Category: VR&AR

Minimize human errors by practicing scheduled maintenance and emergency activities in a safe environment of VR training.

Why VR trainings are effective for water treatment companies?

Virtual reality provides the simulation of training scenarios that are hard or impossible to recreate in real life, such as power line accidents or high-voltage operations. Today, advanced manufacturers, including water treatment companies, actively adopt such solutions.

In the course of training, personnel can practice the scenario-based operation of water treatment equipment with visualization of all possible error consequences, and then pass an exam and start performing their duties right away. Such trainings reveal employee reactions to any emergency or tricky situations when the test doesn’t follow the usual scenario. The test results are always available for the employee’s supervisor.

Moreover, a full-fledged VR simulator is a cost-effective solution that will be five times less expensive than creating its physical analog. VR simulator is easier to scale. It can be flexibly adapted to the ever-changing infrastructure and equipment of water treatment facility compared to physical simulators, which quickly become outdated and take a lot of time and effort to be updated.

VR training details

VR training includes a hardware and software suite of interactive visualization tools with a set of training, hands-on, and testing scenarios. A virtual workplace simulates the real environment and equipment, while training scenarios represent routine and emergency procedures.

Training participants/roles:

• Trainer. A trainer uses a training module to add users, assign training topics and testing, manage scenarios, and generate statistics on training results.
• Trainee. A trainee uses a VR simulator to practice routine procedures and take tests. However, trainees also can practice hands-on skills without a mentor at any time.
• Supervisor. A supervisor receives training or testing results in the form of an Excel spreadsheet report and video records of the completed session.

You can also track the specific metrics to evaluate the session’s or whole course’s effectiveness – detailed statistics show each employee’s retained knowledge and preparedness to work:

• Time to complete a training scenario. The time begins once the VR simulator is started, and stops, when a training scenario is completed. You can track how the learning pace of your personnel changes over time.
• Task fulfillment accuracy. This shows the percentage of actions performed correctly in training scenarios. You can track how the level and quality of personnel training change over time.
• The number of trainees per month. This shows how the number of personnel trained to perform the work changes over time.

What do you get in VR training format?

Spoiler: almost anything!

The training complex for the water treatment plant includes:

• Interactive maps of production areas with integrated training scenarios. We recreate not only rooms of your facility, but also the exterior premises with realistic interactive equipment.
• Training simulator for operating personnel based on the plant’s mathematical model (for example, a copy of the plant automated process control system).
• VR training simulator for maintenance personnel to train their repair and maintenance skills on requested equipment: decanter centrifuges, thermal dryers, solar dryers. Our team of qualified analysts and developers with experience in implementing VR simulators for industrial enterprises has all the required experience to recreate any equipment in VR (electrical safety, water treatment, health and safety, metallurgy, and more).
• VR simulator to practice any emergency drills: fire, flood, blackout, high altitude, explosives, high-pressure works, high voltage. Test your employees’ reactions and skills!

User and business benefits

• Faster and better personnel training. Continuous personnel training and qualification testing
• Less human errors. Practicing skills in standard and emergency situations
• Reduced risk of injuries and equipment damage. Increased awareness when operating real equipment

NNTC creates a product that really adds value: we identify business needs, design architecture, develop a simulator, scale it, and embed it in a business process. Are you interested in such VR training for your company? Contact us!

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• 3D models for production sites and how useful they can be

Oil and petrochemical refineries are rather complex sophisticated facilities demanding accurate management and proper maintenance. In this case, 3D models for production sites – an exact digital twin of a building – are created to help maintenance staff quickly reach a certain location, thus making their life easier.

Just one 3D model can replace tons of accompanying documents and dozens of conventional mock-ups.

• Even the most accurate and well-crafted, mock-ups are of offline nature and provide general building details only. Instead, a 3D model is interactive and allows you to zoom in, turn around and remember any particular section.
• Such a 3D model is an effective learning material, as clicking and travelling through it is more of an adventure than trying to handle a mock-up.
• A 3D model is a HSE manual displaying hard-hats-on locations and places to avoid (even if you’re wearing a genius hard hat). Newcomers find interactive maps and routes more helpful in memorizing the object structure, compared to dull paper layouts.

On top of that, 3D models for production sites are less expensive to maintain (compared to a mock-up) and easy to move (a simple flash drive will suffice) and update with new data layers. Unlike mock-ups, a 3D model supports collaboration.

How to use 3D models for production sites?

In addition to replacing excessive documentation, a 3D model works as a simulator for employees to pass some internal assessment. Moreover, you can upload complete technical specifications of nodes over the model, so that employees could brush up the assignments and plan their activities before its shift.

Another trend is virtual tours for inspection authorities and stakeholders. One of our customers implemented a role-based model where users are granted different access rights depending on the assigned role. For example, some users can observe the entire model, including specifications and related details, while others see just equipment exterior and location, with some layers being simply hidden from their eyes. This results in different content for different roles without any chance of unauthorized access.

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Industrial companies face similar challenges, which lead to lost profits: high LTIFR, unscheduled equipment downtime, and long-scheduled maintenance. Solutions based on immersive reality (digital models and VR trainings) can solve these problems.

Employee safety and health are top-priority tasks at any industrial enterprise. According to the International Labour Organization, approximately 2.3 million people worldwide die every year because of workplace accidents or occupational diseases, which number is equal to a large city population.

Accidents and work incapacity lead to idle time and equipment downtime, the company’s financial losses, and tarnished reputation. Yet too often, accidents and deaths are caused by employee error, proving that conventional occupational safety trainings are no longer sufficient.

These problems can be solved with training simulators, which visualize technological processes using VR and 3D technology. In addition, VR makes training as effective as that in real life.

• VR training is a must when it is hard or impossible to simulate an emergency in real life, such as a high-voltage plant operation or fire.
• VR also help learn how a certain employee will respond and act in an extraordinary situation. For instance, you can run emergency scenarios in any sequence or even in parallel to make a trainee choose what to do to address the emergency.

Facing the facts about VR trainings

PwC recently studied the efficiency of training in VR. Here are the key takeaways:

• During VR courses, employees can be trained up to four times faster!
• VR learners are up to 275% more confident to act on what they learned after training—a 40% improvement over classroom and 35% improvement over e-learning.
• VR learners are 3.75x more emotionally connected to the content than classroom learners.
• VR learners were up to four times more focused during training than their e-learning peers, and 1.5 times more focused than their classroom peers.
• VR learning can be more cost-effective at scale.

VR learning will likely be an enabler of a new age of enterprise training and education, delivering a cost-effective, immersive, and efficient soft-skill training experience. But how it’s done?

Let’s dive deeper!

Should it be high voltage equipment failure or fire at the production facility, VR trainings help reveal employee reaction to any emergency or sudden obstacles, reproduce tricky situations when an incident doesn’t follow the usual scenario, and, more importantly, enables employees to get prepared to such incidents in advance. For example, the introduction of VR in Ford’s manufacturing process reduced injures by 70%.

Both highly probable AND catastrophic risks for desalination plants include electric hazards and high-pressure fluids. Any hazardous situation or emergency can be easily reproduced in a computer simulation, with virtual reality technologies being capable of showing almost any content, including even “playback” of past accidents to prevent them in the future. For instance, we have recently helped one company to overcome some of the HSE challenges with the power of smart technology. Plant management was not sure of how well the team can handle emergencies and complex routine maintenance tasks. The cost of error or inaction can be quite high, as you certainly know.

We suggested using an innovative approach to tackle such a challenge: a VR simulation + operator training simulator (OTS). Workers can go through very realistic simulations as often as they need, which builds enough confidence and understanding to mitigate the risks and properly act in an emergency.

How VR trainings work

During such VR trainings, employees obtain necessary knowledge and skills and pass tests in a computer simulation, with the test results being available to the supervisor who thus can speed up onboarding and new knowledge perception through practice.

People get hands-on experience in the equipment whenever they need and simulate all kind of emergencies and maintenance tasks to gain confidence and speed. The consequences of any HSE breach can be reinforced in virtual reality through visual effects, like a full-screen explosion accompanied by bruising, thus impacting the psycho-emotional state of employees to make them more careful in their routine activities.

The benefit for the stakeholders is the transparency of skill assessment. There is a record of VR trainings for each employee – time spent on each particular action, the number of attempts, how often each task is practiced, etc.

High and medium voltage electrical equipment training is another hugely compelling use case demanded by our multiple customers:

We develop VR trainings because we know they save lives. If you are interested in how VR can be integrated into your organization, please contact us.

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