5332 Hillandale Rd, Davenport IA
5332 Hillandale Rd, Davenport IA
If one had to pick a part of industrial production that shows with utter clarity just how multifaceted the gains from applying XR and AI to industry are, construction would have to be somewhere amongst the top candidates.
In construction, all of the costs XR and AI-augmented training can defray are front and center. There’s the costs associated with the serious consequences of work-related accidents or worker mistakes. In the most perilous forms of construction, just one large procedural error can cause serious physical injury or death. Obviously such incidents come with monetary costs–higher insurance premiums, new legal fees, and the like–but they also come, more importantly, with terrible human costs.
But it’s not as if it’s a simple matter to construct a training environment for construction workers that’s going to resemble the actual environment they’ll work in. There aren’t any cheap replicas of the cranes that build high-rises and skyscrapers lying around. And even if there were, the training window remains limited–you can’t provide hands-on training to a construction worker in the actual tasks they’ll be doing when they are not onsite.
Unless you do it in VR.
In VR, a realistic replica of their environment can be delivered for the comparatively cheap cost of a piece of training software–and hands-on instruction in that environment can be achieved anywhere that the trainee can access the appropriate VR platform, be it a web browser, headset, or mobile phone.
The reduction of those costs have knock-on effects. Due to the greater efficiency and effectiveness of the training, incidents are reduced; reduced incidents reduce legal, insurance and human costs; less money spent on lawyer’s fees and insurance contracts means more money to invest in better machinery or facilities; and so on.
These cost-absorbing network effects aren’t speculative fiction anymore, as they were twenty years ago. Indeed, the Journal of Construction Engineering and Manufacturing recently published an article Advances in Immersive Virtual Reality–Based Construction Management Student Learning | Journal of Construction Engineering and Management | Vol 151, No 1 that explicitly affirmed them, and did so in the specific case of the Construction industry.
And, as much as the methods of creating new facilities and infrastructure, and the construction work that entails has changed since the early days of VR, one thing has stayed constant–the increasing complexity of construction site methods and machines, and the skills required to use them effectively. Which is to say the cost savings curve of XR training is likely to bend upward into the future, rather than downward.
The implication is that firms that learn how to leverage XR early on and effectively have a greater chance of getting a leg up on firms late to the party. So if you’re working in construction, and remote VR training isn’t a part of what you do yet, getting on board now–before everyone else–is an opportunity you shouldn’t pass up.
That is one among many reasons that CoAxiom Services offers the XR-AI-related training and task automation solutions it does–samples of which are worth checking out elsewhere on this site–and one among reasons that, if you are working in construction, our solutions can provide you with a great deal of value.
