As a Captain, I realized the catastrophic lack of integration of modern technologies into maritime training. After completing another course on ship handling, I thought about how wonderful it would be to create a tool that would allow any officer to build a strong theoretical foundation and then immediately acquire the necessary sustainable skills by applying this newly acquired knowledge. In practice, all maritime specialists gain knowledge at Universities, and then, with years of seafaring experience, acquire the sustainable skills so essential to the industry. How long this road is! "There must be another way!" I thought. This idea eventually evolved into a search and study of ready-made solutions available on the market that could accelerate the learning process and, most importantly, the acquisition of sustainable skills. Full-mission simulators initially seemed an interesting solution, but their high cost put off most candidates. Then I became very interested in the new Virtual Reality technology, which allowed for deep immersion at a relatively low cost.
Ever since university, I had been interested in programming, and using Virtual Reality to create a maritime simulator seemed like a great idea. Having allocated a certain budget and hired a team of professional developers, we began to bring my idea to life, but over time, I realized it was too ambitious for my very modest budget. Ultimately, the project had to be put on hold at the initial stage, but this provided me with invaluable experience and strengthened my desire to achieve my goals.
While continuing to work as a Captain on a container ship, I began to delve deeper into development, particularly the development of Virtual Reality applications. My practical maritime experience and experience in daily ship handling, coupled with my knowledge of application development, allowed me to continue development, first alone and then with the support of my wonderful daughters. We are currently developing and testing a VR-based and Part-Task maritime simulator focused on ship handling, navigation and decision-making in realistic operational scenarios.