CS WAVE: Virtual Reality for Welders’ Training
† † † ††
L. Da Dalto , O. Balet , J. Duchon , D. Mellet D’Huart
† ††
CS, Virtual Reality Department
Rue Brindejonc des Moulinais, BP 5872,
31506 Toulouse Cedex 5, France
(laurent.dadalto@c-s.fr, olivier.balet@c-s.fr,
jerome.duchon@c-s.fr)
ABSTRACT
Virtual reality (VR) is a set of technologies that one often
confines to R&D projects or high technology applications for
innovative sectors. Nevertheless, tangible interfaces and VR,
when specified from end-user's needs, can also lead to relevant
and accepted products for the most common and traditional
industries. CS WAVE is one of the first in this field applied to the
learning of skilled gesture for welding. It results from an R&D
project funded by the European Commission in the frame of its
5th framework programme. During two years, CS and AFPA have
specified, developed and assessed the WAVE system in close
collaboration with end-users. It is henceforth an inescapable tool
that has proved efficient for the learning of the welder profession.
CR Categories and Subject Descriptors: Virtual Reality,
Training, Motion tracking.
Additional Keywords: Welding.
1 INTRODUCTION
In 2002, CS and AFPA have launched the WAVE R&D project
with the support of the European Commission. This project,
which successfully ended in 2004, aimed at developing CS
WAVE, the first system using Virtual Reality (VR) technologies
for training welders. This project was coordinated by CS, a
European leader in virtual reality application development, and
co-developed with AFPA, the main operator of the French
Ministry of Social Affairs, Labour and Solidarity aiming to
provide vocational guidance and training to unemployed adults.
The objective of this project was more than the sole
development of an innovative system. It had first to provide an
accurate answer to training difficulties in the particular field of
welding. Moreover, the project had to guarantee the acceptance of
the proposed system by manual workers and trainers who can be
reticent about new technologies.
Indeed, the introduction of innovative technologies in the
general industry is a complex process. Often starting from a
research phase, this process develops through out long periods of
validation and assimilation before progressively integrating the
industrial cycle. It is a question of demonstrating and re-
demonstrating the relevance of the proposed solution to the
industrial actors while providing concrete argumentation and
figures to the most conservative of them. If this seems rather
feasible for engineering industries, it is far more complex when
dealing with more traditional occupations such as those
employing manual skilled workers.
We will see in the following sections that our strategy was not
to replace current training practices but to support the training
process during the first phases of the training programme. At this
stage, unskilled trainees use huge amounts of expensive welding
consumables during practice sessions in order to acquire the
AFPA - DEAT
13, place du Général de Gaulle
93108 Montreuil Cedex, France
(dmellet@club-internet.fr)
psycho-motor bases of the activity. Our aim was also to provide
trainers with means to closely monitor and assess the gestures of
the trainees.
In addition to the development tasks, we have demonstrated in
this project that VR technologies can help the trainees to
assimilate and control body-movements and gestures faster and at
a lower cost. In addition, the architecture of our system enables
the seamless integration of CS WAVE within the existing training
process, without disrupting the organization, and while improving
the quality of the learning and the educational dialogue. This was
definitely the second key of success of the project.
2 RELATED WORK
VR technology is increasingly used to support learning [4] [11].
It can be efficiently used to learn technical procedures [9],
medicine [8], military strategy [10], occupational skills [2] or
academic contents [6], … Former pedagogical approaches used to
focus on “realism” to set up learning situations. Therefore, photo-
realistic visual feedback and credible sounds were required. Some
systems might also have used haptic feedback in order to recreate
the realistic sensations of manipulating tools.
Burkhardt & al. [4] have recently proposed an alternative to the
“realism-oriented” approach. It is based on multi-sensory
structures to afford the cognitive and learning activity of the
trainees. This new approach is grounded on one side on empirical
investigations of learning in VR which suggest that additional
sensory information enhance the learning of abstract concepts
[13]. Winn claims that new references to sciences as biology of
cognition are needed [12]. Therefore, it is grounded on studies of
action, perception and cognition [7] which have emphasized the
strong relationships between senses, such as between vision and
touch. Mellet-d'Huart [5] proposes a model of action in order to
support counter-intuitive design methods for virtual environments
for learning. He shows how conceptualization and simplification
of a scene may facilitate the understanding of a process, and how
accurate guidance may facilitate the realization of embodied and
embedded activities.
3 TRAINING WELDERS
3.1 Problem
In this project, we had to address two complex and combined
issues: Welding and Training.
The first difficulty relates to the targeted domain. Indeed, a
skilled welder gains most of his manual and cognitive expertise
from his own experience. Postures and kinematics are essential
components of this expertise and they are very difficult to teach to
a group of trainees unless driving them individually in their
movements. Contrary to the common thinking, the working
environment of the welder is not a real problem for the
practitioners. Indeed, the trainee quickly learns to acclimatize to During the project various technologies and hardware
his limited field of vision, to his equipment and to his equipments have been tested and validated or rejected according
environment (dust, heat, …). to their user-friendliness or their financial cost. Indeed, the cost of
Current training implies a succession of trials and errors post- the final system has been a constant concern for the consortium.
controlled by the trainer. These attempts are numerous before
reaching an acceptable gesture. This implies a long and laborious 4 CS WAVE
learning cycle for the trainee but also huge expenses in raw CS WAVE is a distributed system based on 3 main elements
material and welding consumables for the training organisation, that we describe in the following sections.
namely tons of thousands of euro per trainee. As an example, an
AFPA trainee consumes one metric ton of raw material during the 4.1 Architecture
20 weeks of his training programme.
Figure 1 outlines the overall architecture of a CS WAVE
The second difficulty we had to face was due to the nature of
configuration.
the training. As presented, the learning of the welder's profession
is widely based on empirical experiences. Providing a tool that Tr a in in g c en t r e
enables to accurately monitor gestural parameters implies the
proposing of an adapted methodology with the appropriate
Control centre Control centre
metrics. Welding errors can hardly be interpreted in details from
the resulting welding cord without having seen the movement that Workbench

led to the error. Virtual welding brings a relevant answer to this

problem by enabling the close monitoring and recording of Server
welding gesture parameters that are made available to the trainer.
Therefore, we had to find the most relevant parameters to track Workbench

and their best representation to optimise the learning process for

the trainees.

Workbench
3.2 The methodology
During year 2000, AFPA’s training engineers studied how new
technologies could be applied to the welding training process in
order to enhance and optimise the learning experience. This Control centre Control centre

initiative was part of the overall modernization programme of

AFPA’s educational methods. With regard to welding, the main Figure 1: CS WAVE Architecture
idea was to set-up a solution enabling the progressive learning of
4.2 The welding workbench
the welding gesture. Therefore, it was necessary to conceive and
create a system that could accurately simulate the welding A welding workbench [Figure 2] has been designed within the
process. project. It features a mobile TFT screen, which automatically
The specifications from the end-users were multi-dimensional: positions according to both the user’s height and the exercise to
- From the trainee’s perspective, it was necessary to offer an perform, an embedded PC with an Ethernet port, and a tangible
ergonomic tool enabling both the understanding and the mastering interface [3] that is a welding torch or an electrode handle.
of the welder’s gestures more quickly and deeply than with The latter are the only means available to the trainee to interact
existing pedagogic methods. with the workbench. They are the real tools of the welder and are
- From the trainer’s perspective, it was necessary to provide a referred as the “welding tool” in the remaining of this paper.
tool for monitoring and in-depth analysing the gestures of the
trainees. Ideally the tool would also enable to keep track of the
trainees’ progress, to work from distant places and to support and
illustrate the dialogue between trainers and trainees.
- For the training centres, it was required to provide a tool, at a
competitive price, that enables substantial savings on consumables
and raw material. This would imply a tool that should replace part
of the practical exercises during training workshop.
The tool had to feature new technologies without disorientating
trainers or trainees. The seamless integration of the system in the
training process was a critical issue for all the categories of users.
The consortium started the conception of this tool, CS WAVE,
in 2001. The development had a two year duration. An iterative
methodology has been adopted with the successive release of
prototypes that have been first evaluated by trainers, and then by
trainees, who provided new requirements used in turn to refine Figure 2: the welding workbench
both the specifications and the design of the next release. Thus,
the project has been driven by the end-user needs in order to
maximize the chances of success and adoption of the project final
results. Validation phases have been carried out on real cases
where a training centre has been fully equipped and more than 60
trainees have undergone their training programme with the CS
WAVE system. They were the first welders to learn their job with
a VR system.
 In order to cope with electro-magnetical interferences and
occlusions that inevitably occur during training session, we
needed a new sort of tracking system to instrument the welding
tool. This has been developed by InterSense in close collaboration
with the consortium. It is now marketed by this company as the
IS-900 PCTracker, a six degrees of freedom motion tracking
system based on a hybrid technology of inertial and ultrasonic
tracking. The position and orientation of the tracking are
determined by the output of the accelerometers and gyros. Drift
correction is accomplished in InterSense’s advanced Kalman filter
by fusing the output of the inertial sensors with range
measurements obtained from the ultrasonic components. The
result is a full 6-DOF tracking of the welding tool that is very
smooth, precise, and free from jitter.
In the following, we briefly present the successive stages the
trainee has to pass to complete a training exercise.
Identification
The first dialog box requires the user to choose his name, in the
list of persons authorized to use the workbench, and to enter his
four digit password. Once performed, he is identified and
recognized by the workbench which repositions the screen at his
height. If connected to the network, the workbench automatically
informs the CS WAVE server and, incidentally, the control
centres that a trainee is about to perform an exercise.
Exercise definition
The following dialog boxes graphically present the different
exercises and the various options available to the trainee. The
trainee can then successively select the different options of the
exercise with his welding tool [Figure 3].
Figure 3: defining the exercise
Once fully defined, a video presents the movement to be
learned and the various gestures to master.
Performance assessment
Each exercise is based on pre-defined parameters that are
monitored during the exercise in order to assess the trainee’s
performance. These can be speed, distance between the welding
tool and the steel sheet, angles or complex trajectories to follow.
The performance is assessed taking into account the selected
level of difficulty, which defines the error tolerance for each
parameter.
For the lowest level of difficulty, the users can also active
visual helpers (i.e. 3D metaphors [1]) that indicate, for each
parameter of the exercise, the quality of his performance and the
respect of the constraints.
Exercise performance
Then, the workbench first places the screen in the right
configuration for horizontal or vertical welding. Then, a virtual
representation of the metal sheets to weld is displayed at real scale
on the screen.
The trainee positions his welding tool at the beginning of the
welding cord to create. A set of visual indicators indicates the
ideal origin of the cord. While performing the exercise, the
created welding cord is rendered in three-dimensions [Figure 4]
under the welding tool and a realistic sound is played.
For each parameter of the exercise, a corresponding visual
helper, if activated, appears in green (or disappears) when the
trainee stays within the zone of tolerance. It flashes in green when
he approaches constraint limits and becomes red when the user
gets out of constrains.
All the monitored parameters are transmitted in real-time to CS
WAVE server which broadcasts them to all the trainees’ control
centres. Thus, each trainee can follow any exercise from any
control centre.
Figure 4: performing the exercise
Results
At the end of the exercise, the system provides a graphical
representation of the trainee’s performance. The first information
is the level of success of the exercise. If positive, the user can
automatically validate the level corresponding to the exercise.
Then, detailed results are made available in the form of graphs
along the welding cord for each monitored parameter [Figure 5].
The analysis of these graphs, usually with the assistance of the
trainer, will allow the user to better understand his errors and
determine how to improve for the next try.
Figure 5: results
4.3 The control centre
The control centre is the software tool used by the trainers to
remotely define, monitor and review exercises [Figure 6]. It can
also be used by the system administrator to create and manage
user profiles for trainers and trainees. In addition, the latter can
consult their statistic and progress with the control centre tool.
Control centres can be installed either inside (local area
network) or outside (wide area network) the training centre in
order to provide remote expertise and monitor trainees activity
from distant locations.

Figure 6: the control centre interface
If the welding workbench is a totally autonomous system only
requiring a power socket and a network connection to run, the
control centre is a software application requiring a Windows
XP/2000 host.
4.4 The server
The server is in charge of the network communications between
the different elements of the CS WAVE network. It is also in
charge of the persistence and the consistence of distributed data.
Indeed, the information available within a CS WAVE network
is either static (GUI skins and configurations, exercise parameters,
videos) or dynamic (results of exercises and result syntheses).
Both sorts of information are stored in the server’s database and
replicated on all the control centres and workbenches, the role of
the server being to maintain the consistence of these databases.
Installed on a PC dedicated to this usage, the server can be
controlled by the system administrator through a dedicated
interface enabling backup, storage and update procedures. It also
provides him with synthetic information on the state of the
complete system as well as networking statistics.
5 THE BENEFITS
If the initial objectives shared by AFPA and CS were fully
achieved by the project, new benefits have occurred during the
validation phases, thus reinforcing again more the relevance of the
proposed technologies for the welding training process.
It is the combination of all these benefits, shared among all the
actors of the domain, which make today CS WAVE a viable and
adopted product.
5.1 CS WAVE added-value for training
Continuous and real-time gesture monitoring
As originally foreseen, continuous and real-time gesture
monitoring is probably the main contribution of CS WAVE to the
welding training. Initially, the trainer had to base his analysis of
the trainee’s performance on the sole result of the real welding
cord.
With CS WAVE, all the parameters of the gesture can be
tracked and reviewed by the trainee and analysed by the trainer
even in real-time. This information is also accessible afterwards,
allowing the trainee to better understand his errors with the
support of a trainer.
Self-training
The system we propose enables autonomous training for the
first time in this field. The trainee is initially guided by the trainer
then left alone for the exercises. Depending on the exercice mode,
CS WAVE can take the place of the trainer and guide autonomous
trainees or even leave them totally free.
5.2 For the training institutes
Reduction of the raw material costs
The reduction of the raw material costs is one of most
interesting results of the project. It was indeed impossible to enter
the world of industrial training and demonstrate the interest of
new technologies without proposing a real financial benefit.
Based on an averaged training course duration of 1000 hours, a
trainee consumes approximately one ton of metal. One has also to
add the gas, the electricity and the miscellaneous other
consumables. Expenses are mainly concentrated in the first phases
of learning curve where trainees waste a lot of material to grasp
the complexity of their future profession.
Today, it is demonstrated that CS WAVE can reduce the
expenses of raw material used for training of more than 30 %. We
consider that this is a rather pessimistic figure that can be greatly
improved once the system and the new training method have been
fully optimised.
It is now up to every training centre to integrate and adjust the
use of CS WAVE during the training courses in order to facilitate
the learning process of the trainees and accelerate the acquisition
of their skills.
Environmental protection
The environmental preservation, a recurring and critical
concern of our societies, is a real problem for training centres. It is
indeed inevitable to consume material in the frame of industrial
manual worker training. As previously mentioned, this
consumption is far from being negligible in the welding domain.
Thanks to CS WAVE, the reduction of raw material, of noise
pollution and energy consumption has also been advanced by the
training institutes as a strong justification for the adoption of the
system.
5.3 For the trainer
Analysis and follow-up of the gestural learning
CS WAVE is an unprecedented monitoring and debriefing tool
for the trainer. Henceforth, he can very accurately analyse the
quality of the trainee’s gesture, the intrinsic of the welding cord
through a live analysis of the slightest variations of the motion
parameters during an exercise.
This information is also synthesized and archived by the control
centre in order to provide a complete history of the trainees’
progress.
Distant follow-up and control
Trainers usually suffer from frequent travels and very high
workloads. In addition, it is very difficult for them to leave
welding workshops for a long period because their pedagological
activity relies on the observation of the trainee’s gesture and the
resulting welding cord. At most, they can spend few minutes in
their office provided that it is close to the training area. Trainees
call them very regularly to validate their progress.
CS WAVE has here again radically changed the situation. The
distributed architecture of our system and the ability offered by
the networked control centres to manage and follow exercise from
distant locations have now allowed a better availability of trainers.
They have improved their working conditions while incidentally
gaining their support for the adoption of the system.
5.4 For the trainee
Progressive and independant learning of the welder’s gestures
This was the main pedagogical objective of AFPA’s training
engineers during the specification of CS WAVE. The welding
training requires the assimilation of a large number of correlated
parameters that are either cognitive (physics and mechanics of the
phenomenon) or kinematical (postures and motions). CS WAVE
enables the trainer to break down the welding exercise to more
limited and focused exercises, thus decomposing the problem and
simplifying the learning process. This enables the progressive
learning of every dimensions of the gesture, first independently
and then gradually combined.
More practical training
Our system offers the ability to perform the same exercise
multiple times without wasting expensive consumable. This has
increased the time spent welding by trainees from 30% during
classical workshops up to 80% during CS WAVE workshops.
This has clearly accelerated the acquisition of both the practical
knowledge and the required concentration .
Captivating learning with reduced stress and risks
In the professional world, learning welding is seen as a complex
and difficult task performed through out a boring and stressful
succession of trials and errors. The validation phases of the
project have demonstrated that the integration of our system
within the training process has changed this image. CS WAVE
game-like graphical user interface, its tangible interaction device,
as well as the real-time and visual interaction it offers, have turned
welding training into a captivating educational experience.
In addition, the ability offered to trainees to analyse their
results, to keep track of their performance, and the competition
resulting from the comparison of these results between trainees,
have set a really studious atmosphere within welding workshops.
6 CONCLUSION
CS WAVE is a welding training system resulting from the
WAVE IST project that ended mid-2004. This system has clearly
demonstrated its relevance and its effectiveness to train welders
from different perspectives as presented in section 4 of this paper.
It is today commercially exploited by CS, and is currently
deployed within the whole network of AFPA’s training centres
(60 centres ).
CS WAVE was also awarded "the excellence in productivity”
prize by a group of 33 journalists from the industrial press at the
INDUSTRY 2004 exhibition in Paris and “the science and
education trophee” of Laval-Virtual 2004. Since the end of the
project, we have been approached by numerous international
distributors, which promises a fast exploitation at an international
level.
It is also important to stress that the success and the acceptance
of this system could not have been guaranteed without the strong
and constant synergy between CS engineers and AFPA’s trainers.
All this clearly demonstrates that an innovative system using
VR technologies can become, if its development is driven by real
end-user needs, a viable and accepted product that break through
very quickly after the R&D effort in the quite conservative
industrial world.
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8 AUTHORS

Dr Laurent Da Dalto is a senior engineer of the Virtual Reality

Department of the CS company. His main areas of expertise
include physical lighting simulation, real-time rendering and VR
training. He is also the product manager of CS WAVE and the
responsible for the industrialisation of various VR training tools.
He received his Ph.D. in computer graphics from the Toulouse III
university, France. He is the author of 8 international papers and
contributed to the redaction of several books in his domain. Prior
to this current position, he was the animation manager of the R&D
team of Kalisto Entertainment, a French video game company.
There, he was in charge of the development of the software engine
for real time animation of bodies and structures (“Dark Earth”,
“The Fifth Element”, “Nightmare Creatures” video games).

Dr Olivier Balet is the Technical Director of CS' Virtual Reality

Department. His main areas of expertise include virtual reality,
virtual storytelling, 3D interaction, multi-modal computer-human
interfaces, and cooperative working. Prior to his current position,
he has conducted research on 3D interaction at the Toulouse III
university where he received his diploma (M.S.) and Ph.D. in
computer science (VR specialisation). He is the author and has
been the Project Manager of several European funded projects
(CAVALCADE, VISIONS, V-Man, V-Planet, VISTA, etc.).
He has been an active expert to the European Commission for
activities under FP5 KA3 and KA4 (Virtual Reality, Simulation,
Multimedia and Collaborative Working Action lines) and FP6
(FET, Cultural Heritage, networked audiovisual systems). He is
VR assistant professor at both the Toulouse III University and the
ENSICA high school, program committee member or reviewer for
international conferences (Eurographics, ICVS, VRIS, Minitrack,
TIDSE, etc.), and the author of more than 25 papers published in
international journals and conference proceedings.

Dr Daniel Mellet-d'Huart is project manager in the R&D

department of AFPA, the largest French vocational training
organization for adults. He introduced and developed virtual
reality systems to support learning and training. He participated in
the realisation of industrial applications such as CS WAVE, or
others that are under development to train trainers to interviews,
or to train industrial machine operators. He is expert in the field of
VR-learning: design of training resources and educational
applications.
His educational background is a PhD in VR design method for
learning applications, masters in education, electronic media and
management. He has worked with AFPA since 1982 as a labor
psychologist, educational adviser, training center co-manager,
member of a large European project coordination team,
forecasting engineer, and project manager for virtual reality. He
is the author of 12 international papers, 10 national papers,
research reports and participated in international scientific
missions. He also co-authored the VR learning chapter in FUCHS
P. & MOREAU G. (Eds.) Le traité de la réalité virtuelle. Presse de
l'école des Mines de Paris, 2003,