From Dealerships to Digital Twins: How Toyota Material Handling Transformed Training with VR

As Toyota Material Handling North America continues to scale its operations across hundreds of dealership locations and multiple manufacturing facilities, the challenge of training technicians efficiently has become increasingly complex. Traditional, in-person training models struggle to keep pace with the demand for consistent knowledge transfer, rapid onboarding, and upskilling on evolving electric forklift technology.

To address these challenges, Toyota Material Handling partnered with VR Vision to reimagine technical training through immersive virtual reality. By leveraging multiplayer VR experiences powered by Photon networking technology, TMH has created a scalable, collaborative, and secure training environment that enables technicians across North America to learn, practice, and problem-solve together without the constraints of physical location.

Challenge

With over 300 dealership locations across North America and multiple factories, TMH faces a major issue of training new technicians and existing technicians on their new and existing products. Trainer knowledge retention is a major issue across all industries as well as their capacity to train new and existing technicians. Flying trainers from dealership to dealership or flying technicians to one location multiple times per year is not cost or time effective or environmentally friendly. 

Solution

There are two VR Solutions being utilized: Parts Identification and Troubleshooting. Parts Identification allows technicians to work seamlessly together in multiplayer to tear down and remove all the panels of different digitally doubled forklifts and identify parts together in real time. The trainer can also educate and evaluate trainees in the sessions and educate them further than the scenario may usually provide via narrations. Troubleshooting teaches new technicians how to troubleshoot various difficult scenarios that they will experience in their everyday work with a multimeter and learning of the schematics. Newer technicians will learn how to safely perform troubleshooting while working on the digital double forklift, from removing panels, disconnecting the battery, testing amperage and voltage on very small sensors and the vehicle manager.

Platform / Devices

Meta Quest 2 & Meta Quest 3

Use of Photon

VR Visions Networking SDK is based on the Photon PUN & Fusion SDK. It allows all of our clients and TMH to work together in VR across the world on a secure server. This scalable solution allows us to provide Realtime virtual collaboration in VR while maintaining our client’s tough security and IT requirements.

About the Client

Toyota Material Handling North America is an industry leader in Material handling equipment & forklifts in the world with 1/3 of the equipment sold being theirs or Raymonds. With over 300 dealer locations across the US, their training department has their hands beyond full training new technicians on their products or existing technicians on new products.

About the Agency / Studio / Partner

VR Vision is a Toronto Based company leading provider of immersive virtual reality (VR) training solutions for enterprise organizations. We help global brands like Toyota, Siemens, and Coca-Cola revolutionize workforce development through turnkey, scalable VR simulations and our proprietary Vision Portal SaaS platform. Founded in 2016, with over 8+ years of experience in immersive learning, over $10M in revenue and growing SaaS ARR from Fortune 500 clients. Our training is used by 30,000+ technicians across industries including energy, utilities, and manufacturing. 

By adopting VR-based Parts Identification and Troubleshooting training, Toyota Material Handling has transformed how technical knowledge is delivered, retained, and shared across its vast dealer network. Technicians can now train collaboratively in realistic digital environments, gain hands-on experience with complex electric forklift systems, and build confidence before working on physical equipment, all while significantly reducing travel, downtime, and environmental impact.

Powered by VR Vision’s immersive training solutions and Photon’s real-time networking infrastructure, this approach demonstrates how enterprise-grade VR can meet the rigorous security, scalability, and collaboration demands of global organizations. The result is a future-ready training model that supports Toyota Material Handling’s commitment to operational excellence, technician safety, and continuous innovation in workforce development.