A lot of aviation vocabulary and procedures were born from the sea. Port and starboard, the rank structure, the red and green lights on the wingtips, the rules of the road all came off ships first. But when it came to training, maritime learning took second place over a century ago. Pilots have been flying simulators of sorts since the 1920s, and an airline crew can now be typed on an aircraft they have never actually flown. My brother was one of them: the first time he flew a 737, he had a bunch of passengers in the back!
Maritime simulation is a much smaller industry and we started late on extended reality. I spent 23 years at sea, most of it as a senior officer and captain, and the years since on the other side of the problem, selling the systems that replace some of that time on the water. I'm finally at a point where I can confidently say we are catching up, and I'd like to run you through how and why.
Tim's talk at the Global XR Summit 2026
There is currently a much larger emphasis on the maritime trade. Most people in the USA don't realize that over 90% of our imported goods come by ship. There is a huge deficit of seafarers worldwide and with the renewed emphasis on maritime, including funding availability, all maritime schools are looking to expand. Unfortunately, those schools generally have two issues. One is student throughput, typically limited by a lack of space in the facility. The other is the expense of installing a full mission ship simulator.
A ship's bridge is not a cockpit. It is a workplace that goes all the way around you, very often extending from one side of the ship to the other and leaving an operator with a large number of blind spots. When docking, arguably the most critical maneuver of a vessel, a ship's crew has to work with tugboats. In addition to being aware of the general vicinity all around the ship, the captain and pilot need a perspective of the tugboats alongside. Handling a tugboat means looking up at the ship you are working and down at the water at the same time, with your hands on the controls and your eyes going back to the sensors and winch control every few seconds. Three flat screens in front of you cannot cover that. A projection dome can, but it needs a large brick and mortar room, and a huge physical mockup of the bridge built inside. And while the fields of view are different for a ship and a tug, the problem with visibility is the same.
Training schools do not have that room to give. Ships have far less. Expanding a facility costs a building, and that is why a headset that lets a mariner see their own hands on their own throttle has moved this along faster than anything else in the last decade.
The Riverine small boat trainer for the US Navy
Riverine, the US Navy maritime small boat trainer, was our first program with Varjo. There are two units, one at Little Creek and one in San Diego, modeling a PB40 with two crew positions on a 3DoF motion base. We learned plenty the hard way on that one, including that a green screen was not optional. The real surprise was the motion base. We assumed that putting a headset on a moving platform would make people sick, and it did the opposite. With motion, the operators' inner ear is more in touch with what their eyes are expecting.
XR bridge stations at MITAGS in Maryland
MITAGS in Maryland is one of the largest and most respected training centers in North America. Their all-weather bridges had hit their limit at three screens per station, so they now use six XR stations that all interact with each other, with a much wider field of view and lower technical refresh costs over the life of the system. While each system is its own cubicle, full bridge resource management training can be done by combining multiple cubicles into one vessel, each with its own required function.
Replica tug control platforms at USMRC in Newport, Rhode Island
The one I point people to now is USMRC in Newport, Rhode Island. They do very high-end tug work, and modern tugs demand it. Large, powerful tugs can be made to walk sideways through the water while 60 tons of line pull tries to put them on their side. These sophisticated vessels require advanced training. USMRC provides it and was fortunate to have its enrollment booked with overflow. Space was limited, so to accommodate more trainees we put small replica tug control platforms wherever there was space, which turned out to be a library and somebody's office. They have since put more than a million dollars into expanding those capabilities.
The same reasoning is now aimed at bigger programs. On the US Navy's Transit Protection Training System at Kings Bay and Bangor, where we worked as the technology provider for Cubic Global Defense, the customer requires an additional full-mission bridge, more part-task positions, a dedicated submarine conning station and integrated weapons. There is no floor left in either building to put any of it. Recovering that floor from the screens is the only way I can see to get there.
P-COVE, the "ship in a box"
P-COVE is my favorite, and between ASI, our prime contractor, and Wärtsilä, we call it the ship in a box. Flying a crew to San Diego or Newport to practice one evolution is expensive and rarely tailored to their own ship, so we send the trainer to the ship instead. It is a RAVE Computing RenderBeast, a headset and a small controller, all in a wheeled case. Disney Cruise Line is going the same way, with their own Azipod control layout and a dedicated unit planned for each ship. It's my understanding that other cruise lines are heading in that direction as well.
As in any industry, budget is almost always the first hurdle. Even though the cost of an XR station is absolutely dwarfed by that of a full-scale bridge trainer, it is still considered a new solution in this space, so cost per station is scrutinized. One headset and the computer to drive it is affordable. My alma mater, the United States Merchant Marine Academy, has a single classroom with 64 stations in it. Multiply it out and the number starts to grow. But I am slowly seeing the tide of understanding turn: reaching this scale of training with traditional methods costs something on a totally different playing field. Each of those stations currently has four high-powered PCs, three 32" displays and three smaller sensor displays (radar, ECDIS and conning). The space is extremely tight and renewing that equipment is costly at volume. Moving to a Varjo XR-4 solution will free up substantial space while increasing realism.
Our own library is the second problem. We hold more than 750 high-fidelity ship models, each of which took months to tune, and none of them were built with an interior, because until now nobody was ever going to look around inside one. Everything we build for the Navy, Army or Coast Guard is now XR compatible from the start. Bringing the back catalog forward is a real piece of work. There is a tremendous amount of potential to reduce that workload using Varjo's Teleport application, and we're actively pursuing it.
Multiplayer is the third. We can do two crew today. A bridge team is more than two, and one of them needs to see the officer standing on the opposite bridge wing. Knowing that Varjo is releasing frequent updates to advanced segmentation methods makes me confident we can increase the number of people in a virtual scenario soon.
Wärtsilä's small boat trainer with Varjo mixed reality
None of this replaces the reason we build simulators in the first place. You cannot hand a new officer half a billion dollars of ship, put another hull 100 feet off the beam and let them try underway replenishment for the first time. What has changed is how much room and money it takes to let them practice it first, and I'm excited to watch the progression.
Timothy Park is Sales Director, Voyage Solutions at Wärtsilä, where he works on maritime simulation and training. He spent 23 years at sea, most of it as a senior officer and captain.