Our Bluewave and Learning and Development teams have been working on a new way of using virtual reality (VR) to improve how we respond to pollution incidents. This exciting technology creates a virtual environment, enabling teams to be trained in conditions that mimic the real-life pressure of a live incident. This means we can refine and improve how we respond in a real-life setting, helping to reduce the number of pollution incidents and their impact on the community and the environment.
The difficulty of training for a pollution incident
A live incident can be the first time a first responder faces the magnitude of a potential pollution risk. We needed to enable our operational teams to experience a pollution incident more realistically and learn how to put their classroom training into practice, without having to wait for a live incident where the stakes could be much higher. We first tested how we might do ‘pollution drills’ as guided conversations, with experts, but these had limitations. Exploring different ways to bring the experience alive, we began to consider VR.
How virtual reality works
VR is a technology that places you in a computer-generated environment, where you can move and interact - it feels incredibly realistic, as you are completely immersed in the experience. This immersion can be effective when delivering training, as it gives a practical experience to the learner.
Using virtual reality to train for incident response
This technology is advanced and sophisticated but has the additional benefit of being a much more cost-efficient way to train and prepare our operational teams. VR technology has made significant advances over the last decade and its impact is growing rapidly beyond gaming, to sectors like education, architecture, medicine and wellness. The possibility of using VR to replicate high pressure environments in a safe way, offers training experience for our operational teams that we couldn’t achieve in other ways.
Training for working under pressure in an incident
As a 24/7 business, our sites are manned continuously to ensure any issues that occur are identified quickly and corrected as soon as possible. First Responders (those who are the first to attend when an incident occurs) must remember many crucial steps to prevent damage to the environment and to stay safe.
Bringing virtual reality training to life
We have developed a VR proof of concept - something that we can test rapidly and learn from - with operational teams, alongside a local company specialising in the use of VR for training, who had previous experience working with water companies. The proof of concept we developed allows operational teams to respond to a pollution incident, and crucially provides a safety net to make mistakes, without there being a significant real-world impact. Users can explore a virtual site – identifying what might have gone wrong, sample, take photos and get feedback on their experience.
What’s next?
We're really excited about the potential of this approach. We plan to complete testing of the proof of concept, before rolling this out further as part of pollutions training, to help First Responders perform effectively during an incident.