AIXR VRAwards 2019 ‘VR Education and Training of the Year’ winner
Vodafone challenged Make Real to develop a scalable solution to raise awareness around the risks of working at height.
The Learning Need
Working at heights can be a dangerous and demanding task but when installing and maintaining the cell phone infrastructure, a significant portion of Vodafone’s workforce need to work at heights every single day.
As part of a global drive to reduce health and safety incidents, as well as improve the overall well-being of their workforce, Vodafone wanted to tackle this challenging area. They were looking for a solution that raised awareness of the real-world demands of working at heights while allowing learners to explore the associated risks in a space that was safe to fail in.
Solution
Make Real worked in collaboration with Vodafone to develop a Virtual Reality (VR) application that allowed learners to take on the role of a field engineer. In the experience, you need to select the correct safety equipment and perform a crucial hazard assessment before climbing a rooftop mast above a cityscape, in order to adjust a microwave antenna.
Designing With the Audience in Mind
The real target audience for this VR application wasn’t the engineers themselves, but the managers and stakeholders who manage all aspects of their working environment. The objective was to allow them to step into the engineers’ shoes and experience the reality of working at heights for themselves.
This community of managers and stakeholders is large and not always easy to reach. They work across 20 different territories all around the world.
Make Real analysed employee movement between global offices and placed the most immersive VR hardware and software at key hubs to reach the widest audience possible.
A version for the more portable Oculus Go was also created and made available to other offices, further extending the experience reach. Additionally, we worked with the Oculus team to enable public store release of the application.
To make it even more accessible for this globally dispersed audience, the experience needed to be available on mobiles, as well as VR devices. For seamless integration with the rest of their learning content, Vodafone also needed a desktop version that could be uploaded onto their Learning Management System (LMS) – Vodafone University. The experience was designed to be consistent, no matter which device it was deployed on, lowering development costs across all devices.
After the launch, Make Real’s aim was to understand the impact of the experience on our target learning group. Based on their quantitative research, the early feedback from the launch has been overwhelmingly positive.
STUDIO: Make Real
