AtkinsRéalis Digital R&D unit – Hazard Quest
[This case study is reproduced with kind permission of the Digital Construction Awards, and is for a 2026 finalist shortlisted for Digital Team of the Year – a category sponsored by nima. Read all the shortlisted profiles on Digital Construction Plus. The winner will be revealed at the Awards dinner on 18 March at the London Marriott Grosvenor Square.]
The new digital R&D team at AtkinsRéalis was formed … through a first-of-a-kind, 24-hour hackathon recruitment process.
The team has a diverse skills base around data science, AI, gaming engines and immersive technologies. It has rapidly established strong governance and agile delivery structures, adopted Scrum, Kanban boards and collaborative tools like Miro.
The team quickly identified an opportunity to enhance its existing virtual site access by building a smarter training platform based on 360° site data. This resulted in a gamified, immersive training platform called Hazard Quest.
Delivery required overcoming substantial technical challenges, such as building a cost-efficient pipeline for generating photorealistic 3D environments from short 360° videos using a novel AI technique, as well as integrating these 3D environments into a gamified training platform.
The team developed a prototype focused on safety-critical training, allowing them to test core assumptions and build the technical backbone. By month three, the team had produced two prototypes exploring the impact of gamification and photorealism on learning. They conducted A/B testing with 20 new joiners, demonstrating that an interactive 3D induction experience significantly improved retention of key safety information, such as the location of first-aid kits and fire exits.
Part of the team’s strategy for developing an innovative product was a social media campaign on AtkinsRéalis’s intranet. This received more than 4,200 impressions and 18 creative submissions that further informed development.
During the early stages of the project, the team held collaborative workshops with stakeholders to address initial scope misalignments and ensure a shared understanding of objectives. User research combined quantitative testing with one-to-one focus sessions, which revealed that photorealistic environments improved spatial awareness by 20%.
Despite challenges such as IT delays and being early-career professionals, the cohort transformed from a newly formed group into a highly effective, agile team capable of rapid experimentation and disciplined delivery.
By developing a new solution in just six months, they demonstrated the value of a diverse, cross-functional R&D team and a sprint approach to service development in the engineering consultancy sector.
A conservative estimate suggests that deploying Hazard Quest could avoid 10.8 tonnes of CO2 annually and save £45,000 per site, as well as reducing the number and cost of safety incidents.
[This case study is reproduced with kind permission of the Digital Construction Awards, and is for a 2026 finalist shortlisted for Digital Team of the Year – a category sponsored by nima. Read all the shortlisted profiles on Digital Construction Plus. The winner will be revealed at the Awards dinner on 18 March at the London Marriott Grosvenor Square.]
