Substation Technician Training

Step into the virtual shoes of a technician as you perform a routine procedure at a substation. Start at the office, grab your PPEs, enter the site, and perform the gas switching procedure. Watch the full playthrough below.

My primary role was to improve the interaction system for the equipment and tools, which were extremely complex. Every hose, fitting, and gauge all connected to each other in some way. Every dial and button is interacted with, and the hoses have physics for the sake of realism. I improved the UX by heavily pairing every interaction with cues such as glowing markers, haptics, and contextual pop ups.

I also focused heavily on optimizations for this project. A huge challenge was the overhead from rendering the entire substation. It’s a giant open space with nothing blocking the view. We couldn’t split the scene or use occlusion culling. I experimented with LODs but ultimately relied on batching tools to squeeze everything into as few draw calls and batches. Interestingly, we were able to get below 100 calls/batches (recommended), but our poly count was over 1 million (not recommended)! We were getting acceptable frame rates ranging around 40-72. While 40 is low, it worked out because the substation was completely static and the Quest had an interesting feature called space warp that would interpolate frames, so the low frames were hardly noticeable. When the user needed to interact with something, they usually looked down away from everything.