Imagine Employee Training with VR/AR
Co-Writer & Imagine Lab Supervisor: Joshua Ramirez
Once a month, Imagine Moody comes together in the Imagine Lab to host the Moody MeetUp, a conversation designed to engage UT students and faculty with topics around how certain industries are changing thanks to emerging technology. For the month of November, we wanted to focus on the enterprise and professional spaces, and how virtual and augmented reality may influence the future of employee training. To help demonstrate the use of these technologies, we invited Accomplice, an experimental design firm here in Austin, to bring their new and in-progress demos to our MeetUp!
When thinking about VR/AR for professional use, there are more than a handful of hurdles to overcome, yet the possibilities remain bountifully hopeful and limitless for developers and businesses alike. The first issue to recognize is that VR/AR are not perfect substitutions for reality. Not all senses are yet available in immersive tech, and the current quality of virtual spaces are not photorealistic or effective. These factors may also apply to other forms of training, but for companies that rely on margins of success and limited resources, VR/AR can be a tough sell.
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Also, training for these industries have to be handcrafted for each scenario, in that employee training has always been particular per use and company. Therefore, training in VR still requires a good amount of intentional design that is focused on tasks that make sense in virtual space.
In VR, it is not enough to just re-create the work environment, but just as importantly it requires successfully implementing 360° views and controls. Because an individual’s role might be different depending on the position, developers must tediously create these experience tailored to each task within the space, and that is just the first problem. The next challenge would be deployment, especially since VR/AR can require space and equipment that can be costly. That is why most virtual training is available through standard headsets — meaning that the visual fidelity of these experiences also must compensate for faster load times and standard throughput of economical displays. To leverage these, Accomplice and other developers have built experiences that challenge users to approach methods of learning rather than specific training scenarios.
The demoes displayed for this meetup, courtesy of Accomplice, are Monocle and Workroom. Monocle is a VR app that aims to solve the headaches of traditional memorization and learning strategies. As advertised, Monocle turns your existing curriculum into a white-labeled VR training app for one low monthly fee. At the MeetUp, we had the opportunity to try out Monocle. Standing in a room, you are able to filter through images and text surrounding you as you use the controller to switch modes of data presented to you. The demo utilized a short poem, and through the use of mnemonics. As one of the developers described, mnemonics was an effective use of a virtual space, in that data such as a line in the poem can be associated with the window or door or image within the room itself. And since the experience was in VR — there was no hassle in setting up the room, switching between words and images, and altogether the demo felt focused on assisting the user with learning the poem.
The other demo that Accomplice discussed was Workroom is a web-based virtual reality platform that allows businesses to easily host and manage webVR experiences. This experience, albeit was not available to demo, was still interesting to note Accomplice’s goal to make VR accessible. With webVR, a company can easily plugin an experience on their website, and a customer can then connect either a headset or mobile device. While the actual products are not yet released, these apps show a hopeful exploration into immersive learning and training for the next generation of commerce and communication.
Finally, as we have explored so far, augmented reality often shows up as the leading platform in enterprise applications. AR focuses on blending real world scenarios with adequate learning experiences by introducing layered information, contextual analysis, and visual guidance that overlays real world objects much easier than what could be done in VR. Simply put — in virtual space, the workplace has to be recreated; in augmented reality, the space already exists.
Don’t miss the latest updates on Imagine Moody — Where Entrepreneurship Meets Innovation in The Moody College of Communication at The University of Texas at Austin. Moody MeetUps are every second Wednesday of the month during the fall and spring semesters. Keep up with us on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and sign-up for our monthly newsletter!
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