Bondi Labs: game-based simulations and VR safety training

Bondi Labs has teams in Brisbane, Melbourne, London and Beijing. It describes its research-based products as addressing global challenges in supply chain and logistics, biosecurity awareness and inspection, workplace safety and food quality control.

Its first game-based simulation trained biosecurity inspectors on the Chevron-operated Gorgon Project, a large liquefied natural gas development off the northwest coast of Western Australia. The project sits on Barrow Island, an A-Class reserve, and a very strict biosecurity protocol applies there because an invasive pest carried in on machinery, a container or someone's clothing could trigger an eradication effort lasting days and costing millions. At its peak the construction phase had up to 10,000 workers on the island.

Bondi Labs first recorded what the inspectors did and found that their approaches differed considerably. Working with Chevron's biosecurity team, it then built an immersive virtual world where inspectors could train and be assessed without real consequences. It plays on a desktop or tablet and contains the virtual objects and pests the inspectors meet on the island. Founder and managing director Jonathan Marshall described the goal to Logistics & Materials Handling magazine as competence that is efficient and standardized, with data that lets management trust the inspections.

The team concluded that any industry with safety training needs could use the same approach and turned to logistics and warehouse safety. It adapted the biosecurity simulation and built new virtual environments, among them a warehouse, a sea port and a supply base, in which warehouse workers can train to spot hazards.

With the global logistics company DB Schenker it co-designed Kuube, a cloud-based workplace health and safety simulation product for logistics and warehousing. By 2019 the company had spent five years building an online platform for simulation training and a library of hundreds of reusable virtual assets. Scenarios address competencies such as forklift and material handling equipment pre-start safety checks. Kuube was designed to run on standard office desktops, on iPads and on VR devices.

Bondi Labs also announced a strategic partnership with the Supply Chain and Logistics Association of Australia, which has more than 8,000 members, to offer Kuube in the context of the Chain of Responsibility compliance requirements for the industry. Marshall put the number of people working in the sector at upwards of half a million, all exposed to serious safety risks.

The App Store page that carried Kuube in 2019 no longer loads. No current product page for Kuube is confirmed, so whether the training is sold today is not established here.

For safety simulations that are playable now, the games directory records an official page and a dated status for each entry.