Perched high up in the turret as the tank rumbles slowly along the dusty road, you scan the roadside for signs of an unexploded bomb.

Your heart is pounding in your chest and you tell yourself to ignore it. Stay calm. Do your job. The United Nations Mine Action Service is here to decommission improvised explosive devices, the lethal consequence of decades of civil war, and you must help eliminate this threat to civilian life.

The bomb explodes, rocking the tank and leaving your colleagues maimed upon the road.

It is a brutal introduction to the work of Dublin start-up VRAI. “Back in 2017, the UNMAS had personnel being deployed on to these dangerous routes on a daily basis,” co-founder and co-MD Pat O’Connor explains to BusinessCloud.

“Because it was such a high-threat environment, a lot of the civilian support staff couldn’t leave the base in Mogadishu. And yet their operational colleagues were going out every day and one in 10 of them were being hit by an IED.”

In 2017 alone almost 2,300 people were killed or injured by IEDs in Somalia, highlighting the importance of the mission.

The UN turned to VRAI to produce a training simulation which would help limit the danger posed to its staff by improving their ability to identify ground signs that indicate a roadside bomb.

“We drove the routes with the African Union troops and created a hyper-realistic, 3D 360-degree video of the routes,” says O’Connor. “And then within that we built high-quality, high-poly 3D assets so that essentially the environment you’re interacting with is real footage.

“That helped us to show how difficult it is to spot indicators of roadside bombs. Not only did this help to reduce deaths and serious injuries, but it also created an empathetic link because for the first time the support staff could see how difficult it is for the deployed troops to do this job.”

VRAI, founded in August 2017 by O’Connor and co-MD Niall Campion, an experienced director and content creator, looks to combine concepts from videogame development and cinematic special effects to create what it terms ‘extended reality’. It provides services to the defence, security, energy and utilities, aviation and construction sectors.

“Those industries are very serious businesses, which are dangerous by nature,” says O’Connor. “If you’re going to train people, it can’t look like a game – it has to look for real. Immersion is key: you need to forget that you’re in the virtual environment.”

Early big-name clients include International Airlines Group at Heathrow and Samsung UK. “These are large organisations who have lots of people being trained and put a high value on making sure they’re trained properly and safely,” says O’Connor.

According to the ERM Global Safety Survey, 52 per cent of Fortune 500 companies have suffered a death or serious injury in the past 18 months, despite spending £80 billion per year on employee training. “That tells us that the training can be improved,” says O’Connor.

“About half of that training is conducted by lectures – how much do you actually remember from a PowerPoint lecture? The science would suggest you retain about five per cent of information per hour of lecture, whereas if you practise by ‘doing’, you recall about 70 to 75 per cent of that information.

“The challenge with high-hazard environments is that practice by ‘doing’ is in itself inherently dangerous; it can be costly to bring people from remote locations to one area; and there can be a rarity of equipment or instructors.”

VRAI’s aim is to reduce workplace deaths and serious injuries to zero through its main product, Hazardous Environment Awareness Training (HEAT), which aims to improve the quality and safety of high-hazard training through AI reporting and analytics. “We’ve developed a sophisticated data pipeline, where approximately 100,000 data points per minute are captured about what you’re doing, how you’re doing it and also the movement of your hands, head and body,” explains O’Connor.

“The back-end of our platform then takes that rich data set, correlates it to your individual training record and starts giving you insightful reports on how people are performing in certain areas, allowing you to make the training bespoke.

“But where it gets very exciting is when you have, say, more than 500 people passing through the same training experience and the system has enough data to start applying artificial intelligence. It will then start finding insights and correlations between behaviour and activities, which can improve the product over time and therefore reduce deaths and serious injuries in the workplace.”

An example he offers is training for maintenance work on an offshore wind farm. “The UK is the largest offshore wind market in the world. All the easy spots near the coast are gone so the new farms are like 100 miles off the north coast of Scotland.

“Put yourself in a maintenance person’s shoes on the first day on the job: you’re put on a boat somewhere in Aberdeen; you have to go 100 miles into the North Sea; the waves are bigger than your house; the turbines you’re climbing to the top of are 110 metres high and sway three metres left or right in the wind. So you tell me: are you going to be focused on your essential maintenance tasks or your own feelings of anxiety?

“What we can do is recreate those environments onshore in a highly safe environment without having to stop a turbine generating electricity.”

Key to that sense of immersion is haptic feedback, where people act within the simulation as they would in real life instead of using videogame-type controllers. However VRAI is looking to go even further. “We’re now building biometric sensors into our haptic gloves so we can judge how you feel,” says O’Connor.

“Let’s say we both land an aircraft inside a training simulation fine: what you don’t know is that inside, my heart is pumping and coming through my chest. It’s important to identify that we’re having different reactions: could I land that aircraft repeatedly without having a serious problem?

“If we can identify how people are feeling in those high-stress environments, we can almost inoculate against that feeling in the real world. The equivalent concept in the military is called ‘battle inoculation’: at a very simple level, before you deploy overseas, they stick you in a hole and they blow stuff up all around you and shoot over you so that when you go to that war zone, you can operate safely when it’s happening for real.

“We’re always trying to push the bar – we pride ourselves that we innovate on behalf of large companies because we have the nimbleness to do that.”

The military analogy comes from a very personal place: O’Connor spent 20 years in the Irish Defence Forces including more than three years’ experience of overseas operational deployments in high-threat environments including the Syrian Civil War.

“One of my last roles was as squadron commander of a cavalry unit,” he reveals. “Training was always a challenge: if you have a unit in the south and you need to move it towards the middle of the country to do an exercise, organising a lot of people to move is difficult and costs a lot of money. I always felt there must be a better way to do this.”

Headquartered in Dublin, VRAI has built a high-quality team of 12 with a diverse skillset. “One of our 3D artists comes from a fine art background in Ireland while we also have data engineers from India and a strategy consultant from Japan. Diversity is a mindset as much as anything else,” says O’Connor.

“We’ve got five different nationalities and we’re gender-balanced. And that, for me, counterbalances the complexity of the tech landscape, because the pace of change is so fast.”

The company has €575,000 funding including backing from the Enterprise Ireland High Potential Start Up Programme and is now also registered in the UK. “We just started our first major job there on the ground with HEAT at IAG and Heathrow,” says O’Connor. “We certainly see the UK is a big focus for us in the next 12 months.”

It is exploring potential bases on these shores: “There are some interesting clusters in the in the North East of the country. We’re also looking at London and up in Scotland as well.

“There are lots of potential areas with great clusters of highly innovative companies.”

 

Published on businesscloud.co.uk, read it here

Press Release
7 November 2019

2,550 Dublin Bus drivers will soon experience what it feels like to cycle on the roads of the capital with a brand new virtual reality (VR) training initiative. Launched today, Thursday, 7 November, by Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport, Shane Ross in Dublin2Bike, Dublin 2, the new bus driver training initiative uses the latest VR technology to simulate the cycling experience in order to deliver a better understanding of the challenges faced by cyclists on the roads of the capital.

The training video footage is taken from a 360^o perspective of a cyclist on an actual cycle journey from Parnell Square to Camden Street during a typical morning commute across Dublin city centre. Shown on Oculus Go, the ten minute video was devised by the Environmental, Health and Safety Department of Dublin Bus and produced by VRAI, a Dublin based company. It will be used in Dublin Bus’ dedicated training centre for all new drivers and as part of bi-annual driver awareness training for existing drivers.

Speaking at the launch Minister Ross said “I am delighted to be here, today, to launch the Dublin Bus Virtual Reality Cycling Driver Training Experience. This is a really important development in driver training which will harnesses the latest VR technology available to deliver real benefits for bus drivers and cyclists.  It will help increase driver awareness of the challenges facing cyclists and will most importantly make cycling in Dublin a safer experience.”

Dublin Bus is an early adaptor of the most advanced technologies in its objective to be leaders in road safety in Ireland. It was the recipient of a Road Safety Authority (RSA) ‘Leading Lights in Road Safety’ Award 2017 for its commitment to promoting road safety within its organisation and for making a significant contribution to safer roads.

Ray Coyne, CEO of Dublin Bus said “As the largest public service transport provider in Ireland, we move up to 500,000 people a day around the capital. Increased use of public transport, coupled with an increase in cycling and increased on street priority, will play a key role in enhancing the safety of vulnerable road users while reducing congestion. Through our innovative use of technology and virtual reality, we can now bring a cyclists view and travel experience to our 3,500 employees through our enhanced training programme. As our cities roads become more congested a long term solution for the benefit of the majority must be delivered. Public transport and active mobility modes, including cycling, can deliver this solution”.

Dublin Bus drivers are trained to the highest standard and complete their world class training in a dedicated in-house training centre in Phibsboro where all drivers receive a Certificate of Professional Competency (CPC). In keeping with Dublin Bus’ goal of continuous improvement all drivers receive bi-annual driver awareness training. Dublin Bus continuously develops its driver training programme and seeks to use the most innovative, efficient technologies to produce expertly trained and competent drivers.

-ends-

For further information:

Carol Donohue, Communications Dept., Dublin Bus. Tel: (01) 703 3143 M: (087) 388 6927

Nigel Goggin, Conway Communications. Tel: (01) 661 9728 M: (087) 604 1161

Notes to Editor

• Approximately 1,800 buses and 12,200 cyclists* (*National Transport Authority Canal Cordon Report 2018) share the road during peak times.

From BUILD 2019, Edition Q4

Read article on build-review.com.

There can be little doubt that technology has bought about revolutionary change across a plethora of industries, becoming one of the key drivers of growth, innovation and development on the global business landscape. It wouldn’t be such a leap to suggest that VR is one of the most promising of these new technologies that has entered the market in the last couple of decades, with wide-reaching effects that are only now just being realised. One area that is seeing early utilisation – and, crucially, impressive results- is in health, safety and training. We spoke with Pat O’Connor, Managing Director of VRAI, to find out more.

As a content creation company that specialises in capitalising on the unique benefits of augmented an virtual reality, VRAI is at the very forefront of an emerging and ever-growing industry. Moreover, through their work with large organisation such as Samsung, IAG and the United Nations, VRAI are well-placed to notice new trends before they become industry-defining goliaths and, more importantly, they have become adept at solving real business problems with technology-centric solutions. Combining these two advantages, VRAI have developed a new training platform that uses their considerable experience to reinvent best practices, as Pat explains. “Hazardous Environment Awareness Training, or HEAT, is an AI powered VR training platform that improves training effectiveness, reduces risk to employees and enhances operational outputs by reducing human error. Our HEAT VR training platform has 3 main elements – onboarding, training and analytics. “In the onboarding phase, trainee profiles are created which captures demographic information such as age, years of service, whether the individual is salaried or contract, and data of that nature. During the training phase, the VR headset acts as an IOT device capturing rich datasets on the trainee movement and performance. In our next iteration of our HEAT training product we are building in biometric sensors that will then allow clients to not only measure how people perform tasks, but also how they feel while carrying out these tasks. Finally, in the analytics phase, all of the data captured in the previous phases is analysed via our cloud-based AI platform providing deep insights into training effectiveness and employee performance. In effect, the more training clients conduct the more data that is produced and the greater the organisational learnings. “This product is focused on reducing deaths and serious injuries in the workplace while improving operational performance.” Pat continues, moving to discuss how VR, as a technology, has the potential to change huge swathes of the business world, in numerous industries, fields and sectors. At the crux of all this is training, which comes at a colossal cost for the world’s most successful companies. As Pat explains, there’s simply a better, more effective way than the current approach to this most essential of everyday elements. “The Fortune 500 spent approximately $100Bn on training in 2018, with over $11bn of that spent on safety training. Over half of these companies have had an employee death or serious injury occur in the previous 18 months. Considering the amount of money being spent, the problem is not the amount or length of training, it is the effectiveness of the training. We know, today, that the vast majority of training is delivered via lectures, or lecture-based training. This type of training is highly inefficient, ineffective and does very little to prepare people for the realities of carrying out the work in the ‘real world’ and in a real environment.” HEAT, then, represents an alternative to current training techniques which represent anvast financial burden on industries where the money is, to put it simply, better spent elsewhere. Understandably, healthcare is one industry where the effectiveness of VR is swiftly being realised. “Traditional training often required experienced staff to take time to train their more junior colleagues. With VR-based training, we can codify the knowledge of the more experienced colleagues to free them up to focus on healthcare delivery. By undergoing training that better reflects the real-world working environment, it better prepares new staff so that, when they start work, they are less dependent on experienced staff to show them the topes. The research shows, more effective training leads to more effective outcomes. “Of particular note is the effectiveness of simulation training, which is already used a lot in the medical industries. In this, VR training is an obvious complimentary service. Simulators can be expensive to use, are generally limited in availability and are only available to students on the college campus. VR training allows you to empower your trainees to train themselves with the system acting as the trainer, capturing their performance and guiding them. The added bonus for both trainer and trainee is the additional data-driven insights that can drive performance improvement. In fact, in some colleges, it is being used to gamify training to create “leader boards,” Pat adds. Yet, despite the runaway successes of VR and the promise of the future change that HEAT is sure to bring, there’s still obstacles to overcome. Here, in his closing comments, Pat enlightens us about the journey that lies ahead for VR and like technologies. “As with any new technology, companies need to be clear on the business case for adoption – it’s the race to be second. Thankfully the benefits of VR training are now becoming more obvious for clients, particularly when it is available on an AI powered platform such as HEAT that can be integrated into existing LMS systems. Now companies are clear on the business case, it’s about finding the best solution. “Finally, scalability of training solutions is also key as our client companies are generally large cap firms with a global footprint. This means the system must be available in multiple sites, in multiple languages and with bespoke, tailored training.” “We see VR as the laboratory which enables organisations to gather rich data on how their people perform and train in order to improve safety and operational efficiency.”

Tech Talk on News Talk podcast with Jess kelly to hear about the Fast Track into IT (fit.ie) female-only tech apprenticeship we are sponsoring. Our managing director here at VRAI – Pat O’Connor, talks about why diversity is so important, how it gives a competitive advantage while also increasing the auality of business. Apply for the ICTAO tech apprenticeship here.

Catch the podcast here.