The contemporary geopolitical environment and strategic uncertainty shaped by asymmetric and hybrid threats urge the future development of hands-on training in realistic environments. Training in immersive, virtual environments is a promising approach. Immersive training can support training for contexts that are otherwise hard to access, dangerous, or have high costs. This paper discusses the challenges for virtual reality training in the CBRN (chemical, biological, radioactive, nuclear) domain. Based on initial considerations and a literature review, we conducted a survey and three workshops to gather requirements for CBRN training in virtual environments. We structured the gathered insights into four overarching themes—the future of CBRN training, ethical and safety requirements, evaluation and feedback, and tangible objects and tools. We provide insights on these four themes and discuss recommendations.

Police communication is a field with unique challenges and specific requirements. Police officers depend on effective communication, particularly in high-stress operations, but current training methods are not focused on communication and provide only limited evaluation methods. This work explores the potential of virtual reality (VR) for enhancing police communication training. The rise of VR training, especially in specific application areas like policing, provides benefits. We conducted a field study during police training to assess VR approaches for training communication. The results show that VR is suitable for communication training if factors such as realism, reflection and repetition are given in the VR system. Trainer feedback shows that assistive systems for evaluation and visualization of communication are highly needed. We present ideas and approaches for evaluation in communication training and concepts for visualization and exploration of the data. This research contributes to improving VR police training and has implications for communication training in VR in challenging contexts.

Environmental sustainability has become more and more a very important topic that will also change our way of life in the near future. A question is how people can be influenced into becoming more aware of environmental sustainability. Since technology is considered a means to simplify people’s lives, it can also be used as a tool to support people’s awareness of these aspects. This paper investigates how we can use a mobile phone in combination with a solar panel as a wearable in a playful way to support people’s awareness of plant-based environments. For this purpose, the first version of a mobile game was developed with the goal that the players can not only learn what a plant needs to grow healthy but also learn about the sun as a renewable energy source.