WORKING AT HEIGHT A VIRTUAL NECESSITY Here, Alastair Hogg, Director for Fall Protection Sales and Business
Development at MSA, looks at how simulating 3D environments is transforming business and safety.
According to the Health and Safety Executive’s (HSE) latest statistics, there were 144 fatalities in the workplace during 2017/18, and 26% of these were caused by falls from height. There is no doubt that the UK health and safety sector is improving year on year, but when it comes to protecting people while they work, there is always more to be done.
WHY VR? As a business that develops fall protection solutions, MSA are at the forefront of saving lives every single day, and it is our job to ensure workers get home safely at the end of each working day. With the introduction of virtual reality, we are now enabling customers to experience our products in a truly immersive environment, without actual exposure to the potentially life-threatening hazards faced by people working at height.
For us as a business, it is about being capable of tangibly showcasing solutions and effectively demonstrating the true value of highly engineered, superior quality fall protection.
Virtual Reality (VR) has undoubtedly been a gamechanger for MSA. It offers a new and innovative way to convey our suite of products to customers and transforms sales meetings. We’ve been using these technologies at trade shows and in presentations, with fantastic customer engagement and feedback.
HOW DOES IT WORK? MSA worked with immersive technology specialists, Render, to develop VR and showcase its fall protection products in a completely new, interactive way.
The technology makes our products come to life for 18
our customers. The VR scenarios can be accessed through HTC VIVE® headsets or through a mobile app on both iOS and Android. It has enabled us to truly showcase our fall protection expertise and the benefits that brings to customers.
You’re not just seeing and hearing - an immersive narrative gives customers the full sensory experience. In the VR construction experience users literally climb up to a virtual rooftop, using a controller to ‘clip on’ at every step before they reach the rooftop to carry out vital maintenance. By enabling customers to experience the products for themselves in a life-like hazardous environment, we can communicate the value of choosing the right fall protection solutions in seconds.
After selecting their choice of language for the simulation, users then select the correct equipment for working at height, including a full body harness and a personal fall limiter (PFL). After clipping on and scaling a ladder to the roof of a commercial unit, the user is required to remove an inspection cover from an air-conditioning unit. The worker is in a fall arrest position and the VR user virtually ‘falls’ backwards over the edge of the roof. MSA’s Latchways fall protection system successfully arrests the fall before gently lowering the user to the ground.
This has been a really exciting development for our business. We are always looking at new innovations and how we can forge ahead and improve the industry - we’re also offering the VR experience across the aviation, oil and gas sectors, and we truly believe this type of experience can improve health and safety stats on a global scale.
www.msasafety.com/VR
www.tomorrowshs.com
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52
