EON Reality Inc., the world leader in Virtual Reality based knowledge transfer for industry, education, and edutainment, in partnership with The City of Tshwane announced the inauguration of EON Reality’s Tshwane Interactive Digital Centre (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’s forward looking approach, Executive Mayor Ramokgopa’s strong commitment to bring an IDC to Tshwane, and 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 Continental Africa.

With the global Augmented and Virtual Reality markets expected to reach 150 billion dollars, 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.”

Dave Lockwood, Director, Tshwane IDC added that, “virtual and augmented reality has huge potential across the whole of Africa, as a way to support, but also to transform how we learn complex subjects, such as vocational skills at college and maths and science at school. Language barriers, as well as low literacy levels, tend to reduce how we understand what is being said and taught. By showing a concept, in a way that we can also play with it means that we can “see” what is been taught, hence, we can understand it better and also remember it much longer.

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. 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 memorising 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 prioritise investments linked to education and development of young people. This explains our quest for state of the art technologies that assists the City to ignite excellence when delivering services. The Interactive Digital Centre will propel vocational skills training and development to unprecedented levels in South Africa,” concludes Dumisani Otumile, Group Chief Information Officer for the City of Tshwane.