South Korea’s tech giant Samsung Electronics Co. has employed virtual reality equipment based training system at its workplace, making training at production lines more efficient and less costly. The so-called cyber training first started at the company’s Consumer Electronics (CE) division and it is expected to spread out to other business departments including IT & Mobile Communications (IM) division, which makes mobile phones.

Prior to adopting the cyber training, the Korean electronics maker’s CE division trained its new employees at assembly lines by showing them a video of a manufacturing process and having them repeat the production steps. It took a lot of resources including space and money because the conventional training system required a new trainee to disassemble product components one by one then put them together.

The department, to offset such disadvantages, introduced a cyber training program using the Rift, a virtual reality gear developed by the United States-based Oculus VR LLC. Under the new training program, a worker would put on a virtual reality gear and hold a specially designed stick, getting the same kind of training experience as following the actual manufacturing process such as holding a screwdriver to tighten a screw on an air conditioner.

“(The cyber training) is not exactly the same as the conventional training, but it allows the trainees to physically get used to the most important steps of the manufacturing process,” said Lee Kye-bok, director at Samsung Electronics Air Conditioning Manufacturing team. “Currently, the CE division has installed 10 virtual reality training systems and uses them to train new employees.”

The cyber training is possible only because all products are designed with three-dimensional (3D) blueprints. The 3D product sketch makes it viable to easily produce software for training by simply adding information about manufacturing environment.

“The company plans to use the virtual reality system not only to train new employees but also to evaluate capabilities of experienced workers,” said Lee.

SuperData Research Inc., the U.S-based market tracker, expects the worldwide virtual reality market to grow exponentially by 750 times to $150 billion in 2020 from $200 million this year as it sees more industries including education, medical, and manufacturing are opting to employ the virtual reality system on top of the entertainment industry that is actively using the system now.

By Lee Seung-hoon

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