RWTH Together University

As part of the RWTH Together University project, funded by the Stiftung Innovation in der Hochschullehre, one of our subprojects is building the operating room of the future together with students. Students design their own virtual learning spaces using low-code tools that make it easy to create virtual environments themselves. The resulting drafts then serve as the basis for a more detailed implementation in the multi-user VR platform Anywhere Academy. To make the VR learning spaces as realistic as possible, we use modern technologies such as Gaussian Splatting. They allow us to generate detailed 3D environments from photo and video footage with comparatively little effort, which can then be explored in VR.

As a second subproject, we are building a chatbot that supports students by answering questions about studying at the Faculty of Civil Engineering. It uses Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), a method in which we feed an LLM with specific information. This lets us control where the LLM gets its information from and ensures that students receive the right information. In addition, the chatbot independently searches relevant RWTH websites to stay up to date.

RWTH Together University is funded with around six million euros by the Stiftung Innovation in der Hochschullehre through its Lehrarchitektur funding line. In addition, RWTH Aachen University is contributing 1.5 million euros of its own funds to implement the measures in an agile way and to anchor them for the long term. The university thereby underlines its ambition not only to realize the innovations during the project period, but to integrate them into studies and teaching in the long run.