The Creation of a Multi-User Virtual Training Environment for Operator Training in VR

Many industries are today heavily exposed to competition which increases the demand for continuous innovations, faster product changes and continued improvements, this is especially true for the automotive industry. Such demands raise the complexity and set a need for continuous training and development of our operators and assembly personnel to keep up with new designs and product changes. This, in combination with an aging population and a growing shortage of experienced assembly workers, increases the need for efficient training capabilities.Today most of the operator training is supervisor driven and takes place in the live production environment working with real products. This approach might introduce uncertainties and a risk to the production system as less experienced workers, still in training, might jeopardize quality, ramp ups and takt time. With the rise of virtual reality there are growing possibilities to carry out these training sessions in a more secure, non-disruptive, virtual environment without jeopardizing ramp ups, takt time or quality. This paper evaluates the possibility to introduce virtual multi-user operator training as an alternative to traditional supervised "onsite" training for assembly workers. Recreation of different assembly task from an automotive case company was created in virtual reality while introducing multi-user functionality to allow multiple operators and supervisors to observe, instruct and evaluate the performance of the operator in training. The developed demonstrator is used as the discussion basis throughout a focus group interview study with selected participants from an OEM case company and the potential of a multi-user virtual reality application as a complement for traditional operator training in operator training is discussed and future research directions for multi-user virtual reality trainings at OEMs is presented.