Virtual Reality Collaboration at Volkswagen

The multi-brand automotive Volkswagen Group in collaboration with VR production studio Innoactive has created what it calls the Volkswagen Digital Reality Hub Group, a VR platform to facilitate long-distance collaboration in production and logistics.  Users of the platform can collaborate using VR apps across the Audi, SEAT, ŠKODA and Volkswagen brands. 

“Virtual reality creates the ideal conditions for cross-brand and cross-site collaboration.” Jasmin Müller, Audi Brand Logistics

Apps in the platform already include VR logistics training, realistic workshop environments created using photogrammetry, and VR spaces for exchanging best practices.  Users use avatars to talk with one another ‘face-to-face’.

Dennis Abmeier from Group IT and the VW Digital Realities Team said, “exchanging knowledge is just as important as bundling knowledge . . . All employees have access to all existing VR elements as well as existing knowledge via the platform.  That way, we enable individual units to implement new use cases quickly and jointly move in VR application so they can create new workflows interactively.”

The VR Hub should be seen in the context of the four cornerstones of VW’s Group production strategy: future-oriented working structures, higher efficiency, intelligent processes, and a versatile production network.

The borderless workplace creates enormous potential for synergies across internal and external borders, and the VR Hub is an important tool in realizing those synergies.  A tool alone, however, is just part of a success equation, and it is a very positive sign that training features within the Hub.  Successful virtual collaboration requires people with the mindsets and technical/social skills to work across distances.  

The Volkswagen Digital Reality Hub made its public debut at the Digitility conference in Cologne on July 5 and 6, 2017.

You can access a video presenting the platform here.

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