Training with Augmented Reality: the benefits in a case study

One of the downturns of the global population ageing is that the elders work longer, making the natural turnover at the workplace slower.
The ageing workforce doesn’t translate just in demographic problems, but also in knowledge transfer problems to the youngest generations.
Because the younger generations have less chances to start their career and build their skill set, the result is a big experience gap between old and young workers.

This is where technology comes into play. Since providing an effective and comprehensive training requires a certain amount of hours spent in class and in the field, technologies like Augmented Reality can be a useful training tool for at least two reasons: 1) it is more practical; 2) the information is longer retained.

An important scenario where AR Training is extremely relevant is in safety applications. In 2014, there were close to 3.2 million non-fatal accidents that resulted in at least four calendar days of absence from work and 3.739 fatal accidents in the EU-28 (ESAW).

A case study for safety applications

The European project Angels (Augmented Reality Network Generating Learning on Safety) was carried out between 2013 and 2014 by a team made of Policlinico Tor Vergata (Italy), Hopital Brocà (France), NCONZO (Cech Republic), UJI (Spain), Entropy KN (Italy) and Inglobe Technologies (Italy) with the aim of assessing the impact of AR in training for prevention of risks in the workplace in the healthcare sector.

The hospitals involved were:

Hôpitaux de Paris (France)
University Hospital Brno (Czech Republic)
Hospital Virgen de los Lirios; Hospital Nisa Rey Don Jaime; DIAVERUM center (Spain)
Policlinico Tor Vergata (Italy)

The main objective of the project was to compare the learning performance and ease of use of AR training with respect to traditional training on books and in the classroom.

How the AR Training was carried out

The method of assessment was a large scale trial, involving 117 participants from four countries with the following work roles: nurses; auxiliary nurses; nursing students; doctors; and other healthcare professionals (e.g. psychologists). The average age of seniority in the role was 8,76 years.

The training duration was 15 days, during this period the participants had the chance to use the system in one of the two available modes: free and guided.
Using the system in free mode the trainee is free to explore the environment retrieving information about generic risks.
Using the system in guided mode the trainee has to follow a series of obliged steps related to specific risks.
82% of the participants used the system in free mode, the remaining 18% used it in guided mode.

Before and after the training period, the participants filled in pre-assessment and post-assessment tests aimed at understanding their level of comfort with new technologies as well as the learning impact of using the ANGELS system.
Based on the information provided by the participants, by means of the assessment tests, results were prepared and summarized in the following paragraphs.

The ANGELS AR Platform for Safety

The Angels system used for the training activities is an authoring platform developed by Inglobe Technologies composed by a web-based software, a server and a mobile client.
The web-based platform enables the creation of custom Augmented Reality procedures for safety purposes, allowing the administrator to upload a planimetry related to the building where the safety risks have to be managed. The administrator can manually place the safety procedures in specific areas/rooms on the planimetry, so that when the user is in a given area of the building, by scanning the nearest QR Code, she can visualize what are the safety risks in the area and she can access the procedures on how to manage those risks.

Joint Analysis Results

The results of the study include an analysis of several variables like the participants’ capability of use of new technology, preference towards the traditional or the AR system, overall performance of participants trained with the traditional system compared to those trained with the AR system.

Regarding the familiarity with new technologies it is clear that the participants didn’t have a high technological aptitude, they were average users. It is not necessary to be a power user in order to be able to use AR systems effectively.

When faced with the decision of which system they prefer to use to carry out training activities, about three fourths of the participants declared they prefer the ANGELS AR system over the traditional one.

Finally, the results from the post-assessment questionnaire clearly showed how the ANGELS system was able to improve the level of knowledge of trainees about the risks in the hospitals. In general the guided training mode proved to be slightly at increasing the level of knowledge.

Conclusions

The evidence from the ANGELS project, clearly proves that Augmented Reality is a very effective technology used in the context of training activities.
Moreover no particular technological aptitude is required to trainees, in fact the average trainee can easily use AR training system with success and improve her knowledge.

References:
Platform Home Page: http://projects.armedia.it/projects/angelsSK/
Project Preliminary Paper: http://www.inglobetechnologies.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/paper_ICERI2013_Angels.pdf

January 9, 2017

VR Training Might Help Part-Time NFL Referees Get The Calls Right

If you’re a sports fan, you likely have a special relationship with referees. Typically, when it benefits your team, they’re the most incredible and qualified employees in existence. However, the second that a call is against you, you’re wondering how in the world this person got the job.

If you’re an NFL fan, the last few years have been quite eventful whether the cards fell in your favor or not. Coming off the substitute referee circus of 2012 and a series of rule additions of varying efficacy in subsequent years, the NFL is looking to VR for potential training of our thankless officials.

While it may feel like a full-time headache to audiences, being an NFL referee is not actually a full-time job and New Orleans Saints head coach Sean Payton thinks that fact is madness. He alluded to refs having to split time and attention between officiating NFL games and their full-time jobs often results in the system not improving. Many believe that the NFL should make a change. As it turns out, VR could be the spark the sport needed.

In statements made while interviewing with BizTech, the NFL’s SVP, Chief Information Officer Michelle McKenna-Doyle stated the the league was “in the early phases of developing VR training materials for referees”. The NFL has already fostered a relationship with VR companies via concussion recognition, various film and video series, and post-game coverage, so it makes perfect sense to bring it to officiating as well.

Emulating the angles and slow motion clips that referees get access to during replay review in live games shouldn’t be an issue for virtual reality, but hopefully the VR simulations will be detailed enough that refs can watch plays unfold in natural game speed with enough definition to notice things a bit better. It’s tough to imagine this tech being efficient while officials are still part-time, but hopefully this technology will find a home within the league.

Maybe we’ll be able to find out if Odell Beckham Jr. would be more effective in VR playoffs than he was in real life.

Tagged with: football, nfl, Referee, training, virtual, VR

January 7, 2017

‘Flaim Trainer’ Uses Vive’s Tracker For A Realistic Firefighting Experience

It’s been a pretty cold CES. The industry has been hurriedly hopping on one foot to another as they wait outside for Ubers and taxis to get to their next appointment, and heat lamps have had queues of people lining up to feel their flames. If you really wanted to stay warm, though, all you had to do was visit the HTC Vive booth.

Flaim Trainer was one of the several demos HTC was showing off with its new tracker this week. Rather than attaching the new kit to a smartphone or baseball bat, the Institute for Intelligent Systems Research And Innovation (IISRI) from the University of Deakin in Australia attached it to a fire hose. The implication is immediately obvious; what if you could train the next generation of fire fighters across the world with experiences that are expensive and often impossible to replicate in real life?

To do that, you need something more than just a VR headset. You need to be able to replicate the flames of the heat and give trainees an experience that they could mistake for real life, triggering and testing the kind of impulses they’ll need when on the job. To achieve this, the team has created a fireman’s jacket that heats up as you get closer to the flames. For obvious reasons it doesn’t quite scorch your skin, but after five minutes it certainly had me sweating.

In VR, I had a kitchen fire in front of me. When I pulled on the lever for the hose, it would pull back to create a realistic sense of water pressure that I had to lean into so as to not fall over. I had to really work to get the fire put out, and as the experience progressed smoke began to gather at the top of the room and make it harder and harder to see.

It was a brief demo that showed a lot of potential, and Dr. James Mullins, Senior Research Fellow and volunteer fire fighter explained that the team wants to take it a lot further. “We have a big need, in Australia at least, to learn different techniques for firefighting,” he said. “The idea is we can push out content to fire houses all over the world and get people training in some new and interesting and unique experiences. Some firefighters go their entire career and only go to some jobs one or two times in their lifetime.”

Flaim Trainer could give them experience they might not otherwise get, then. It could also be used to help educate people about fire safety. The demo will also be expanded upon with locomotion so that you can move through an entire house and add new tasks like searching for people trapped in the environment.

“Hopefully within the next three to five months we’ll have this system in a state we can push it out,” Mullins said. “We’re beta testing, we’ve had a lot of fire fighters through, a lot of feedback. It’s all about developing the different scenarios that they want right now.”

Tagged with: flaim trainer, tracker, training, Vive

October 28, 2016

Using Virtual Humans with Personality for Medical Training

benjamin-lok On today’s episode, I talk with Dr. Benjamin Lok from the University of Florida about how they’re using Virtual Humans as patients to train medical students. He talks about the key components for creating a plausible training scenario which include both accurate medical symptom information, but also more importantly a robust personality and specific worldview. Humans hardly ever just transmit factual data, and so whether the patient says too much or not enough, the students have to be able to navigate a wide range of personalities in order to get the required information to help diagnose and treat the patient.

LISTEN TO THE VOICES OF VR PODCAST

Virtual humans help to embody symptoms that a human actor can’t display, assist in going through an extended interactive question and answer path, or they’re used within collaborative training scenarios where it becomes difficult to get all of the required expert collaborators into the same location at the same time.

Dr. Lok makes the point that creating virtual humans requires a vast amount of knowledge about the human condition and that it’s really a huge cross disciplinary effort, but one that is one of the most important fields of study since it has so much to teach us about what it means to be human.