At the recent Augmented World Expo (AWE) Asia meeting, delegates heard how Pfizer had trained large numbers of its Covid vaccine production staff using VR. They chose VR because the production line needed to be operating 24/7 during the pandemic and so could not be stopped for training purposes. The company deployed 500 Meta Quest 2 headsets loaded with a simulation of the manufacturing plant environment – allowing staff to practice the work processes in a highly realistic virtual situation. Users were able to repeat processes as often as they liked in an unpressured environment, something that Pfizer saw as highly important.

This award-winning VR training programme was able to condense the material from 100-page SOP documents into a single interactive, immersive behavioural training experience. This allowed hundreds of operators to be trained quickly and efficiently whilst allowing the Pfizer production line to continue to produce billions of doses of its Covid vaccine. Check out the video for yourself below:

Immersive training is extremely well-adapted for use by biotech and pharma companies because it allows staff to be trained in highly complex scientific or technical subject matter, in an interactive and immersive environment, without the costs and risks involved in manual and / or real-life training. In addition, it allows training to be conducted at scale without the need for travel, accommodation and catering that is normally associated with group training.
Empathetic Media Health has produced a wide range of bespoke immersive training programmes for pharma, biotech and health-tech companies – click here to see some of our case studies. To arrange an informal chat, feel free to contact Mark: mark [at] empatheticmedia [dot] com.