Virtual reality becoming real at Invensys

Who says the gaming and automation industries don’t have anything in common?
If you talk to the Invensys folks, they feel they have a hit with their virtual reality training software called EYESim.
Taking the gaming skill sets popular today, EYESim combines virtual reality technologies with high-fidelity process and control simulation, computer-based maintenance and documentation management and other applications.
The end result is a realistic representation of a plant that can provide a safe training environment for workers to increase operating efficiency and skills.
During a demonstration of the product at the Invensys North America Client Conference in Houston, the company showed how it could be a useful tool to help train workers today. But down the road, Dr. Tobias Scheele, vice president of advanced applications at Invensys, said this could be the future of control rooms.
“With experienced workers with their institutional knowledge (leaving the industry), we need to bring the problem to the experts, not the expert to the problem,” he said.
“This is just the starting point,” Scheele said. “The control room of the future should not be flat. Why not use virtual reality to aggregate information to virtualize the information.”
In short, to get a working profile of a plant, Invensys goes and takes a boat load of digital photos and then meshes them together to form the virtual plant.
The company then takes the DYNSIM high-fidelity process simulator, FSIM Plus software, I/A Series control system emulation and some other programs and creates a computer-generated representation of a plant.
With a headset, workers then enter a completely immersive environment in which they can move throughout the plant. They can control valves, check gauge readings and even work through an emergency situation.
With the use of avatars, it is possible to investigate the maintainability of process machinery at the plant, said Invensys’ Director of Global Consulting Maurizio Rovaglio.
“Virtual reality helps with the training in the field. It is possible to train on different types of accidents,” he said.
While it may seem easy to dismiss a virtual reality program as just a gimmick, but this product line has some great potential for Invensys.