July 14, 2020
VR for Auto Collision Repair
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July 14, 2020
VR for Auto Collision Repair
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This is an edited version of a Captivate VR course I created for Service King’s Apprentice Program. The original course (shown in the screen shot) contains 3 VR environments, 8 videos, and more images (with text layers), as well as a quiz. This edited version only includes the first VR environment, which you can explore at the end of this post.

Our target audience was a young-ish crowd (recent high school and college graduates) from the apprentice program. So we weren’t too concerned about them figuring out how the VR environments work. Most digital natives can quickly figure these things out. However, given it’s such a new technology I included instructions about what to do in a VR environment.

I made sure to keep the videos short by speeding up the action in Premiere Pro (all are under 2 minutes). My decision was based on the research a VR aficionado on LinkedIn shared with me. 30 minutes is about the maximum amount of time anyone should spend within a VR environment.

The image below shows the full course. For competitive reasons I can’t share the entire course with the community, but this should give others an idea of its magnitude and how cool Captivate VR courses can be. The numbers are custom SVG’s that I swapped out in the HotspotShapes folder in the gallery. That allows me to change colors within Captivate and keep the glowing animation behind the numbers to indicate a hotspot. This approach is much better than using images as hotspots, which don’t offer the flashing circles to indicate a hotspot.

VR course for Captivate

I had a good idea of what the course was to look like, but due to the unpredictable nature of autobody repair (there’s no way to tell which car will be at one of our shops on a given day) I went in a bit blind to do the video shoot. I wasn’t too concerned, simply because I was recording one of our master mechanics, and had already established good rapport with him. He allowed me to follow him around as he reassembled an Audi A3. On the back end of the project the Director for the Apprentice program and I wrote the script for the voiceover. While it’s a little daunting not having a game plan (or storyboard), the truth is our master mechanic had a gameplan, and did what he does best. I just got out of the way and let him lead. It also helped that he explained what he was doing as he reassembled the vehicle.

For what it’s worth, I can see us continuing to use Captivate VR. There’s just no way to replicate what a 360 image or 360 video can do in terms of context. For autobody repair it allows our learners to see things from more than one angle, which is crucial since vehicles are not 2D objects. I have a few other ideas for how we’ll be using it, namely painting, welding, advanced disassembly, structural repairs, and a few other fun topics. I’ll share what I can with the community. VR is such a cool tool to have at our disposal, and I can only see this tool getting better with each iteration.

Here is a list of the equipment and software I used to create the assets and the course:

Ricoh Theta V

Sony a7II, various lenses, tripods

Adobe Premiere Pro, Media Encoder, Photoshop, Illustrator, Captivate

Below is the sample course itself. I hope you enjoy it and that it inspires you to push VR to new boundaries.

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3 Comments
2021-12-07 22:00:01
2021-12-07 22:00:01

thanks for the share!

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2021-12-07 21:59:39
2021-12-07 21:59:39

i’ve seen education and fashion, but havent considered this use case

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2021-12-07 21:59:17
2021-12-07 21:59:17

this is an interesting application i haven’t seen before

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