O&G: platform operations

This simulator is training oil platform workers the behaviour under the occur of an emergency situation. Engaging and realistic environments together with first person scenario makes you live the moment and fully perceive the emergency-training information.

Project

Platform operations are meant for engaging as well as supervising tasks held by platform workers. It is based on regular tasks and trainings for new people, but vast part of the content also includes the emergency trainings.
Target audience: oil platform workers, technical and service staff, students.

This project was initiated by our company in order to show virtual reality capabilities in terms of safe employee training. Work on Oil platforms is dangerous if safety precautions are not being considered. Therefore, workers must be trained in the most realistic way and actually experience a number of dangerous situations so they would know exactly how to behave if one occurs in reality.

This simulator can be used for employees of actual Oil platforms, new members planning to join technical teams. It can be a great visualization of the actual work of a platform employee for the ones who are thinking about the job as it can show individual pros of such a working environment.

Development time: 2,5 months
Engine: Unity/Unreal
Platform: PC + HTC Vive
Setting: Nowadays
Visual style: realism
Language: multi (ENG/RU/LT)
Age: 12+
Stage: demo

01- Research

Emergency trainings like real life experiences

We have started the project as we do with all the others - an in-depth research was made in order to locate which parts of the industry could be adjusted in a way that would guarantee profit or money-save. Though we can provide custom solutions to specific needs of companies, here we went for investigation of how we could help on our own. It turned out that Oil & Gas industry has two main factors where VR solutions could be successfully integrated: expensive equipment for training and emergency situations. While equipment and its transportation to platform is usually a full operation to take care, it is much more convenient to train the employees how to use it even before they touch it in real life. This saves time as workers fully understand the equipment prior to its arrival. Also, such trainings eliminate the possibility of a training failure in real-life as in VR workers can learn from their own mistakes right away without any actual consequences. Apart from all the training based on new equipment integration or individual skill upgrading tasks, emergency situations caught our attention at second place.

Though safety precautions are being taken very seriously in all the platforms and other Oil & Gas facilities, virtual reality not only fully eliminates the injuries and accidents possible to happen on real-life emergency trainings, but also provides much better results. Trainees are able to experience the emergency situation as they are transferred to the location like they would watch a movie. Only here, they are the main protagonists and it is up to them to follow all the audio guidance through an advanced level scenario which introduces all the safety equipment and how to use it, detailed visual explanations of evacuation plans, best emergency routes and so on. The mentioned aspects are exactly what we have chosen to recreate in our demo version for oil platform workers.

02- Development

A virtual oil platform

The development process of the oil platform started with creating the environment as close to the real-life platform as possible. 3D modelers were using the reference material provided by researchers and created the atmosphere that best suited our emergency evacuation scenario. After this was done, we have implemented realistic movement and task mechanics so the user could actually feel like a platform worker. After the sound design was done, we were ready to test the app with some personnel from the according industry.

03- Maintenance

Trainings with colleagues and more individual tasks

Our post-demo work on this project now focuses on creation of new assets - real life objects that could fill up the environment for it to feel even more realistic. After we successfully executed emergency training scenario, we will develop a couple of more visualized interactions to even further engage the user into the virtual training experience. Multiplayer feature is also planned to be introduced for the trainees to be able to train at once and interact between each other. This will lead to better team-build and decision-making skills.

Click to see the video-captured VR experience on Vimeo →