, the network's applied-research and innovation centre for vocational training, the programme adopted Virtualware's VIROO platform as the central XR infrastructure connecting the centers. The deployment now spans 27 vocational training centers, with full-scale multi-user immersive rooms installed across more than 25 of them as shared infrastructure.
The rooms deliver 1:1 real-scale training scenarios in which groups of students train together in the same virtual environment, locally or remotely. The platform's device-agnostic architecture extends the same content beyond the rooms to individual VR headsets and standard classroom devices, so centers can run immersive sessions, PC-based VR, or 2D desktop modes from a single content library.
Content created by the network
Rather than relying on off-the-shelf content, teachers author their own multi-user training scenarios with the platform's Unity-based creation tools and share them across the network, enabling reuse and standardisation between institutions. The centers have created 15 immersive training applications to date, spanning vocational families that include electrical systems, industrial manufacturing, logistics operations, safety training, and inclusive care scenarios.
EASO Politeknikoa in Donostia-San Sebastián is one of the centers applying the strategy in practice, integrating immersive sessions into everyday classroom teaching; one of its professors, quoted below, highlights the value of creating and sharing content with colleagues at other centers.
Funding and expansion
In December 2023 the Basque Government awarded Virtualware a €1.5 million public contract to install 12 additional multi-user immersive rooms across the VET network. The regional programme has since served as the template for a national scale-up: by late 2025 the platform was deployed in over 80 Spanish vocational training centers, including 66 national Centres of Excellence under a separate six-year contract with Spain's Ministry of Education, Vocational Training and Sports.
