EON Reality, the world leader in Virtual Reality based knowledge transfer for industry, education, and edutainment, in partnership with The City of Tshwane announce the inauguration of EON Reality’s Tshwane Interactive Digital Center (IDC).
This IDC is a central part of Tshwane’s long term plan, Tshwane Vision 2055, to “break the cycle of generational poverty, inequality, and underdevelopment” as well as to enhance the local business and investment climate in South Africa’s capital city.
Tshwane is working on its Tshwane 2055 Vision, which defines how the city will develop and grow towards a becoming a “Smart City”, where effective investments are made in human and social capital, transport, utilities and modern ICT systems. These define the elements that fuels sustainable economic development and a high quality of life.
The City covers 6 368km², stretching 120 km from east to west and 108 km north to south, which makes it the third-largest city in the world in terms of land area, after New York and Tokyo/Yokohama.
EON Reality’s seventeen year relationship with local VR company the Naledi3d Factory, made Tshwane a natural choice for EON Reality’s first IDC in Africa. With the global Augmented and Virtual Reality markets expected to reach $150 billion, content creation has to expand to keep up with local and global consumer’s needs.
This new IDC will establish a local AR and VR ecosystem in Tshwane and its Entrepreneur School that will help to develop skilled local resources.
“We’re extremely excited to partner with the City of Tshwane and build an IDC in South Africa,” said Dan Lejerskar, chairman of EON Reality. “We fervently believe that knowledge is a human right and this aligns perfectly with Tshwane’s goal for greater income equality, creating jobs, and improving educational opportunities.”
Not only will the IDC enhance the local business climate and create jobs, the content and applications created by the Tshwane IDC will help with vocational skills transfer and improve local STEM education.
School children experience the Idome Mobile at the Tshwane IDC Inauguration
Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality applications improve education and successfully address the issues of illiteracy and language barriers by showing rather than telling. This hands on educational approach helps all students perform better in the classroom by making learning more engaging, improving retention, and building experiences to be recalled rather than memorizing facts.
“Virtual Reality based knowledge transfer will be crucial to the future of education in South Africa, particularly in Tshwane. As a Capital City, Tshwane is often confronted with difficult policy choices given the limited financial resources and competing service delivery needs. To this end, the City has taken a policy position to prioritize investments linked to education and development of young people,” said Dumisani Otumile, Group chief information officer for the City of Tshwane.
“This explains our quest for state of the art technologies that assists the City to ignite excellence when delivering services. The Interactive Digital Center will propel vocational skills training and development to unprecedented levels in South Africa.”
