Development of a New Generation of Welding Simulators for Education and Training

Abstract

During the years a number of different simulators have been developed for the welding community. These simulators have been targeted to different user groups and different technical level of the group itself. The technological quality has mostly been on a professional level, although the user friendliness, we must admit, may have a wide interpretation of the word “friendliness”. The use of mobile devices, pads and so forth, with other interface methods than the keyboard, that has appeared over the last years have given us new opportunities to define user interfaces that are completely different from what was possible before. This paper will discuss a work in progress for a simulation project development related to education and training, in two different projects, IWSD (Leonardo da Vinci project) and Green Weld (EEA Grant project), currently running in Romania and in Bulgaria.