The Marches Education Partnership is pleased to announce that each of the three main partners, Herefordshire Ludlow and North Shropshire College, Telford College and Shrewsbury Colleges Group, has an Immersive Cave set up and ready to be used by students, visitors and employers.

What is an Immersive Cave?

CAVE stands for Cave, Automatic, Virtual, Environment. Each set up can vary, but in simple terms, it is a completely dark room where projectors beam large, life-sized 4k graphics onto three of the walls in front of you. There are also many different sensors, containing motion tracking technology which helps to create a fully immersive environment for more than one user.

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Project manager, Rob Jenkins said: "This is cutting edge technology and it is very exciting to have it accessible to students in The Marches area. It is early days, but the shared objective of the partnership is to develop some bespoke scenarios, to supplement the learning of our students in an extremely engaging way.

"Using a 360 camera it is possible to film different locations and transport the users to any environment in the world. For example, they could be in a workshop looking at diagnostics equipment for an electric vehicle, on a factory roof answering questions about the installation of solar panels or even in a hospital theatre preparing for surgery. The possibilities are endless."

Hereford Times:
The Marches Education Partnership also has a mobile training unit which is equipped with an immersive cave, virtual reality headsets, simulated at-work training facilities, and other training software being developed specifically for the partnership.

This will be touring soon so if you see it at an event near you, please come and try it for yourself!

The Marches Education Partnership is also pleased to announce that it has recently been successful in a bid to work on an exciting new project in low carbon, renewable technologies.

Hereford Times:

The partners are committed to working together on a series of initiatives to support our industries by identifying skills gaps and creating course content to meet the changing landscape of what is required. This includes upskilling the existing workforce, future proofing our courses and raising awareness across the Marches area.

Each college is currently undertaking extensive building works, ensuring we are ready to offer the very best training in electric vehicles, solar PV, solar thermal, ground source/air source heat pumps, underfloor heating and water harvesting.

To keep up to date about the courses on offer please follow The Marches Education Partnership on social media. We can be found on Facebook and LinkedIn.

For more specific information or enquiries, please email a member of the team on: projects@hlnsc.ac.uk