More about Martijn Boosman


The basis for Martijn's career in safety and security simulation training was formed through a combination of volunteer work at the Netherlands Red Cross and his experience as entrepreneur in his first company "Creative Solutions".


Martijn was trained as product designed with a specialty in user interface design at the University of Technology in Delft, The Netherlands. Shortly after his graduation as MSc. in Industrial Design Engineering in 2000, Martijn founded company XVR Simulation in the Netherlands (then called E-Semble) and secured a first round of investment. The XVR software (initially branded DiaboloVR and TabletopVR) is a multi-player 3D XR training environment for incident commanders. The advanced editor allows users to create their own incident and disaster scenarios and present them to their students from medical, police, fire and other emergency services for interactive training.  


In the start-up years Martijn was CEO as well as the lead product manager and user interface designer. During the further growth Martijn's main responsibilities were international sales and business development. Martijn kept closely involved in product design to ensure that XVR’s innovative product portfolio stayed well aligned with market requirements. By 2009, the company had expanded to a market leader position in Europe and Australia delivering virtual reality simulation to emergency services in more than 20 countries. With a company size growing beyond 20 staff Martijn decided it was time to hand over his CEO position to an experienced manager allowing him to focus fully at commercial growth of the company as Chief Commercial Officer. The company is now the world leading supplier of XR simulation software for emergency services training. 


In parallel with his work at XVR, Martijn co-founded and led a number of not-for-profit initiatives:

The Sagbata Foundation - A project organization set-up to design and build an early-stage AI-enabled decision support tool for strategic decision making in Biological events. The project was undertaken within the NATO Civil Emergency Planning structure with support from the Netherlands, Switzerland and Canada.

The VictimBase Project - Martijn and his mentor Dr. Michel Debacker designed "VictimBase", a state-based casualty condition template and storage database for dynamic patient description for use in simulation software. The project was supported by various donors including CAE from Canada.

EMDM Academy - Martijn took on the daily operational leadership of a project spin-off for the successful European Master in Disaster Medicine in which he was Lecturer on Simulation Training. The EMDM Academy organised and ran multiple simulation programmes including a complete disaster medicine course which included simulated and live exercise for the Abu Dhabi Hospital Management Agency SEHA.

After Martijn left XVR in 2018 he founded new companies in the field of simulation based education and training, CrisisSim, XR Support Center Europe and SystemicVR.  Martijn's role at the companies he founded and/or worked in has always been a combination of leadership, commercial activities, project management and product innovation.

Martijn is actively involved as committee member in the  IT²EC, Europe's largest defence training technology exhibition and technical conference.


Martijn's commercial competencies are centred around his ability to convince people of different cultural backgrounds and a very personal consultative sales approach based on strong, lasting relationships with partners and customers. Martijn has closed both small sales as well as large multi-million USD projects. Besides his experience as sales and business development Martijn has a strong analytical commercial mind which allows him to devise innovative revenue models and Product Market Combinations. 


Martijn was able to build up project management skills in his role as project manager for a number of large (multi million USD) projects which included new product development, design and build of simulation centres and provision of training and support services. Martijn's cross-cultural management skills were tested and strengthened in projects in several European countries, China, Singapore, India and the Middle East. His strength in project management lies in senior oversight and taking timely and decisive action to balance customer requirements, customer expectations and supplier capabilities. 


As trained product design engineer Martijn will always be attracted by product innovation. Martijn's role in design processes has included core user interface design as well as more advisory roles as strategic product innovator in the more mature stages of product cycles.

Martijn is strong in sharply devising the end users needs and translate them into a very high level of engineering detail in sketches and verbal briefings. Once development of product features are underway Martijn is also very alert in preventing scope creep and misunderstanding between subject matter experts, functional designers and engineers.

Publications and Presentations:
Data-Driven Approach for Medical Competency Assessment Using VR Patients
(2024 International Conference on Brain Computer Interface & Healthcare Technologies)

Virtual Reality is Disruptive: Martijn Boosman 
(2023 Article on SimZine Magazine)

 Introspect Model: Competency Assessment in the Virtual World
(2015 International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management) 


The EMDM Triage Game: Use of VictimBase standardised simulation victims in medical disaster education and training
(18th World Congress on Disaster and Emergency Medicine 2013)

Victimbase: Disaster Victim Descriptions for Simulation, Training and Research
(2011 Article in Prehospital and disaster medicine Journal)

Presentations about Sagbata Project
(2004 Meeting of the States Parties to the Convention of Prohibition [...] of Biological and Toxin Weapons (Geneva))
(2004 NATO CEPC Civil Emergency Planning Committee)
(2004 NATO CEPC International CBRN Exercise)

The Sagbata Project 
(2003 Article in Prehospital and disaster medicine Journal)