Create an immersive experience aimed at team managers of maintenance crews to raise awareness around the dangers of working at height, including typical risks found and the importance of personal protective equipment, at scale across the wider organisation. This community of managers and stakeholders is large and not always easy to reach. They work across 20 different territories all around the world.
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 wellbeing 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.
Make Real worked with key stakeholders in all related Vodafone departments to create a VR climbing demonstrator, that was user tested for VR immersion and presence at a series of internal events, to validate whether the experience of climbing in VR provided enough depth to be convincing.
Full VR setups were deployed to the main Vodafone HQs, creating a permanent presence for 80% of employees to have access to.
Oculus Go mobile VR packages were created for self-learning, where employees could borrow the kit either at work or to take home.
A 360° video version built in HTML5 was deployed to the Vodafone University LMS for all employees to access via their work laptops and mobiles.
From demonstrator to full experience, user testing took place at key stages of development to ensure the experience across full to mobile VR to desktop video was impactful and engaging but most importantly, comfortable. This included updating locations of the (!) hazard markers during the risk assessment phase to ensure all users, no matter of physical ability, were able to spot them without too much vertical head movement.
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.
A version for the more portable Oculus Go was also created and made available to other offices, further extending the experience’s reach. Additionally, we worked with the Oculus team to enable public 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 – 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, our aim was to understand the impact of the experience on our target learning group. Based on our quantitative research, the early feedback from the launch has been overwhelmingly positive.
The public release of the Oculus Go version has seen nearly 4,000 installs of the application with an average review score of 4/5, with many reviews highlighting the positive message users have received about Vodafone and their approach to employee well-being as a result. If you have an Oculus Go, you can download the free VR application here: https://www.oculus.com/experiences/go/1701947649841720
The experience was finalist and winner of the AIXR VRAwards 2019 “VR for Training and Education” category.
We’re always happy to talk to you about how immersive technologies can engage your employees and customers. If you have a learning objective in mind, or simply want to know more about emerging technologies like VR, AR, or AI, send us a message and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.