When Professor Lauritz Lipp wants to have a private conversation in a relaxed atmosphere, he gets into the motorboat.

It hums softly, the sun is shining, there is no rain on the Virbela campus.

Instead, a tiny island with high cliffs and evergreen lawn.

“We could have had our own external environment configured, but that is only possible for an additional charge,” says the professor.

Sarah Obertreis

Editor in business.

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    Lipp teaches communication design at the private University of Europe for Applied Scienes (UE). Today he is giving a tour of his latest project: the university's virtual campus. He is ten weeks old. Still, everything looks a bit like the "Sims" here, just less modern. Lipp apologizes for the "awkward" graphics. After all, this is how the virtual campus also works on ten-year-old computers.

    Ayla Hentges, a 26-year-old student from Lipp, has settled down at the unoccupied reception.

    Her avatar is wearing an oversized black blazer and a wine-red blouse.

    Lipp has opted for a baseball cap, a yellow cardigan and white dress shoes.

    His avatar comes to the counter, the speech bubble above his head flashes, he plays a stray student: “Hello, could you please tell me where the Office of International Affairs is.” - “Uh,” replies Hentges.

    Not just a corona project

    You and your fellow students are not really familiar with the almost 40 rooms. It doesn't matter, Lipp finds his way, after all, he helped set up the virtual campus with all its seating, posters and book walls himself. The steps of his avatar echo through the hallways, conversations from bystanders penetrate the laptop speakers. If someone forgets to press the button that closes the door of a seminar room, you can hear the lecturers as you pass. “That's what I find interesting about this world,” says Lipp, “there aren't too many security options.” But that also means: If a student's avatar arrives late for the lecture, Lipp sees it directly and can warn him. Whispering in lectures doesn't work - everyone hears that.

    The semester times are written on colorful post-its on the virtual wall of the International Office, the door is closed. A consultation is actually taking place, says Lipp with satisfaction. Behind the glass door are the avatars of the university staff and the student.

    The virtual campus is not just a corona project, it should help the UE in the long term to bring its students together who actually go to the university at the real locations in Berlin, Hamburg, Iserlohn and Potsdam.

    Your avatars can now not only sit together in lectures, they have also sung karaoke in the past few weeks, and in a seminar room Hentges and her fellow students have set up a three-question mark audio book quiz that anyone who just comes by can play .

    "It is important to us to encourage chance meetings again," says Lipp.

    It doesn't work through Zoom and Teams - everyone felt that last year.

    "The air is completely different here"

    On the virtual campus, up to 200 of the almost 3,000 students at the UE can attend lectures at the same time.

    While Lipp's avatar is lecturing, the professor can throw slides on the walls in the virtual auditorium or himself as a video image.

    If it gets too crowded in the hall, the students or Lipp click away the furniture - or the avatars just stack on top of each other, after all they don't know claustrophobia.

    Virbela - the company that conceived this world was founded twenty years ago in California by a behavioral psychologist.

    Alex Howland found in his research that it makes little difference whether people learn in a simulated environment or in a real one with direct contact with others.

    What I learned was just as good or bad.

    This is why the UE is now also promising that its students will learn better on the Virbela campus than through Zoom lectures. "The situations are similar in the video conferences, but here you can remember certain rooms and the clothes of the others," says Lipp. His white-shod avatar walks towards one of the computer tables in the wide hallways. Here the students show their theses. A video portrait is currently running about a young illustrator.

    It took a long time, says Lipp, to find a suitable program. Most of them were way too expensive for a university - 200,000 or 300,000 euros - but the software from Virbela is affordable, and Lipp likes to chat with the employees at the entrance, who - as they repeatedly assure - are really not bots. "Ah," says Lipp as he hops straight out of the student's lounge and onto the landing stage. "The air is quite different here."