TechViz - Blog - AR / VR for engineering

What if learning could be different? Since the Covid-19 crisis, many industries have adopted virtual reality to train their workers. VR training replaces traditional in-person or online training with a fully-immersive experience. And it happened across many industries: construction, engineering, manufacturing, healthcare…

For many years now, our training methods have started to shift. Instead of a standardized knowledge aimed at a population, what if you could have training content tailored to what your employees need, with your own 3D data?

Immersive technologies play a crucial role in the pharmaceutical and healthcare industry worldwide. According to a report from Statista, the market for augmented and virtual technology in medicine and pharma will grow by $4.64 million by 2025 thanks to many advancements in the healthcare industry in recent years.

Many industries are adopting AR and VR technologies inside their processes. For most use cases, traditional handheld controllers are more than enough in product-design and production processes. But for some precise use cases, adding VR finger tracking and haptic feedbacks is a real game-changer.

The history of VR has often been influenced by the defense industry. One of the first VR projects was developed in the 1960s for a US military combat system. Virtual reality has always played a significant role in the military field and was adopted by all services: army, navy, and air force. It is mostly used for army training purposes, but there are other use cases where VR is a powerful tool.

The energy sector is in the midst of a tremendous shift as it embraces the use of virtual reality software (VR) and augmented reality (AR) technology on a global scale.

Using this technology has improved processes for engineers, resulting in better decisions, higher efficiency, and reduced costs. Traditionally, product designs have been rendered in 3D on a computer. After approval, a prototype is created to determine whether the physical rendering fits together well, is ergonomically sound, etc. With advances in virtual reality and augmented reality, a new product can be viewed in the early stages of the design process. Companies can focus on correcting errors at this stage before moving on to production.

While Industry 4.0 affects production lines and machines, it is also a challenge for operators. With the happening of modern plants, the increase in automation and robotization, their environment has become more and more complex, and they must adapt fast. To keep working efficiently, not only they need new skills and tools and so they need to be trained, but also solutions to improve their decision-making processes. With the ability of virtual technologies to provide 1:1 scale virtual machines that you can interact with, it is possible to be trained as if being in a real plant, interacting with real machines. Decision makers can visualize and analyze every step of an operation and improve them without having to go through the whole physical prototype making process. Thus virtual reality appears to be the adequate solution to improve field operators efficiency.

For years, maintenance has been perceived as critical to the productivity performance, but treated as an afterthought during the development phase and as a pain point in the operation phase.

Maintainability had unmet needs that were hard to address with traditional development and production techniques. Yet, with the cost of service being built into the ownership model of an ever-larger number of products, companies are increasingly paying attention to ensure easy and efficient maintainability. The rise of new technologies, such as the Virtual and Augmented Realities (VR /AR), the Internet of Things (IoT) associated with Artificial Intelligence are changing dramatically the way it is addressed.

Updated September 27, 2022

Many businesses have been using virtual reality to improve their processes for years. As a matter of fact, the use of VR in businesses has been accelerated since the covid-19 pandemic, as VR enables to improve business meetings from afar while still having an incredible feeling of reality. More and more sectors accelerating digital transformation are taking advantage of VR for business in order to conceive products with way less errors and collaborate more efficiently with 3D data.

The automotive industry is a fast-paced sector which continuously adopts technologies that powers their digital transformation. Virtual Reality (VR) is one of the most fitting technology to provide the automotive sector with new methods and tools to design better vehicles, test different configurations, check driving ergonomics, refine manufacturing processes, etc.