When a university overtakes industry: Why the XR lab in Bielefeld is a window into the future of mechanical engineering

Combating the skills shortage: How extended reality is shaping the engineers of tomorrow

Siemens and Sony are getting serious: Why these XR glasses are the most important trend in engineering

For a long time, virtual reality in engineering was primarily seen as one thing: an expensive, albeit fascinating, viewing tool. Design work was done on flat 2D monitors – VR glasses were only used at the very end. But this error-prone and time-consuming media break is now a thing of the past. At Bielefeld University of Applied Sciences (HSBI), a technological paradigm shift is currently underway that is likely to significantly shape the future of mechanical engineering. It is the first university in Germany to use Sony's new SRH-S1 XR glasses, specifically developed for the enterprise sector, in regular teaching. The special feature: through unprecedentedly deep integration into Siemens' CAD ecosystem, the glasses are transformed from a mere display device into a fully-fledged creative tool. For industry, this step promises massive increases in efficiency and cost reductions; for the education sector, it is a groundbreaking answer to the chronic shortage of skilled workers. A deep insight into a laboratory that is ahead of its time – and into a technology that will forever change our understanding of spatial design.

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• HSBI | HSBI is the first university in Germany to use Sony XR glasses in teaching – a tool for design in a new dimension

The end of the 2D monitor: How Sony's XR glasses are reinventing industrial design

It is rare for a single lecture at a German university of applied sciences to offer a glimpse into the future of an entire industry. This is precisely the case at the VR lab of Bielefeld University of Applied Sciences (HSBI), where Professor Dr. Jan Robert Ziebart from the Department of Engineering and Mathematics is the first person in Germany to use the Sony XR SRH-S1 headset in regular university teaching. The device, developed in close cooperation between the Japanese technology company Sony and the industrial software giant Siemens, marks a turning point: Extended Reality is no longer merely a viewing tool, but a fully-fledged design instrument directly connected to one of the world's leading CAD platforms.

This development deserves in-depth economic, technological, and educational policy analysis. Behind a student in a Bielefeld laboratory, using data glasses to design a virtual 3D printer, lies a global revolution in the product development process of mechanical engineering, a multi-billion-euro market movement in the XR sector, and an answer to one of Germany's most pressing skills shortages.

The device: Technological substance behind the hype

Before considering the economic implications, it's worth taking a sober look at the technical details. The Sony SRH-S1 is neither a consumer product nor a gaming accessory. It's a standalone enterprise XR headset that Sony launched in early 2025 at a price of US$4,750 – exclusively in the business segment and initially available for order directly through Siemens.

The technical specifications justify the price. The device uses Sony's own ECX344A OLED microdisplays with a resolution of 13.6 megapixels per eye, which corresponds to a resolution of 3,552 × 3,840 pixels. This surpasses even Apple's Vision Pro, which only manages 11.7 megapixels per eye. Color reproduction achieves 96 percent of the professional DCI-P3 color gamut at a brightness of 1,000 nits and a refresh rate of 90 frames per second. Qualcomm's Snapdragon XR2+ Gen 2 processor powers the device. It features a passthrough function with color video viewing and a flip-up visor mechanism that allows for seamless switching between real and augmented reality. Control is via two custom-designed controllers: a pen-like pointer and a ring controller for the other hand – both designed for precise interaction with three-dimensional objects.

The crucial technical innovation, however, lies not in the hardware alone, but in the software integration. With "Siemens NX Immersive Engineering," the system offers a direct, deep connection to the Siemens NX CAD ecosystem, one of the most widely used design applications in industry worldwide. The system consists of three interconnected modules: NX Immersive Explorer for design reviews and collaborative viewing, NX Immersive Designer for direct, real-time design work, and NX Immersive Collaborator for cross-site team reviews. The integration is so deep that the VR mode can be accessed from within NX with a single click – without data export or format conversion. This is precisely the quantum leap compared to previous VR approaches in engineering: What was once a cumbersome media break is now a seamless workflow.

The economic context: A market in transition

HSBI's investment in this technology comes at a time when the global extended reality market is experiencing exceptional growth. Market analysts estimate the global XR market will reach approximately $253.5 billion in 2025. By 2034, it is projected to grow to over $2.1 trillion, representing a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 25.5 percent. Other analysts, depending on their methodology, arrive at somewhat more conservative figures: Market Research Future estimates the market at $51.3 billion in 2024 and expects it to reach nearly $300 billion by 2035, with a CAGR of 17.4 percent. The range of estimates is explained by differing definitions of the market – some studies include related hardware, software, and service segments more broadly than others.

Significant growth trajectories are also emerging for the German market in particular. According to estimates from the German machinery market, the domestic AR/VR market will reach a volume of €21 billion by 2028. Furthermore, around 75 percent of all German companies now use virtual or augmented reality in their daily business, and almost all users report satisfaction with the results achieved.

For mechanical engineering and product development in particular, the efficiency promises of XR are no longer merely theoretical. Systems like the NX Immersive Designer are designed to increase productivity in design processes with complex geometries by up to 30 percent. This is achieved by shortening iteration cycles: Instead of editing a model on the computer, transferring it to the headset, checking it there, taking off the headset, editing it again, and putting it back on—a process tolerated in academic research but considered uncompetitive in industry—direct CAD integration enables real-time corrections without any media breaks. The economic logic behind this is simple: Every iteration loop saved in the virtual design phase reduces the costs of physical prototypes, manufacturing changes, and approval processes.

Why VR alone is not enough: The limitations of previous approaches

To fully understand the value of this new approach, one must consider the limitations of previous VR practices in engineering. While virtual reality systems have become increasingly established in industrial companies in recent years, they have always encountered a fundamental limitation: they were viewing tools, not creation tools. Engineers could walk through a finished 3D model in VR, experience scale, and grasp spatial relationships more intuitively – but as soon as a change was needed, the headset had to be removed, the computer opened, the design adjusted in the CAD system, and then re-prepared for VR display.

This media break has real costs. It interrupts the creative and analytical flow of design, increases the effort required for feedback loops, and makes it difficult to justify from a business perspective to use VR in early, iterative design phases, where the added value would actually be greatest. Furthermore, creating high-quality VR environments for specific machines or workspaces is traditionally extremely time-consuming. Therefore, the technology often only becomes economically viable when it comes to scalable training applications or the final verification of completed designs – but not for the actual, iterative development work.

Extended Reality goes beyond this limitation by not completely obscuring the real environment, but rather overlaying it with virtual elements. This not only offers cognitive advantages—the user retains spatial orientation, can use a physical keyboard, and avoids bumping into obstacles—but also fundamentally changes the way digital models can be worked with. The design created on the screen is simultaneously present in physical space, tangible, verifiable, and modifiable.

Educational economic dimension: The HSBI as an anticipation of the labor market

HSBI's decision to integrate the Sony SRH-S1 into its regular curriculum, making it the first university in Germany to do so, is not only a technological move, but above all a strategic one in educational economics. It anticipates a development that the German job market for engineers has not yet fully embraced, but very likely will.

The current situation on the German engineering job market is characterized by a structural paradox. According to an analysis from October 2025, an average of 194 unfilled positions for engineers and IT specialists were contrasted with 100 unemployed professionals in the same field – a bottleneck indicator pointing to a chronic shortage of skilled workers. At the same time, competency requirements are changing rapidly: In the next ten years, around 315,000 engineers and IT specialists will retire. A recent VDI study from March 2026 shows that 80 percent of the engineers surveyed expect to need to expand their skills in the next three years to remain professionally relevant. The respondents cited technological advances in artificial intelligence and automation (87 percent) as the main driver of this need for further training, followed by competitive pressure (57 percent).

In this context, early familiarity with XR-supported design is not an academic luxury, but a tangible competitive advantage in the job market. The VDI (Association of German Engineers) has explicitly called for the systematic integration of future skills such as digital and AI competence, as well as interdisciplinary work, into engineering education. HSBI delivers precisely this with its use of the SRH-S1: students not only learn how to operate a tool, but also develop a conceptual understanding of the possibilities and limitations of a technology that will shape their professional lives.

Professor Ziebart explicitly emphasizes in his teaching that this understanding must also be critical. Not every application justifies the effort of an XR environment. Creating such an environment requires time, technical expertise, and suitable data. Its use is worthwhile when the design space is too complex for 2D viewing on a monitor, when spatial collisions between different components need to be collaboratively tested by student groups, or when hazardous situations need to be simulated that could not be tested in reality. This ability to weigh the pros and cons – when is XR useful, and when is it an effort without added value? – is itself a highly marketable qualification.

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The industrial signaling effect: What Siemens and Sony aim to achieve with their partnership

The technological collaboration between Siemens and Sony is not a coincidence and is not limited to the SRH-S1 device. It is part of a strategic market positioning from which both companies benefit. Siemens, whose NX CAD system is among the globally dominant design platforms, is opening up a new usage channel for its software with XR integration and strengthening customer loyalty at a time when the transformation to the cloud-based NX X is being driven forward. Sony, in turn, whose professional XR ambitions are being consolidated under the new XYN brand, gains immediate industrial credibility and a clearly defined use case for its enterprise headset through the partnership with Siemens.

The strategic dimension goes even further: In 2025, Siemens launched its first international "Immersive Design Challenge," which attracted over 900 students from more than 230 universities in 38 countries. A team from Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg won, impressing the jury with their "BatteryTwin XR" project – a digital twin for the life cycle of electric vehicle batteries. From an economic perspective, this challenge can be interpreted as a classic ecosystem strategy: Siemens and Sony are investing in the education of a generation of engineers familiar with their technology, thereby creating a long-term demand and expertise base for their products. HSBI, the first university in Germany to use the device in its teaching, is thus part of a deliberate market development strategy pursued by major industrial companies.

The design process is changing: From the 2D monitor to the three-dimensional workspace

To fully appreciate the transformative impact of this new approach, it's necessary to examine the conventional CAD design process. For decades, this process has taken place in front of a two-dimensional screen. Three-dimensional objects are modeled, but always viewed only in projection onto a flat surface. To examine all sides of a model, it must be manually rotated. Insights into spatial relationships, collisions between components, and the ergonomic accessibility of a design arise in the engineer's mind – through mental rotation, experience, and intuition.

This cognitive effort is enormous and prone to error. Studies show that spatial reasoning is one of the key, yet unevenly distributed, cognitive resources in engineering. VR and XR democratize this process: they externalize the mental rotation into physical experience. Those who can walk around a model as if it were physically present in space can grasp spatial relationships with a fraction of the cognitive effort and a far lower error rate.

The impact on collaborative design processes is even more far-reaching. In a project where several students or engineering teams are working on the same physical workspace—as in the Bielefeld example, where three groups are simultaneously converting a decommissioned 3D printer—clash detection is traditionally a time-consuming and error-prone process. XR makes it possible to bring all individual designs together in the same virtual space and immediately visually check whether components interlock, obstruct each other, or differ from one another. The NX Immersive Collaborator goes a step further and allows this collaborative review process across locations, i.e., between teams at different sites, in real time.

Limits and open questions: Where technology is still growing

A sober analysis cannot ignore the limitations of the technology. At a price of $4,750, the Sony SRH-S1 is a substantial investment that presents a significant hurdle for most medium-sized businesses and especially for many educational institutions. HSBI can play a pioneering role because it is using the device early and purposefully for research and teaching – an investment that is justified from an educational policy and strategic perspective, but cannot easily be scaled up to a wider audience.

Added to this is the still considerable effort involved in data preparation and system integration. While direct NX integration significantly simplifies the workflow, the system requires a homogeneous software environment. Companies or universities working with other CAD systems—such as Autodesk Inventor, CATIA, or SolidWorks—do not yet benefit from the specific Siemens-Sony integration. The market for broadly compatible XR design tools remains fragmented.

Ergonomic questions also remain. Wearing a headset for several hours places physical and visual demands on the user, which can lead to fatigue depending on the usage situation. The SRH-S1, with its halo headband and flip-up visor, is designed for extended wear, but the optimal usage pattern in everyday industrial use – intermittent, for intensive phases of collision testing or design review – is probably not that of an eight-hour workday wearing the headset.

Finally, the issue of data security in a corporate context is not trivial. CAD data is among the most sensitive information assets of an industrial company. As soon as this data is fed into cloud-based XR platforms – as is possible with the cloud-based NX X – new requirements arise for data protection, access management, and IT security, which must be handled with particular care in the EU regulatory environment.

Higher education as an early indicator: What the HSBI initiative says about the level of technological readiness

It is no coincidence that the pioneering role in the use of this technology has fallen to a university of applied sciences and not a large corporation. Universities are often ahead of medium-sized businesses in technology adoption, but also more open to experimental applications than conservative industrial companies. In this sense, the HSBI initiative is a valid early indicator of the technology's maturity level: it shows that the technology is mature enough for regular operation among non-experts, but is still in a phase where it is primarily used in environments with a high tolerance for learning and an explicit educational mandate.

This phase—let's call it the phase of educational pioneer users—is crucial for the diffusion of a technology into broad industrial practice. It produces a generation of graduates who are familiar with the tool, know its strengths and weaknesses, and will actively demand and implement it in industrial companies later in their professional lives. In Everett Rogers' diffusion theory, HSBI would correspond to the so-called "early adopters"—those actors who, through their credible use of an innovation, build the crucial bridge to the early majority.

Other universities have pursued similar, albeit less technologically advanced, paths: HTW Dresden is researching the use of VR in mechanical engineering for material simulations and assembly processes, Ostfalia University of Applied Sciences is testing AR-based learning in production engineering for maintenance and planning tasks, and DHBW Stuttgart is integrating AR/VR into engineering degree programs to make hidden processes visible to students. However, what HSBI is doing with the SRH-S1 is qualitatively different: it represents a shift from a paradigm of observation to one of creation, amounting to a genuine paradigm shift.

The deeper meaning: Spatial thinking as a competitive factor

Behind the technical and economic analysis lies an anthropological question of fundamental importance to engineering: How do people think in three dimensions, and how can education foster this thinking? Spatial reasoning is not evenly distributed across the population. It can be trained, but in traditional classroom settings with a blackboard and a CAD monitor on a two-dimensional screen, the limitations of training quickly become apparent.

XR technology has the potential to reduce this cognitive inequality. Those who are able to walk around their model, who experience scale at a 1:1 level, who see collisions instead of having to calculate them, develop a more intuitive understanding of space – regardless of whether their innate spatial reasoning skills are above average or not. This has direct consequences for the quality of designs, for the diversification of the engineering profession, and for the inclusion of groups of people who have traditionally been underrepresented in the classic design profession.

At the same time, the technology is changing the division of labor in the design process. When design reviews and clash detection no longer require physical presence, but can be conducted remotely via the NX Immersive Collaborator, the geography of engineering work shifts. Teams in Stuttgart can collaborate with designers in Bielefeld and suppliers in Warsaw in a shared virtual workspace. This possibility is not new – it was previously pursued with VR collaboration tools – but its integration into a professional CAD system takes it to a new level of practicality.

Outlook: From experiment to practice

The HSBI initiative is at the beginning of a development whose course is still open. However, some development paths can be identified in light of current trends. The XR market as a whole will continue to grow, driven by falling hardware prices, improved display technology, 5G-enabled cloud connectivity, and an increasingly broad ecosystem of industrial applications. For the Sony SRH-S1 in particular, it is crucial whether and how quickly Siemens extends the NX integration to further CAD and PLM workflows and whether the system can gain a foothold among a broader user base of mid-sized industrial customers.

The message for higher education is clear: those who train engineers without equipping them with the tools of the next generation of engineers risk a gap between the realities of their education and everyday industrial practice. This gap is costly for the economy because it lengthens training periods, lowers qualification levels, and increases the pressure on company training budgets. In a situation where 80 percent of German engineers see a significant need for further training and where 315,000 skilled workers will retire in the next ten years, closing this gap is no longer an academic question, but a question of industrial competitiveness.

The HSBI in Bielefeld has provided an answer with a single device and a determined professor: The best preparation for the future of design is designing in the future. Now. In the lab. With glasses that transform the real world into an augmented one – and turn a viewing tool into a true instrument of creation.

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