We’re stepping out of the corporate world to dive deep into VReduMED, a successful Interreg CENTRAL EUROPE project. This MedTech innovation initiative is on a mission to support the education of healthcare professionals through VR (Virtual Reality). No sketchy articles here—just a raw, insightful conversation with people building the future.

Our fantastic guests were:

• Zsolt Kereszturi, Manager, Innoskart Digital Cluster
• Dr. Tamás Budai, Assistant Professor and CTO at the Center for Digital Developments, Szechenyi István University of Gyor.
• Zoltán Kaszai, VR/AR Developer and team leader at the same center.

So, what happens when you bring together Hungarian tech experts, international hospitals, and nurses with „very strong personalities”? Let’s find out!

The Mission: VR as a Teaching Partner, Not a Replacement

Right off the bat, Tamas set a crucial expectation: this isn’t about replacing hands-on training. When nurses wanted to practice fine motor skills like IV insertions in VR, the team had to be honest. „The technology is not there yet,” explained Tamas. Instead, VReduMED focused on enrichment—using VR to create scenarios that are too risky, too rare, or too logistically messy to practice regularly in real life.

Zoltan’s Code Meets the „Room of Horror”

The conversation got fascinating when Tamas described one of their flagship applications: the „Room of Horror.” Don’t let the name fool you—it’s not a videogame. Their German project partners already used a physical „error room” for final exams, where nursing students must find hidden mistakes in a clinical setup.

„It was a very good candidate to actually put into VR,” Tamas said. Why? Because in VR, you can create infinite room variations, hide different errors, and—crucially—reset everything with a click. Zoltan, who led the development, highlighted how this solved a real problem: „When you do it in the physical world, you need like 20 minutes to prepare the room for the next student.” In VR you can do it in 1 second.

Zsolt’s Personal Connection and the Stress Factor

Zsolt from the Innoskart Digital Cluster (who joined us for the project’s collaborative perspective) shared a powerful personal insight. His daughter is studying to be a nurse. For him, seeing VR applications for training—like a CPR simulation set as a rainy nighttime roadside accident—was a revelation. It meant students could practice high-stakes reanimation without a live patient.

This taps into a core strength of VR, as Tamas elaborated. The technology can „cheat our senses” to elevate stress levels in a controlled way, mimicking the psychological pressure of a real emergency. This kind of emotional preparedness is hard to train with a static dummy.

The Human Glue: Bridging the Jargon Gap

Perhaps the most compelling takeaway was about collaboration. Tamas spoke candidly about the „really healthy discussion and maybe a bit of dispute” with healthcare professionals. It was a constant process of translation—bridging the gap between medical needs and tech possibilities. Furthermore, working with partners from Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany, Slovakia, and Hungary revealed unexpected challenges. They discovered that even the names for basic medical equipment differed between countries, all of which Zoltan’s team had to account for in their multilingual applications.