Most XR training projects fail in the same place. The headsets arrive, the environment looks impressive, and nobody can say whether anyone learned anything. I work with training centres, simulator integrators and defense organisations on the part that decides the outcome: what the XR system has to do, how it fits the training pipeline that already exists, and how you prove it changed readiness. I have written training requirements inside a General Command, run laser engagement and synthetic training systems as an instructor, and I follow the research on how XR training effectiveness can be measured closely enough to apply it.
Before anyone buys anything: what your training pipeline actually fails to deliver, and whether XR is the right instrument for it. Sometimes the honest answer is that it is not.
Turning a training need into a specification an engineer can build and a procurement officer can evaluate. This is the step most projects skip, and it is why they drift.
Development partnership with integrators, OEMs and training centres building XR into their products. I work as the training-domain side of the team, not as an outside reviewer.
The question everyone eventually gets asked and almost nobody can answer. It is the area I follow most closely in the research literature, applied to your system.
The part most XR programmes underfund, and the reason so many headsets end up in a cupboard. A system nobody has trained the instructors to use will be judged a failure regardless of how good it is. I stay on after delivery: embedding the system into the training curriculum, training the instructors who will run it every week, building the evaluation loop that keeps it improving, and reporting outcomes in a form the organisation funding it can actually read. For a first XR deployment this determines whether there is ever a second one.
This is not a client reference and names no customer. It is the pattern: the shape these projects take, the decisions that determine whether they work, and the places they usually go wrong. Land systems are where I am most at home, so this is the example worth writing down.
A unit is converting to a new infantry fighting vehicle or tank. Three crew roles, commander, gunner and driver, each needing different skills and different amounts of repetition. One full-mission simulator exists or is on order, and it trains one crew at a time. Several hundred soldiers have to be converted. Live training on the vehicle is expensive, weather-dependent and rationed by ammunition and range availability. The delivery schedule does not wait for any of this.
Crews reach the vehicle already knowing the procedures, so range time is spent on what only live training can teach. Throughput stops being capped by a single simulator. Instructors run the system themselves, without a call to the supplier. And the organisation can show what changed, in numbers, when it is asked to justify the next purchase. That last point is what buys the second system, and it is the part most programmes never prepare for.
The same pattern, with different variables, applies to bridge trainers in a delivery gap, procedural stations ahead of a full-mission simulator, and unmanned platform operator training. If your project looks like any of these, the first conversation will be short and useful.
I started as a mechanised infantry platoon commander in the 20th Bartoszyce Mechanised Brigade, responsible for a platoon of soldiers, their vehicles and their readiness. Then three years commanding a cadet platoon, and five years as an academic teacher at the Military University of Land Forces in Wrocław, leading the tactical laser simulation team: instrumented field exercises on Saab GAMER, classes in the VBS synthetic environment, system maintenance, and procurement specifications for new training equipment. Eleven years of that is why I know what a training unit actually needs on a Tuesday morning, as opposed to what a capability roadmap says it needs.
I then moved to the General Command of the Polish Armed Forces, to the Department of Training and Training Devices in the Training Inspectorate. I worked on the Tactical Simulators of the Modern Battlefield programme for armoured and mechanised forces and advised on requirements for the Comprehensive Battlefield Simulation System (KSSPW). That is where I learned how a requirement is written, who quietly influences it, and why a technically superior system can still lose.
Since 2023 I have been on the commercial and technology side, working with motion platforms and, today, Varjo military-grade XR across defense, aerospace and industrial training customers in Poland, the Baltics, the Nordics and wider CEE. That means seeing what integrators are actually building, which hardware choices hold up in a training centre, and which XR projects deliver and which quietly stall.
That combination is the point. Plenty of people can build an XR environment, and plenty understand military training, but the two rarely sit in the same head. Projects fail in the gap between them: a beautiful simulation that trains the wrong thing, or a sound training concept implemented in a way instructors will not use. That gap is where I work.
I work in English and Polish, from Wrocław, across Europe.
Own the defense and simulation pipeline across Poland, the Baltics, the Nordics and wider CEE for Varjo's military-grade XR headsets.
Drove new business and long-term client relationships for motion platform hardware across defense, aerospace and industrial training customers.
Administration and technical support of the advanced simulation systems used in military training at the university.
Worked on the requirements side of national training equipment programmes, as the expert institution advising on what the armed forces should procure.
Academic teacher and technical lead for the university's instrumented live training capability, running exercises for troops and students.
Commanded a platoon of officer cadets through their military training, responsible for turning candidates into commissioned officers.
First posting after commissioning. Commanded a mechanised infantry platoon equipped with infantry fighting vehicles, responsible for its soldiers, its vehicles and its readiness.
Alongside the commercial work I follow one question closely, and intend to pursue it as doctoral research: everyone agrees XR trains people, but almost nobody can prove how well, or adapt the training to the individual while it is happening. It is the same question clients keep running into, which is why I keep reading in it rather than treating it as a side interest.
Armies are fielding equipment faster than they can field the trainers for it. Existing XR simulators deliver environmental realism but have no real-time adaptation layer based on what the trainee is actually doing with their attention. The direction I am working towards integrates immersive XR, eye-tracking and an adaptive engine so that a tactical scenario reshapes itself in real time to the operator's cognitive load and skill level, validated experimentally against conventional training.
It keeps the advice grounded in evidence rather than vendor claims. When a client asks whether XR will actually improve readiness, which effect sizes the literature supports, or how to write a procurement that measures training outcomes instead of headset specifications, that is the same ground.
Nothing below is published yet. These are drafts I am preparing for conference submission in 2027, listed so you can see where my thinking is going rather than as a publication record.
Thirty minutes. What you train, where the pipeline is failing, and what you have already tried. If XR is the wrong answer for it, I will say so on that call.
A short paid piece of work: your training gap mapped against what XR can and cannot solve, with a concrete recommendation and a rough cost envelope. Useful even if we stop there.
Requirements, development partnership, effectiveness measurement and rollout, scoped per phase. Reviewed at each milestone, no lock-in beyond the notice period.
Whether you are scoping a first XR trainer, building XR into a product, or holding headsets you cannot yet prove are working, the intro call is free and reasonably direct.