Dawoud Al Hajiri, Director-General of the Dubai Municipality, on Monday launched a smart training centre, which offers hands-on training using the Virtual Reality Environment.

The Smart Training Hub, supervised by the municipality’s Geographic Information Systems Centre, is considered the first-of-a-kind in the Middle East for the city planning and engineering industry.

With the Smart Training Hub, the municipality aims to enable trainees to learn the techniques and mechanisms used in urban planning and the methods of building supervision and control. The techniques of the centre will also enable the trainees to implement the urban planning rules and the setting up of building regulations as well as performing the land surveying tasks while they are inside the training room.

Al Hajiri toured the training centre, where he was briefed by Mariam Al Muhairi, Director of GIS Centre, about the equipment and training programmes at the centre, which is unique for its use of the latest technology in training.

The centre is equipped with high-end devices and tools that are used in VR technology, while the software was fully developed by the GIS Centre team.

Al Muhairi explained that the training curriculum covers limited fields for the time being such as urban planning, land surveying and building supervision, while in the future it is expected to include other training topics to cover other DM specialty areas.

She added that the centre will be available to the departments and institutions to benefit from it as per their specialisations and fields of work.

Al Hajiri expressed his happiness at the use of modern and smart technologies in training and qualifying the trainees and raising their levels in urban planning.