V360 Marine has launched its first commercial training simulation for power management training using virtual reality (VR) technology. After six months of development, the system is available to the maritime industry, whether it’s for use at a training centre, organisation or vessel. The system has been specifically designed with maritime training experts to provide the full functionality of a traditional simulator.

“We have been developing bespoke systems for a few years now and saw the significant benefits these bring to the industry,” says V360 Marine’s CEO Sam Slater. “By providing a simple-to-use, fully-mobile solution, companies avoid the need to coordinate crew training as it can be completed on board by the crew themselves. Similarly, training centres and other management companies won’t need to rely on physical mock-ups to deploy the training which can be done in any classroom or workplace.”

As well as logistical benefits, these systems can also enhance the learning experience. “Because the simulation is fully immersive, we can replicate all real-life operational scenarios, from synchronising generators to black outs and prime mover failures to safety trip testing,” adds V360 Marine’s COO Greg Beach, who is also an experienced chief engineer in the superyacht industry. “The responsive audio really makes the experience as close as you can get without actually being in that given situation and once you experience a full black out, with total darkness and silence, followed by the warning lights and alarms blaring, it’s not something that you’ll forget in a hurry.”

The simulator provides users with a complete experience, including responsive audio recorded from actual events and an intelligent team training database which records and analyses all activities during training. This provides the candidate with an extremely detailed and concise data set that can be used to target weaknesses to develop as well as strengths for the rest of the team to learn from.

Speaking about future growth, Slater emphasises that the system is not fixed to a single application. “We can develop a simulator for almost any situation and already have crane operations training, Dynamic Positioning familiarisation and others focused on one-off project planning scenarios,” he says. It will be interesting to keep an eye on how the technology is adopted in the wider maritime industry, and if the superyacht industry follows suit.

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