Featured Obayashi Corporation use case

We spoke to Morita san, the director of the Tohoku Branch Civil Engineering Construction Department (hereinafter abbreviated).

This time, we were able to participate in a safety patrol using RICOH Remote Field in the Koshigawabashi floor plate replacement work on the Tohoku Expressway, and get frank impressions about the use of RICOH Remote Field.

The reason to choose RICOH Remote Field, 360° hi-def video, low latency & the feeling of being there

Question: how did start using RICOH Remote Field and how does it relate to your field?

Morita san of Obayashi Corporation:

I am the person in charge of civil engineering at the Tohoku branch, especially from the viewpoint of ensuring workers' safety. On a daily basis, I focus on checking whether measures for accidents that can occur in each site and their appropriate safety management.

Until now, we have been working to ensure workers' safety by regularly going to the site and carrying out safety patrols. It was proposed to use that we use RICOH Remote Field so that we can undertake safety patrols remotely, and now we have been using RICOH Remote Field for over a year. We call the remote safety patrols, web patrol.

It is normal for existing web conference systems have a limited angle of view. Therefore, I thought it was quite difficult to manage the remote environment with web patrols.

Also, there are many cases where the communication environment is not good at civil engineering sites. From that point, I thought that web patrols had an issue.

Question: What was the decisive factor in choosing RICOH Remote Field after comparing with other companies' services?

Morita san of Obayashi Corporation:

The streaming of 360° video so that the whole remote environment site could be understood without instructing people on the ground was a huge factor. The feeling that you are really there, made it possible for us to actually conduct web patrols.

In an environment where missing one thing can be the cause of a terrible accident, being able to share viewing angle without stress between the people on the ground and the people confirming remotely is essential. If this type communication was not be smooth, it would have been difficult to implement web patrols.

In addition, in existing web conference systems, there was a risk that the person on the ground is not showing the points that they might want to hide, but with 360° video we do not have to worry about that, so this was also a decisive factor because it reduces the stress of people who check the site remotely.

Also, the point that we can stream low-bandwidth video when the internet reception is of lower quality was attractive. RICOH Remote Field lets you change the THETA's streaming settings remotely, so if reception is not stable, you can drop the frame rate and continue on with the web patrol with low-latency video.

Question: How to you see your future use of RICOH Remote Field?

Morita san of Obayashi Corporation:

Now that we can implement safety patrols remotely, we can increase the number of safety patrols themselves. Through this, we want to improve our environmental safety to even higher levels.