MiReBooks

Mixed Reality Handbooks for Mining Education

Executive Summary

MiReBooks envisages to produce a series of Virtual and Augmented Reality based (=Mixed Reality MR) interactive mining handbooks as a new digital standard for higher mining education across Europe. Many current challenges in mining education will be met in an innovative new way, by combining classical paper-based teaching materials with MR materials and their transformation into pedagogically and didactically coherent MR handbooks for integrative classroom use.

Motivation

The plan for implementing an MR based system into the existing mining education originates from the challenges higher mining education has found itself to be in recent years. In mining education, often difficult concepts need to be conveyed to students and the students frequently have difficulties to understand those concepts with only 2D prepared material at hand. Real 3D experience will always remain an indispensable factor of mining education. To equip students with the needed skills for their future careers, they need to be thoroughly emerged into their field of expertise. Until now, field trips have always been an important part of this, but mining is a high consequence environment and mining sites are not at the university. Field trips with mining students to mine sites are becoming increasingly difficult and many students face severe difficulties to obtain access to real operations throughout their studies. The remoteness of many mine sites is also often a hindering factor in terms of fundability of such excursions, as well as the limited time that is at disposal. Furthermore, the way students consume information nowadays has changed dramatically from analogous perception to digital nativism. They find it harder and harder to digest information in a traditional paper-based and frontal lecturing manner.

Mixed Reality contents are a solution to overcome these barriers, as they offer the opportunity to take students into a high consequence environment without leaving the classroom, but with obtaining even better and a wider variety of results, as if they had really gone into the field.

MiReBooks is funded by EIT Raw Materials. It lasts for three years and consists out of a pan-European consortium with 12 partners located in Austria, Switzerland, Germany, Finland, Sweden, Estonia, Poland and Italy. The consortium comprises partners from universities, mining companies and mining equipment manufacturers.

Goals

Produce a series of MR handbooks for higher mining education at graduate level, covering the fields of surface mining, underground mining, mining equipment and mine safety and risk management
MR handbooks that combine tradional media with VR and AR content in a pedagogically and didactically sound format. It follows the concept of the so-called ‚Magic Book‘, which enriches classical books with AR and VR content
Introduce MR handbooks as a new teaching and learning standard in the European mining education