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Fernando Salvetti and Barbara Bertagni, the enthusiastic entrepreneur couple from Italy, are on a mission to transform the learning and teaching process through their new initiative, e-REAL. They have always been in search of effective alternatives to traditional education and workplace learning. Pursuing their goal with continuous and consistent hard work finally paid off. Today their new initiative e-REAL, which stands for enhanced reality for immersive simulation, provides corporations, organizations and institutions with powerful solutions for their educational, learning and training purposes. Their solutions are based on an amalgamation of the latest trends from digitization, virtualization and artificial intelligence.

Fernando Salvetti and Barbara Bertagni founded e-REAL together with a group of passionate simulation experts with a combination of educational, clinical, and business professionals. Fernando was born in Turin, Italy in 1967. He was educated in his home country, as well as Switzerland and the US. He is a renowned pioneer in simulation, extended reality (VR, AR, MR), interactive technologies and immersive learning. His partner Barbara Bertagni, an Italian psychologist by profession, was also keenly interested in developing solutions for learning and education. Their relentless pursuit to provide an alternative to traditional learning led them to design and develop an interactive and immersive learning environment based on multi-sensory scenarios. They named this new platform 'e-REAL'.

e-REAL
e-REAL

e-REAL is an ecosystem of solutions that grow as simulation program expansions, which means programs are built as per the needs and requirements of the users instead of being restricted by the limitations of existing technologies and teaching methodologies. Therefore, e-REAL provides custom-tailored solutions depending on specific and contextual educational needs.

e-REAL provides both online and real-world solutions, through multi-sensory scenarios that use visual storytelling techniques to display challenging situations. The major difference between other VR and AR systems and e-REAL is that it provides a completely immersive experience without the need for glasses or goggles. The founders believe that this unique feature helps e-REAL to achieve global recognition as an outstanding innovative solution. e−REAL helps create interactive virtual and augmented reality environments for healthcare, business, industry, and education.

The enhanced reality for immersive simulation (e-REAL) creates a mixed-reality environment for hybrid simulation where physical and digital objects are available for tactile, visual, or vocal interaction in a real learning setting, including both online and physical. It enables an advanced simulation within a multisensory scenario based on challenging situations developed by visual storytelling techniques.

The immersive setting of e-REAL is fully interactive with 3D and 4D visualizations, avatars, electronically writable surfaces, and more. Learners and users can take notes, cluster key concepts, or fill in questionnaires directly on the projected characters. It has been designed as a futuristic solution to be "glocal" (both global and local) networked, and polycentric.

The advantages of e-REAL include its virtually augmented, mixed, digitalized, and hyper-realistic technology which provides the users with an easy-to-use and interactive learning environment. Therefore, it is available both in telepresence and in one or more brick−and−mortar classrooms, as the users are not required to wear special glasses, gloves, head−mounted displays, or other augments. "Its usability also extends to content, as it is easy to not only import and show a user's existing content, but it is also easy for a user to create and edit their own new content. It is truly a totally customizable solution partnered with a powerful multimedia editor", says Fernando Salvetti.

Another advantage of the e-REAL is that it enables a multilayer vision. Multiple versions of the same situation are made available simultaneously. e-REAL makes it possible by overlaying multisource information like words, numbers, images, etc within an augmented reality display. It helps to improve learners' cognitive retention by visualizing relations between topics, contextual factors, cognitive maps and dynamic cognitive aids.

The visualizations provided within e-REAL highlight relationships between different topics. They also help to ensure active involvement from the users by generating new questions for them and facilitating memory retention. Visualizations act as concept maps to help effectively organize and represent knowledge on a particular subject.

The efforts by e-REAL are intended to establish a new paradigm for education and training by sharing and mixing up the latest digitalization and virtualization trends, neurosciences, artificial intelligence, and advanced simulation. These efforts have been recognised by organizations such as British Council Going Global, TLIC at Columbia University in New York, SESAM Europe, RAI Italia, SSH, and IMSH.

e−REAL is expanding as an applied research project performed by Centro Studi Logos (Turin, Italy). It is supported by Logos Knowledge Network (Lugano, Switzerland), LKN (Berlin, Germany), and Logosnet (Houston, Texas, US); and developed technologically and for multimedia content in collaboration with Tiny Bull Studios (Turin, Italy) and several top simulations and research institutions", says Barbara Bertagni.

As a strategist, consultant, mentor, trainer, speaker, author and university faculty with a background in epistemology, anthropology and jurisprudence; Fernando Salvetti has always been committed to exploring the possibilities of modern technology. His passions include virtual and augmented reality, cognitive aids by artificial intelligence, multimedia storytelling, as well as contextual and cross-cultural intelligence among others.

Being a chartered clinical and organizational psychologist, an anthropologist and a practical philosopher, Barbara played a crucial role in developing the immersive solution e-REAL and the Speech Analysis Tool along with her partner Fernando. Over the years, Fernando and Barbara dedicated considerable time and effort to developing a new approach to education and workplace learning. Their vision integrates visual thinking and systemic learning theories with advanced technology and entertaining storytelling methods that provide enjoyable, meaningful, relevant, respectful, and accessible experiences to all. They are mixing up the latest trends from digitalization, virtualization and artificial intelligence with the goal of building powerful solutions for education and simulation.