Virtual Reality training in construction

With the program CIIIC: Creative Industries Immersive Impact Coalition, we aim to increase the capacity to realize immersive experiences, and empower the industry and its creators to capitalize on opportunities. But what are we really talking about? In this series, we dive into inspiring case studies.

On a construction site, safety is an absolute priority. Especially in high-risk tasks, such as lifting loads with a crane, safety is paramount. VTC is the market leader in the Netherlands in the field of vertical transport and was looking for a way for crane operators to safely practice setting up a crane and hoisting the load.

The biggest challenge is in realistically simulating the crane's movements

To make the training as effective as possible, it is necessary for the simulation to be realistic. Therefore, the simulation shows a construction site based on a real working environment. The same equipment is also used. This equipment should not only look real, but also move in the same way. Obvious rules from reality - such as weight and gravity - must be added in the application. This was not so easy: "The biggest challenge is in realistically simulating the crane's movements. For this, we worked closely with several machine operators to ensure that the actions in virtual reality are as realistic as possible," said Quinten de Beet, on behalf of the VR Owl team. The team developed this project internally, working with VR Expert for the hardware.

The application lets three people simultaneously practice and interact with each other. They take on a role of machinist, hoist supervisor or foreman. Among themselves, they can communicate via speech and hand gestures. In this way, they learn how to control the crane and hoist together.

By now we have a lot of experience developing VR applications for training purposes.

The team at VR Owl sees the need to use VR for training more often: "By now we have a lot of experience developing VR applications for training purposes. We have previously had the opportunity to develop realistic simulation training for similar cases." VR proved to be a good move for this project as well: "We currently don't have any hard data yet but the feedback we get back from the client is that with the applications they can train more often and more cheaply at any location. This makes the learning process much shorter without the use of costly company resources.