It's important to conduct training for employees in order to keep the business successful. Efficient training can reduce risks for the company and its staff members and make them qualified enough for the position they occupy. What is possibly even more important, it increases efficiency, productivity, and liability of the personnel. Hardly anyone can argue the significance and benefits of training.
Why Is Virtual Training So Popular?
However, some technical features bring many challenges to the process of training and make it expensive to prepare trainees under natural conditions using real machinery. For instance, training facility can be located in remote area, making it difficult to transport learners and increasing the cost of training. On the other hand, some surroundings may be unacceptable for practice because of the danger that they imply for an untrained person. Furthermore, complex military and industrial trainings in a dangerous environment with unpredictable conditions like demining of territory or working with nuclear reagents can put people's lives in physical danger. In addition to being threatening, some environments aren't favorable for the training process because they are difficult to arrange and evaluate, for instance, emergency response exercises in case of fire.
In cases when there is no real life danger or safety is not an issue, training in some situations may involve costs that will be difficult to get regained. For example, shutting down important machinery or switching it to an offline mode or idling for training purposes can cause productivity decline and financial consequences. Other instances may involve the risk of damage to delicate and costly equipment by inexperienced staff. In addition, there are situations when training is impossible to conduct because necessary equipment is out of service or unavailable due to restoration.
To be honest, a large number of situations implies danger or inability of training that makes them not worth risking to endanger expensive equipment, people's life, and company money. In such cases, new technologies are coming to rescue desperate businesses. Many companies prefer to organize virtual training rather than prepare employees in a real environment. Today, 3D simulations are widely used in areas such as Military, Manufacturing, Education and Health Care. Program-Ace offers you to take a look at virtual simulations that solve many of the training challenges.
Virtual Simulations and the Issues They Solve
Physical simulations represent a combination of user interface and special hardware that allows training by prearranged scenarios. They make it possible for staff members to train safely within a controlled environment and go through many situations under different conditions. Moreover, simulations are easy to observe, control and assess by mentors and instructors. Furthermore, learners can practice a set of skills using training and simulations before starting their work in a natural environment. Besides, it also has a practical value in cases described above when the equipment is too high-priced or far away to be used for training, or there is a real danger to life and health of employees. These are the reasons why armed forces widely use physical multiuser combat simulators to train soldiers how to act in warlike situations like hostage taking or terrorist attack. Likewise, airlines oblige pilots to undergo a complex of training on flight simulators to learn action procedures in emergency situations such as aircraft damage or malfunction. These activities are terrifically threatening to practice under the real conditions, aren't they?
A lot of industrial facilities, including air transportation companies, military institutions, and medical centers, apply physical simulators in their educational process. Such trainers resemble original equipment or real-life situations using custom software and special hardware. However, they also have serious drawbacks. First of all, these simulators are extremely high-priced. They can cost up to 100 percent of an actual equipment expense not including software, accompanying hardware and training of instructors. Such situations can lead to circumstances when it's necessary to reduce the number of trainees or specific conditions that can be trained. Secondary, physical simulators frequently have large dimensions that make it impossible to transfer. Due to enormous sizes, they require additional expenses for employees to get to the training location.
Physical simulators have found their niche. They are used to develop specific skills, especially the ones that are connected with the fine motor, for instance, performing surgery using robotics or control the spaceship. However, the majority of skills don't require such specific, massive and costly equipment and can be trained using more cost-effective solution. Such solutions usually involve virtual computer-generated environment with various scenarios. 3D simulations provide you with the same advantages as physical simulators, but they are several times cheaper. Moreover, virtual training and simulations offers more benefits and new opportunities unavailable in traditional simulators like the chance to repeat the simulation to work out the mistakes, mass training and supervised learning. In addition, virtual simulations provide you with complete freedom from training location.
Virtual training has been applied for quite some time now and showed great results. A lot of companies have benefited from using virtual training that allows overcoming the limitations of physical simulations. On the other hand, although education with virtual simulators is a great opportunity to empower training facilities and increase the number of qualified staff, it also has its drawbacks. The creation of virtual simulation necessitates a lot of investments since they require a competent team of developers, better with game development experience, artists who can create a virtual environment and specialized programming software to create an interactive 3D surrounding. Despite the fact that they are considered to be expensive, they solve the cost problem of physical simulators because they require fewer expenses.
Final Thoughts
Nowadays, virtual trainings have almost unlimited potential thanks to evolution of gaming, virtual, 3D and graphical technologies and are applied in a variety of industries from Aerospace to Military. A wide range of platforms supports virtual reality applications that makes it much more accessible for businesses. Today, there are no more barriers to development and deployment of virtual simulators. A lot of companies offer comprehensive services and develop immersive and interactive virtual simulations compatible with a variety of platforms for a reasonable price.
Program-Ace is an expert in adopting these technologies in order to replace training in a challenging and dangerous environment and develop immersive simulators in order to show trainees how to act in specific situations. We possess a necessary set of skills for the creation of powerful virtual training and 3D simulations and a professional and experienced team always carefully listens to client’s needs and demands. If you need to create fully interactive simulations that facilitate effective training process, Program-Ace is ready to become your solid and reliable partner.
