Igor Fain, an engineer with Dassault Aviation, has spent the last three years developing this new tool, known as Falcon Immersive Practical Training. “Others use ‘virtual’ training, but most of the time it’s simply 3D mockups on a regular screen. Our tool is the first to use VR headsets for training, and the first capable of allowing so many people (one instructor and up to ten trainees) to work together in the same virtual world at the same time. There’s literally nothing else like it,” says Fain.
Fain has not only been working on the execution of the new tool, but has spent the better part of a year demonstrating its incredible capabilities all around the world. He’s wooed crowds at customer meetings in Europe, before an audience of 750 people at the 2016 NBAA convention, and most recently on tours to India and Australia.
ADAPTING TECHNOLOGIES TO CURRENT NEEDS
The VR tool was conceived by another Dassault employee, Patrice Kurdijian, Director, Service Center Network & Maintenance Training. While Dassault had been offering practical hands-on maintenance training to its customers since 2007, Kudijian was looking for a way to improve training content and make it more
practical. He had noticed the advancements being made in virtual reality technologies and imagined combining them with Dassault’s CATIA 3D data for a truly new maintenance training solution.
Kurdijian’s idea was so ground-breaking that Dassault now holds a patent for the techniques used to merge data from several different sensors (the headset and the infrared cameras) across multiple users and to seamlessly display the result in a single coherent virtual world. Over the last three years, Fain and Kurdijian have worked together to bring the system on line.
What’s particularly new and innovative about this system is that it enables trainees to meet together with their instructor in a full CATIA digital mockup of the same virtual aircraft. The system uses high tech VR headsets and sensors to allow the trainees and the instructor to see each other in the virtual world, together with their gestures and movements. All this translates into a training experience that simply can’t be replicated in the real world.
F ALCONER ISSUE 47
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