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Next five years in construction is critical

A new report published by CITB (Construction Industry Training Board) shows that construction can reap major rewards from digital skills and technology, but only if it takes decisive action in the next five years. CITB's report, Evolution or Revolution?, looks at a range of scenarios for the pace of technological change in construction, which will inform the forthcoming CLC Future Skills Plan. The research finds that as a less-automated sector, construction stands to gain much more from modernisation than other parts of the economy. Embracing digital technology and cutting-edge skills can help address ongoing industry challenges like wafer-thin profit margins; the need to recruit, upskill and retain the future workforce; and improving health, safely and mental wellbeing. The next five years will likely see technological adoption evolve, then speed up – but only when the right conditions are in place, including: building a shared definition of what digital construction means and the skills it requires, sharing best practice much more widely and, liberating leaders and managers to take calculated risks and drive new approaches. Stephen Radley, CITB Director of Strategy & Policy said: “Construction has lagged behind other industries in harnessing the benefits of digitalisation but is now looking to [...]

By | 2019-07-19T17:07:00+00:00 July 19th, 2019|
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STARK Learning selects VE Studio for VR training solutions

The DiSTI Corporation announced that STARK Learning, headquartered in the Netherlands, is the newest VE Studio Certified Solutions Partner. STARK Learning specializes in creating innovative digital learning solutions for industrial, energy and education sectors. According to Milan Vogelaar, managing director of STARK Learning, “we are experiencing growing demand from enterprise customers wanting to implement virtual (VR) and augmented reality (AR) technology to improve skills, operational, and maintenance procedural training. To provide scalable solutions that fit our customers’ requirements, we selected VE Studio.” The initial attraction to VE Studio was the robust feature set and in use by aerospace, automotive and energy companies around the world. After conducting a detailed technical and financial assessment, STARK Learning identified that it could reduce development time significantly while at the same time allowing it to efficiently publish training content across multiple platforms using Unity as the rendering engine. STARK Learning points out that VE Studio enables more efficient and flexible development cycles due to its patented data-driven approach to content creation and management. Reducing cost and development time is a real win-win for their customers and STARK Learning. Partnering with DiSTI extends STARK Learning’s capabilities to deliver and support scalable learning solutions to industrial, [...]

By | 2019-07-17T18:58:40+00:00 July 17th, 2019|
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Mission Room and NTAR announce new partnership

The partnership will involve Mission Room supplying technology to enable NTAR to capture 360-degree videos of real world situations, produce immersive training media, and let students experience this in a 3-meter cube Mission Room Arena system. Mission Room will work with NTAR to evolve the company’s immersive training solutions and develop further innovations to the training offering. This will ensure that NTAR maintains a lead in the delivery of their training content. Mission Room will also offer a facility to work with NTAR clients to map this technology to the company’s specific needs. Mission Room enables NTAR to place groups of trainees and apprentices inside virtual dynamic and hazardous situations in complete safety, providing a unique training capability within the rail sector. As the first rail training organisation to take Mission Room onboard, the partnership ensures NTAR will be at the forefront of new and innovative training methods. General Manager of NTAR Simon Rennie anticipates that the Mission Room will ‘enhance situational training in a safety critical environment’. Allowing trainees to be placed ‘safely and collectively, into a simulated environment that could be trackside, in a maintenance depot, or demonstrating standard operating processes’. The Mission Room system has multiple benefits, [...]

By | 2019-07-16T18:22:27+00:00 July 16th, 2019|
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First STRS Attracts Cross-Sector Training Leaders

Nuclear power. Rail. Construction. Oil & gas. Aviation. Healthcare. Renewable energy. Defence. Maritime. First responders. What do they have in common? They are all safety-critical sectors requiring highly skilled personnel. And they are all facing rapid, disruptive change in their domains, driven by inexorable digitisation and automation, budget pressures and a multi-generational workforce with differing learning styles. Thought leaders and subject experts representing these varied industries came together for the first time in a joint forum to examine their shared challenges and to offer each other best-practice solutions in the selection and training of their current and future employees. The event was the first Simulation, Training and Assessment for Resilience & Safety Symposium (STRS), staged in London by Halldale Group and the European Training & Simulation Association (ETSA), the leading providers of information on training and simulation for high reliability industries. “There was a lot of engagement,” said Andy Smith, Halldale CEO, “People were enthusiastic.” “Absolutely fantastic. Much better than we could have expected,” added ETSA President Steve Wilkinson. Andy Fawkes, former lead for the UK Ministry of Defence’s simulation policy / strategy development, who served as moderator for STRS, said, “I think the experiment worked. We are trying to [...]

By | 2019-07-16T13:12:34+00:00 July 16th, 2019|
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Oceaneering leverages Vortex Studio for subsea simulations

CM Labs Simulations Inc. announced that Oceaneering Inc., has successfully integrated Vortex Studio into its planning and prototyping workflows for offshore tools, which will reduce the company’s training times and increase mission readiness. With clients looking for a long-term partner to deliver safe and stable maintenance operations for multiple-years to decades at a time, Oceaneering’s Digital Innovation Design Team was tasked with reassuring potential customers through simulation-based demos. “Our artists excel at creating 3D models, but the systems in place did not let us move to the next level where we could simulate unique scenarios or make changes on the fly,” said Mark Stevens, Digital Innovation Operations director at Oceaneering. “Even the smallest change required the scene to be re-rendered, easily taking five days or more.” CM Labs’ advanced suite of real-time simulation and visualization software, Vortex Studio offered Oceaneering the platform it was looking for; a fast-paced, user-centric prototyping tool, streamlined for deployment testing, training, and customer engagement simulations. Offering high-fidelity dynamics, cable-systems and hydrodynamics, Vortex Studio presented a robust feature set, which was perfect for the company. “With increasingly complex projects, the Oceaneering team wanted to refocus their resources,” explained Lisa Barbieri, CM Labs VP of Marketing & [...]

By | 2019-07-09T18:33:12+00:00 July 9th, 2019|
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Series B Round allows RealWear to expand distribution

RealWear Inc. announced an $80-million Series B financing round. RealWear will use the funds, which are a combination of equity and debt, to continue market expansion and accelerate its platform development. RealWear teamed with JPMorgan Chase & Co. to architect an investment syndicate led by Teradyne Inc. (TER), and includes Bose Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures LLC (QCOM), Kopin Corporation (KOPN), and investors from JPMorgan’s (JPM) Private Bank. RealWear Co-Founder and CEO, Andy Lowery, said, “Our seed investments came from friends, family, early customers, suppliers and business partners. Their faith carried us to our Series A, led by Columbia Ventures Corporation. CVC’s experience in heavy industry, one of our primary markets, made it a perfect match.” Lowery continued: “It was critical that RealWear’s new investors be business and technology leaders. Teradyne, Bose Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures and Kopin fit that bill.” RealWear has focused on products that are specifically designed for the connected enterprise workforce to improve job satisfaction, productivity and safety. Its industrial hands-free wearable computers enhance, rather than diminish, a worker’s situational awareness while delivering vital information on-demand in the harshest of environments. RealWear achievements in the last 18 months include over 15,000 HMT systems shipped, more than 1,300 enterprise customers [...]

By | 2019-07-09T17:09:38+00:00 July 9th, 2019|
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VSTEP launches next-generation safety trainer Response Simulator

VSTEP has released Response Simulator (RS), an advanced virtual training platform. The new system will provide even more benefits to users by further expanding the safety training capabilities. RS builds on VSTEP’s previous incident command simulator RescueSim by setting and enabling a much wider range of training options. The platform will not only accommodate incident command training as a system, but can also be expanded to many more types of training scenarios. These innovations will enable more users to benefit from the advantages of virtual training. The current landscape, in which safety and security professionals work, demands newer, more stringent safety training procedures. To ensure that they are prepared to face potentially dangerous situations, they must obtain the necessary knowledge for correct procedural handling. This is typically done through practical training, which remains costly and prone to accidents. RS eliminates these problems and allows users to train their skills in an advanced virtual environment. “Throughout the development process of RS, we looked at how each improvement can create the most positive impact. This paved the way for the introduction of benefits that are tailored towards users’ needs. Processing this valuable input was a critical aspect to improving how our users [...]

By | 2019-07-08T20:53:58+00:00 July 8th, 2019|
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Immersion chosen to equip French market with Varjo VR-1

Varjo announced the official launch of its local reseller network for the first human-eye resolution virtual reality (VR) device, the Varjo VR-1. The company has chosen Immersion to equip the French market. Varjo’s local resellers will play a key role in introducing the product – designed solely for professionals in industrial design and architecture, training and simulation, as well as research – to companies and research institutions that want to build immersive experiences in human-eye resolution. Previously only available directly through Varjo, the resellers have been handpicked and certified with the goal of providing companies with the best possible local support for acquiring, setting up and implementing the Varjo VR-1. With their deep industry knowledge, Varjo’s local resellers are well equipped to help companies start utilizing VR to shorten design life cycles and make training and research more effective, resulting in time and cost savings. “Varjo has chosen Immersion as the first reseller in France because of their strong background and expertise in the virtual and mixed reality space. As an established player in the industry, Immersion is able to help Varjo to gain a strong foothold in the French market,” said Miika Jokinen, Sales & Channel Development at Varjo. [...]

By | 2019-07-08T20:49:05+00:00 July 8th, 2019|
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Serious Labs to demo Serious:XR training platform at bauma

Serious Labs will provide a sneak peek of its latest emerging technology product, Serious:XR, at bauma in Munich, Germany, from April 8-14. Serious Labs will offer demos of the Extended Reality (XR) platform, as well as its Mobile Elevated Work Platform (MEWP) VR training simulator and Overhead Crane VR training simulator on stand 7 C2:226 in bauma’s Canadian Pavilion. The new XR collaborative worksite platform is designed to train and assess remote workers for plant, industrial and other types of worksite operations. The Serious:XR platform allows trainees to conduct practical and emergency operations in a safe environment, while building and assessing employee safety, efficiency and proficiency. “Safety and competency are crucial for any worksite, but logistics, time and resources often make training a challenge,” said Wade Carson, director of Business Development, Serious Labs. “Collaborative VR training overcomes the obstacles of assessing practical, hands-on experience for today’s global workforce.” The platform allows multiple users to collaborate remotely from anywhere in the world with other team members, trainers and subject matter experts in a simulated virtual environment. By using a VR kit, which includes a corded headset, gaming laptop and internet connection, the user is immersed in a virtual world. “Serious:XR removes [...]

By | 2019-07-08T20:42:10+00:00 July 8th, 2019|
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TANTRUM Lab develops VR Rigger training system

TANTRUM Lab has combined its VR (virtual reality) Crane training simulator with a Rigger VR training experience to develop the TANTRUM Lab VR Rigger training system. The VR Rigger training system uses the same environments as the VR Crane operator and provides an opportunity for the trainees to view lifts from the ground, giving a rigger’s perspective on what may be happening during lifts. The program’s 33 OSHA-approved multiple choice questions will test students’ knowledge of theory as well as provide 3D visual objects that students can use to assess and evaluate. The test then puts students into real-world offshore scenarios where they will use theory in a practical portion to identify 30 hazards in five different scenarios. “No one ever thinks about the riggers, there’s way more of them and they’re the ones in the immediate area of danger nine times out of 10,” said Eastern Region & Gulf of Mexico Regional Sales Manager Travis Cummings. The VR Rigger runs as a standalone system and does not require the complete VR Crane system to be operated. It has specifically been designed to run on the Oculus Go, a standalone self-contained and portable VR system that provides a fully immersive [...]

By | 2019-07-08T20:36:22+00:00 July 1st, 2019|
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