Most XR training projects fail in the same place. The headsets arrive, the environment looks impressive, and nobody can say whether anyone learned anything. Bring me your XR project and we will work out what it actually has to do, how it fits the training pipeline you already run, and how you prove it changed readiness. Then I help you build it on Varjo headsets, from requirements through integration to the day your instructors run it themselves. I have written training requirements inside a General Command and run laser engagement and synthetic training systems as an instructor, so the conversation starts from how units actually train.
I am adding studies and tools as they are ready. Some material is currently available in Polish only. If something you need is missing here, write to me.
MSPO 2026, Kielce, 8 to 11 September. Varjo will have a stand at the exhibition and I will be there, on the defense and simulation side. If you are going, it is the easiest place to walk through a project face to face.
Arrange a meetingBefore anyone buys anything: what your training pipeline actually fails to deliver, and whether XR is the right instrument for it. Sometimes the honest answer is that it is not.
Turning a training need into a specification an engineer can build and a procurement officer can evaluate. This is the step most projects skip, and it is why they drift.
Development partnership with integrators, OEMs and training centres putting Varjo XR into their products and training rooms. I work as the training-domain side of the team, not as an outside reviewer.
The question everyone eventually gets asked and almost nobody can answer. It is the area I follow most closely in the research literature, applied to your system.
The part most XR programmes underfund, and the reason so many headsets end up in a cupboard. A system nobody has trained the instructors to use will be judged a failure regardless of how good it is. I stay on after delivery: embedding the system into the training curriculum, training the instructors who will run it every week, building the evaluation loop that keeps it improving, and reporting outcomes in a form the organisation funding it can actually read. For a first XR deployment this determines whether there is ever a second one.
This is not a client reference and names no customer. It is the pattern: the shape these projects take, the decisions that determine whether they work, and the places they usually go wrong. Land systems are where I am most at home, so this is the example worth writing down.
A unit is converting to a new infantry fighting vehicle or tank. Three crew roles, commander, gunner and driver, each needing different skills and different amounts of repetition. One full-mission simulator exists or is on order, and it trains one crew at a time. Several hundred soldiers have to be converted. Live training on the vehicle is expensive, weather-dependent and rationed by ammunition and range availability. The delivery schedule does not wait for any of this.
Crews reach the vehicle already knowing the procedures, so range time is spent on what only live training can teach. Throughput stops being capped by a single simulator. Instructors run the system themselves, without a call to the supplier. And the organisation can show what changed, in numbers, when it is asked to justify the next purchase. That last point is what buys the second system, and it is the part most programmes never prepare for.
The same pattern, with different variables, applies to bridge trainers in a delivery gap, procedural stations ahead of a full-mission simulator, and unmanned platform operator training. If your project looks like any of these, the first conversation will be short and useful. For what this class of system looks like once it is fielded, Varjo documents driving, gunnery, heavy weapons and JTAC training with primes including Rheinmetall, BAE Systems and Patria: Varjo, land operations training.
This is not a client reference and names no customer. It is a pattern for companies that deliver ground control stations, autonomy and command systems to the military. You own how the platform behaves and where its data comes from. This material is about the layer that gets built last: what the human sees, and when they have to decide.
The customer adds unmanned platforms faster than it adds people. Every platform type arrives with its own station, its own screen layout and its own operator. The command centre or station container fills up with screens, space, power and hands run short, and the operator learns three consoles instead of one. Meanwhile your autonomy is mature enough to run the task on its own, so the operator spends most of the mission watching a system that does not need them, and is then expected to be sharp in the one minute when it does. The question asked at every demonstration is always the same: how many people do I have to seat at these platforms. The answer depends not on the autonomy, but on how the station is built.
I work solely on the human-machine layer, on Varjo hardware, and I do not compete with you for the autonomy, the platforms or the contract. I come in as the partner responsible for the operator station, from requirements and the demonstration scenario, through integration with your ground station, to documentation and instructor training. If you are building a ground control station and wondering whether XR adds anything beyond an effect at a trade fair, the first conversation will be short and useful. For what this class of system looks like once it is fielded, Varjo documents driving, gunnery, heavy weapons and JTAC training with primes including Rheinmetall, BAE Systems and Patria: Varjo, land operations training.
Three studies built on open sources and two tools that calculate on your own numbers. Everything runs in the browser, with no login and nothing sent to a server, every formula is written out, and none of it names a supplier. If you believe a figure is wrong, write to me, I will correct it and record the correction.
Land equipment under contract in fifteen countries of Central, Eastern and Northern Europe, converted into crew positions, training hours and the number of trainer stations required, broken down by equipment category and by country.
Four assumptions move on sliders: hours per crew, years to train the fleet, station hours per year and personnel turnover. Both tables recalculate live. At zero turnover it comes out at about fifty stations; at thirty per cent, over three hundred. Same fleet, different decision.
A comparison of gunner training programmes in Poland, the United States and Germany on source documents. The Polish programme provides for no gunnery trainer hours at all. The American one sets a standard of four hours a month per crew and concedes that real availability is 3.75. The bottleneck turns out to be familiarisation with the vehicle rather than gunnery, and that is the part of the programme easiest to move off the tank.
Derives the cost of an hour on the equipment and an hour on an XR station from your own numbers, then shows how many crews a year you would train and what is actually limiting you. None of the defaults are claims about your market, they are just a starting point to replace.
A research prototype. An animation shows what happens in an operator's eye during a task, and the tool below it turns an eye tracking recording from a Varjo headset into a load index over time. No headset to hand, so there is a full set of demo data one click away. Along with the list of things the method cannot do, because in pupillometry that list matters more.
XR headsets against projection domes as the visual system of a training simulator. Cost per station, floor space, mobility, team training, integration with a motion platform and what each option lets you measure. It does not name a winner, it sets out the criteria on which the decision actually turns, because the honest answer depends on what you are training.
I started as a mechanised infantry platoon commander in the 20th Bartoszyce Mechanised Brigade, responsible for a platoon of soldiers, their vehicles and their readiness. Then three years commanding a cadet platoon, and five years as an academic teacher at the Military University of Land Forces in Wrocław, leading the tactical laser simulation team: instrumented field exercises on Saab GAMER, classes in the VBS synthetic environment, system maintenance, and procurement specifications for new training equipment. Those years in uniform are why I know what a training unit actually needs on a Tuesday morning, as opposed to what a capability roadmap says it needs.
I then served at the General Command of the Polish Armed Forces, as a major and specialist in the Training Devices Division of the Training Inspectorate. I worked on the Tactical Simulators of the Modern Battlefield programme for armoured and mechanised forces and advised on requirements for the Comprehensive Battlefield Simulation System (KSSPW). That is where I learned how a requirement is written, who quietly influences it, and why a technically superior system can still lose.
Since 2023 I have been on the commercial and technology side, working with motion platforms and, today, Varjo XR across defense, aerospace and industrial training customers in Poland, the Baltics, the Nordics and wider CEE. That means seeing what integrators are actually building, which hardware choices hold up in a training centre, and which XR projects deliver and which quietly stall.
That combination is the point. Plenty of people can build an XR environment, and plenty understand military training, but the two rarely sit in the same head. Projects fail in the gap between them: a beautiful simulation that trains the wrong thing, or a sound training concept implemented in a way instructors will not use. That gap is where I work.
I work in English and Polish, from Wrocław, across Europe.
Alongside the commercial work I follow one question closely, and intend to pursue it as doctoral research: everyone agrees XR trains people, but almost nobody can prove how well, or adapt the training to the individual while it is happening. It is the same question clients keep running into, which is why I keep reading in it rather than treating it as a side interest.
Armies are fielding equipment faster than they can field the trainers for it. Existing XR simulators deliver environmental realism but have no real-time adaptation layer based on what the trainee is actually doing with their attention. The direction I am working towards integrates immersive XR, eye-tracking and an adaptive engine so that a tactical scenario reshapes itself in real time to the operator's cognitive load and skill level, validated experimentally against conventional training.
In an unmanned turret the operator has no direct vision. All situational awareness arrives through a single image. Move that image into a headset and you move the entire perceptual channel, not part of it. What remains are three groups of physical elements between which the operator has to divide attention, and that is exactly what makes the distribution of attention measurable.
It keeps the advice grounded in evidence rather than assumptions. When a client asks whether XR will actually improve readiness, which effect sizes the literature supports, or how to write a procurement that measures training outcomes instead of headset specifications, that is the same ground.
None of the above is only a plan. A piece of that workbench can be looked at today: a prototype measuring cognitive load from eye tracking data, with the formulas written out and an honest list of what the method cannot do. It also sits in the Studies and tools section above.
Nothing below is published yet. These are drafts I am preparing for conference submission in 2027, listed so you can see where my thinking is going rather than as a publication record.
Thirty minutes on your project. What you train, where the pipeline is failing, and what you have already tried. If XR is the wrong answer for it, I will say so on that call.
Your training gap mapped against what XR can and cannot solve, with a concrete recommendation and a rough cost envelope. Useful even if we stop there.
Requirements, the Varjo hardware that fits them, development alongside your team, effectiveness measurement and rollout. Delivered in phases, with a review at each milestone.
Whether you are scoping a first XR trainer, building XR into a product, or holding headsets you cannot yet prove are working, tell me what you are trying to train and I will tell you how to get there on Varjo. The first call is free and reasonably direct.