Case study · 2024 · Manufacturing · Oil and Gas
VR Safety Training for an Industrial Services Group
An industrial services group trained high-risk procedures the way everyone does: slides, a demo rig, and a written test — for hazards you can't safely rehearse. We built a VR training program on standalone headsets where crews practice lockout/tagout, confined-space entry, and work-at-height response inside failure scenarios that would be unthinkable to stage physically, with instructors joining live in multi-user sessions and results flowing into the group's training records.
Screens are illustrative recreations — client interfaces stay confidential.
The challenge
Classroom training produced certificates, not reflexes. Incident reviews kept finding the same gap: people who knew the procedure on paper hesitated or improvised in the moment, because they'd never actually done it under pressure.
Training also cost heavily in logistics — flying crews to a central facility, taking equipment out of service for demos — which capped how often anyone could refresh.
What we built
Scenarios from incident data
The twelve scenarios were scripted from the group's own near-miss and incident reviews with their safety leads — including the failure branches: what the procedure looks like when the isolation point is mislabeled or the gas reading changes mid-entry.
Standalone headsets, zero IT friction
Built in Unity on OpenXR for Quest-class standalone hardware — no PCs, no cables, kiosk-mode device management — so a depot can run a session with a headset case and a coffee table.
Instructor-led multi-user sessions
Up to eight trainees share a scenario with an instructor who can trigger complications live, freeze the scene to teach, and replay a trainee's decisions from their point of view.
Scores where auditors look
Objective in-scenario measures — sequence correctness, response time, hazard checks — post to the group's existing training-records system automatically, with an AR tablet companion for on-site procedure walkthroughs at the actual equipment.
The results
- +31%
- Assessment scores
- −40%
- Training days per worker
- 12
- Hazard scenarios live
VR cohorts vs. matched classroom cohorts
travel and equipment downtime eliminated
with instructor-led sessions up to 8 trainees
- Scenario-based assessment scores rose 31% on average versus matched classroom cohorts across the three highest-risk procedures.
- Training days per certified worker fell 40% as depot-based VR sessions replaced most central-facility travel.
- Refresher frequency doubled — sessions are cheap enough to run quarterly, which the safety team credits for sustained scores between certifications.
Client identities stay confidential; figures are rounded from end-of-engagement delivery reporting.
Stack & expertise
- Unity
- C#
- OpenXR
- Quest-class standalone headsets
- ARCore / ARKit companion
- Node.js
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