E-mobility and autonomous driving are not only changing cars and the transportation experience as we know it, it also impacts the processes of how vehicles are produced and how factories are designed significantly. With more than 600,000 employees and 120 production sites, the Volkswagen Group has an ever-increasing need for daily knowledge transfer and collaboration between its facilities and teams spreading across the globe. Virtual Reality (VR) offers a great potential to the Volkswagen Group as it addresses these challenges. It allows Volkswagen to test and approve different pilot projects and set up collaborative VR sessions fast and easy.
Innoactive VR platform now enables Volkswagen to bring people and teams from the many corners of the world together in three-dimensional VR spaces, in real time. It produces efficiencies on multiple levels, less time consuming and costly air travel being the obvious, but it’s so much more than that as Mirko Goeres, Project Lead VR Training Logistics at Audi AG says:” Innoactive provides the ideal platform to deploy VR training to our brands and locations around the world.” Several brands of the Volkswagen Group including Audi, SEAT, Volkswagen and SKODA will be testing the platform in the coming weeks and months.
“The transfer of skills is just as important as the ability to document it and to share it with others.” Dennis Abmeier, IT Lead Volkswagen Digital Realities
In addition to collaboration, training and the exchange of best practices across the organization are key areas of interest for Volkswagen. “The transfer of skills is just as important as the ability to document and share it with others” says Dennis Abmeier, IT Lead Volkswagen Digital Realities. He adds further: “Our Digital Reality Hub will enable all of our employees to access fully immersive and interactive VR training scenarios and knowledge from any place at any time.” But it doesn’t stop there. A unified user experience and deployment across different applications and business units is key to create a centralized VR enterprise “Hub”. It also allows multinational companies like Volkswagen to simulate and plan production facilities while not ever moving a single physical object.
By running Innoactive’s technology on the HTC Vive, experiencing newly designed work stations and processes is now possible in a very realistic 3D room simulation. Because of the industry leading room scale tracking provided by the HTC system, the user’s every physical move is translated into his/her virtual environment, providing the sense of immersion needed to focus on the work task at hand. Hervé Fontaine, Vice President Virtual Reality B2B and Business Development at HTC Vive, summarizes the vision he shares with Innoactive and Volkswagen by saying: “VR is disruptive because it allows you to see things that don’t yet exist, enabling you to plan and collaborate ahead of any actual physical implementation.”
“While XR devices are really starting to accelerate in the enterprise environment now, we are thrilled to be building an entirely new product category with our Innoactive Hub. The platform not only solves many of the pain points in regards to team collaboration, training and simulation, it is also playfully easy to get started with.” Daniel Seidl, CEO and Founder of Innoactivent and become an essential building block for Volkswagen’s connected production process.