Implementing Virtual & Augmented Reality for Manufacturing Training

Manufacturing training is essential if you want your manufacturing plant to be run like a well-oiled machine.

Everything just works better when every employee knows what they’re doing, how they’re doing it and how it relates to the bigger picture – and it helps if you’ve been able to run employees through any emergency situations before they’ve actually happened on the floor.

Virtual reality can change the face of manufacturing training, and it has the potential to make the entire process better, cheaper and easier to access; in turn, this can better the entire manufacturing industry if it’s given enough time.

While most people think they have a pretty good idea of what it is that virtual reality can do, there’s a lot more potential locked up in VR than you might have ever realized before.

Here’s more about the use of virtual reality for manufacturing training, and just how it can make things easier for you and your employees when it comes to training.

Why Virtual Reality?

It gives you all the benefits of reality without the associated cost or danger that might come with a trip to the plant in order to achieve the same goal.

Training can interrupt working operations, too, and a virtual reality environment carries the benefit that it can continue in an environment separate from the actual plant itself, while you can still experience everything you would have in the physical plant – and without having to go there.

It’s cheaper, better and faster than most conventional forms of training – and that’s not all. There are plenty more benefits to why people should be switching to virtual reality solutions for their training needs instead.

Danger & Harm Reduction

Virtual reality can see a drastic decrease in the amount of possible danger during the training phase.

First, virtual reality allows you to put your staff in situations that they never would have seen in a real environment save for the time where an emergency takes place. For training purposes, people can be taught how to react in dangerous situations without having to be exposed to the danger themselves. This includes disaster management and emergency training, and the danger reduction during the training phase also means that any physical work at the plant will likely be safer too due to the adequate training having been provided.

Environmental Adaptation

If you wanted to “make something happen” for the purposes of a demonstration, there are many things that you’ll just have to wait for to happen – or you’ll end up telling employees-in-training a theoretical idea of what could happen instead of being able to show them the demonstration at all. This is one of the main physical limitations for teaching in a real-life environment – and it can be quickly dealt with if you were to switch over to a virtually-aided training setting.

In a virtual setting, any changes to the environment can be made with just a few clicks – and any situations can be triggered in the same way. Then, people can be led through the “theoretical” situation while they’re still able to physically see what’s going on.

People are naturally visual, and VR is the perfect way to provide an all-round training solution. Show, don’t just tell.

The Cost of Manufacturing Training

Manufacturing training in real life doesn’t just carry the very real danger of injury if someone were to screw up on the floor, it’s also pretty expensive even when it’s done right. Training has the potential to cost your company thousands per year, and there’s no real way to make training “cheaper” if you think about it: While you could hire cheaper training solutions, there are a thousand different reasons (including safety!) why you shouldn’t.

Virtual reality can make the entire training phase cheaper, and you don’t have to worry about the fact that you might be cutting corners somewhere, because the virtual reality training experience can often turn out to be better.

It’s also true that a virtual environment matching your factory usually only has to be built once, and can be used for several training phases that match the situation the environment has been built for, whereas training would often require new training consultants every time – and this can add up.

Customized Solutions

When it comes to in-person training, it can often be impersonal – and this is a great part of why people say that training courses don’t stick in their heads enough. If we’re talking about the safety of your manufacturing plant, this can be obviously pretty dangerous when people don’t remember vital information in the face of an emergency.

One of the great things of using virtual reality is the fact that you have access to customized solutions – solutions that can allow you to showcase almost any theoretical situation in a training environment. This means that, during and after training, the people trained are much more prepared to deal with these possible situations.

The Excitement of Virtual Reality

Nobody likes the sound of having to “attend a training day” – hell, most of the time nobody even likes the sound of having to “learn something.” So why call it that?

A virtual training session can seem a lot more exciting than your average training day. It’s cool, it’s futuristic, and it can ensure that the information that’s given during the training phase sticks just because it seems like something really, really cool at the same time.

Of course, the cool-factor of virtual reality is rarely the reason you’re incorporating it into the program – but that’s not the point, and virtual reality can give company training a considerable boost in the right direction. 

VR Leads New Possibilities

What virtual reality can mean for you and your business doesn’t end here: It’s great for more than just training, it also happens to be great for new possibilities when it comes to research – and virtual reality is well-known for powering never-before-seen innovation within the work and research environments because of the fact that it allows you to experiment far more than a real environment ever would.