CSE498, Collaborative Design, Spring 2018
Computer Science and Engineering
Michigan State University

With over 100 years of success and industry-leading innovation, Dow is a global leader in specialty chemicals, advanced materials and plastics. Along with Dow’s ongoing innovation and success is a commitment to its employees’ safety and wellbeing.

Dow manufactures hazardous chemicals that require care and knowledge when handling and transporting. Training new employees is dangerous because a mistake could have serious health implications if employees are exposed to these chemicals.

Our Virtual Reality Simulation for Railcar Loading eliminates this danger by training employees safely in a virtual environment. Our simulator trains employees in the proper way to load a railcar in a virtual railcar facility.

Dow employees wear an HTC Vive Headset and use two controllers to simulate a real working environment. Trainees are taught the steps needed to load a railcar properly and what to do when a spill occurs.

Our training simulator has two difficulty levels, non-certified and certified. The non-certified level gives a trainee hints to teach them the proper procedure. In the certified level, a trainee receives no aid, so they need to know what to do. Our simulator also includes scenarios where a spill occurs, so trainees can learn the proper way to clean a spill.

To help the employees learn, our training simulator gives the employees a score when they complete a session along with feedback on how to improve.

Our Virtual Reality Simulation for Railcar Loading uses Unity Game engine and is played on a Windows computer with the HTC Vive hardware.