A Primer for Learning & Development - Aquinas Learningaquinas.io/wp-content/uploads/VR-Learning-Primer... · weak sense of presence, and I've seen extremely compelling content in

VR LearningA Primer for

Learning & Development

st1 Edi�onWri�en ByHugh Seaton

WithMarco FacciniSten Hallock

Preface wrote this with my colleagues Marco Faccini and Sten Hallock with the intention of giving ILearning & Development professionals a quick, all in one introduction to learning in Virtual Reality. There is limited narrative, but rather discrete sections that allow the reader to skip

straight to what is of interest. I also strove to keep the whole thing short, so have not explored some subjects like polygon counts, etc.

This first edition is intended as an 'open source' document, and we've included many voices across the industry. I welcome feedback, questions and criticism, as we intend to write updates & future editions as the industry moves forward and we learn more. Not least, our SIMs group is hard at work conducting research to push knowledge forward. Email me directly at at anytime.

At the end of this ebook is an early listing of contributors and how to find them. I thank all of them and take credit for any mistakes & omissions.

Hugh SeatonCEO, AquinasMarch 4th, 2018

© 2018, Aquinas Learning, Inc

[email protected]

https://[email protected]


Contents1. Introduction 1

a. Six VR Learning Scenarios 1

b. Six Ways VR Learning Is Unique 2

2. Section 1: The Basics 4

a. What Is Virtual Reality? 4

b. What About Augmented & Mixed Reality? 6

c. How Does VR Work? 7

d. Creating Content 13

e. Authoring 14

f. Content Analytics 15

3. Section 2: VR For Learning 17

a. Competencies & Learning: A First Framework 18

b. VR Benefits 19

c. xApi & Analytics 25

d. State Of The Market Now 26

e. What Can L&D Professionals Do To Get Familiar With VR/AR Now? 27

f. Deeper Look: Why VR Learning Works 28

i. Learning Is About Mental Representations 28

ii. Next Generation Business case Studies 30

iii. Replacing Reality 31

iv. Sensemaking & VR 32

v. Recognition Primed Decision Making 33

g. Assessing VR Learning: Second Framework 34

I. Cognitive Load Theory 34

ii. Situated Learning Theory 37

iii. Multimedia Learning Theory 39

h. Conclusion 41

4. Section 3: Cases 42

5. Section 4: Contributors 47

© 2018, Aquinas Learning, Inc

Virtual Reality learning is ready for prime time.

As a medium, virtual reality (VR) has become much better understood, it has been tried & tested by leading organizations, and it is now easy enough to use that every learning and development (L&D) professional needs to understand what it is, how it works, and how to use it. Companies across the country, and across the world, are finding that VR provides unique abilities to train and upskill their teams, in ways that no other medium can, so while VR might not be part of every course, it will certainly be considered for many.

This eBook will show that despite VR's relative newness in the L&D industry, it is mature enough to make a real difference, and easy enough to use that L&D department will find the medium a valuable addition. We will do this by telling you what VR is, how it works, how it uniquely promotes learning.

Of the large and growing body of VR Learning providers, we've interviewed a cross section companies and consultants to get some key takeaways – here are six areas where experts think VR adds something no other medium can:

Six VR Learning Scenarios

1. Directly experiencing learning content: “Virtual reality allows us to learn concepts without symbols” – without reading, without graphics. For some ideas, and some learners, this is a much more powerful way to learn.

Introduction

© 2018, Aquinas Learning, Inc 1

“VR is ideal for scenarios where the real-world equivalent is too expensive, time consuming, challenging, or dangerous. VR allows users to experience difficult real-world situations, so they can gain familiarity with a situation or practice a specific skill”

- Andrew Downes, Watershed

2. Industrial applications: “We built a forkli� training simulator for our client, Raymond Corp. The training was so effective that one of the main programmers, who had never set foot on a forkli� before, got on one at the dealer demo day and drove it like a pro. The Raymond team was blown away.” Amy Peck, CEO of EndeavorVR

3. Real-Time complexity: When you're in a VR simulation, you are looking around, like you might in an actual crane. No amount of video or written manual can teach that.” Dave Arendash, VR pioneer

4. Managerial Interactions: “95% of [in-person] role-plays fail. Learners have to come in & out of character…it isn't natural or comfortable. VR promises to allow this sort of simulation in a comfortable setting where the learner can feel at ease practicing with an avatar.” Stephen Dornsife, Senior L&D leader

5. Dangerous Situations: “You can show the consequences of things going wrong in VR. There's no substitute for that” Anders Gronstedt, The Gronstedt Group

6. Empathy & Understanding: “VR is great for behavioural learning, for taking perspectives

1. Pantelidis, V.S., “Reasons To Use Virtual Reality In Education And Training Courses And A Model To Determine When To Use Virtual Reality” — Themes in Science and Technology Education

Six Ways VR Learning is Unique

1. First Person: Every other medium is a spectator experience, viewed from outside the action. In VR, things happen directly to the learner, creating richer interactivity, and a unique sense of agency. This matters because we learn and remember first person experiences much more readily than stories or third person vignettes. For the first time, learners are the protagonist.

2. Presence: Empowering the first person experience is the illusion of “being there,” which VR is uniquely able to provide. Presence allows us to believe we are somewhere else, and thus truly engage with business simulations, trips to Africa, negotiations, and an infinite variety of “experiences on demand.”

3. Complete Control over Experience: We can be protagonists in a scenario that we experience as if it were real. The experience itself can be whatever we want it to be, and can be repeated in exactly the same way as many times as we want. This has huge implications for the use of simulations as learning tools: Imagine being able to rewind an scenario and experience it again and again.

4. Real-time, Immersive 3D: The learner's role as protagonist means they can see relationships, in real time, that are impossible to see any other way. For many skills that


involve other people, equipment and processes. This is critical to really becoming competent.

5. Blocking out the world: This feature enables many of those above, but on its own has value because it enables focus and reduces distractions. In today's world, this makes VR a unique way to ensure ideas are absorbed.

6. Empathy: Many immersive virtual experiences show that people react to them more emotionally than other traditional mediums. According to Theresa Wiseman, professor of applied health research in cancer care (Southampton, UK), 4 attributes of empathy exist. The first one is the ability to see the world as another person may view it. The second is a skill to understand other people's feelings. The third one lies in accepting people along with their imperfections, not condemning at the same time. Lastly, the fourth attribute is communicating in such a way as to let people know that one understands their feelings. In traditional media all of these are very difficult to reproduce authentically.

Now let's dive into VR itself, starting from the beginning and taking you through what we know about how it works, how to make it work for you, and some great examples of who is using it well right now.

“We are all created equal in the virtual world and we can use this equality to help address some of the sociological problems that society has yet to solve in the physical world.”

- Bill Gates, The Road Ahead


Virtual reality is any experience where the “real world” is completely blocked out, and replaced by another complete experience, creating the illusion that the user is somewhere they are not.

This can be done with big equipment, like a flight simulator, or a $10 Google cardboard and smartphone. The key features that distinguish VR from other recent technologies like Augmented and Mixed Realities is that it is a completely distinct experience from the real world where the user is currently located.

VR is a Medium

We experience reality through our senses. Since the dawn of time, artists and communicators have created 'virtual' experiences for us, opportunities to see and imagine worlds and events of which we are not a participant. In doing so, these communicators expand our world, giving us boundless educational and entertainment options.

VR at its best shouldn't replace real life, just modify it, giving us access to so much just out of reach physically, economically. If you can dream it, VR can make it.

Matthew Schnipper, "Seeing Is Believing: The State of Virtual Reality"

This is what media do – they serve as conduits from a source of content to the consumer of that content. Over the millennia, especially the past 100 years, these conduits of experience have required less and less imagination on the part of consumers.

If you imagine an early painting from 2000 years ago, many of them were not very good, but as the centuries progressed, painters improved their cra� to the point where photorealistic drawings & paintings are not exceptional. Similarly, live action was once a few people on a stage,

The BasicsSECTION 1

What is Virtual Reality?


and that has progressed through increasingly sophisticated stage performances to radio, to motion pictures to video to youtube to streaming 360 videos that allow the consumer to see incredible details about the world being depicted both real and imaginary.

Virtual reality is an extension of this progression. It is the next logical step, removing a last, and most important barrier to the consumption of content – we are no longer outside of the content, we are part of the experience. We do not require the learner to “imagine if” they were in a scenario, we can put them directly into that experience and allow them to interact with it.

“How to build presence? I like to think of John Keller's ARCS Model (Attention, Relevance, Confidence, and Satisfaction) for optimal learning as a guide.”

- Sherry Nolan Larson, President Learning IDeologies

Presence and EmbodimentThese illusions of entirely different realities are what makes VR different, and we talk about the experience of that difference with the concept of “Presence,” introduced in earlier sections. Here we want to talk about how to induce presence, and through presence, a real sense of ownership of the virtual body, or “embodiment.”

Presence is a psychological phenomenon, as distinct from immersion, which is produced by technology. Immersion, especially the complete immersion of VR, enables presence, but it is not the same thing. I've seen many examples of weak content in top-flight VR gear that produces a weak sense of presence, and I've seen extremely compelling content in lower-quality, mobile VR that nonetheless complete transported the user, creating a strong sense of presence.

“VR or AR on their own are not an 'experience,' any more than TV is. These are media that can be great or not-so-great depending on the quality of content and the level of emotional connection

and relevance they bring to the user.”

- Sten Hallock, Aquinas Head of VR/AR Content & Production

And that is really the key to understanding presence – the overall experience must be compelling and draw the user in, which is yet another reason why keeping the user as the center of the action is so important.

Presence can also be improved by requiring users to do things – being able to act on the illusion draws users into it. But the most important way to drive presence is through embodiment.


What about Augmented Reality & Mixed RealityThis eBook will focus on VR, but there are two related technologies that are in the market right now: Augmented Reality, and Mixed Reality. It is worth distinguishing these before we move further into VR.

An easy way to distinguish the three is to think of the experience in terms of artificial content and real world content, and then in terms of foreground and background. Think of Augmented Reality (AR) as reality with additional content added, Mixed Reality (MR) as content and 'reality' blended, and Virtual Reality as content within an artificial, or 'virtual' world.

Augmented Reality is the real world with extras

Augmented Reality (AR) does just what its name implies: it augments the world by adding content. The players, the objects can all be virtual, but the background is the real surroundings of the user.

AR currently either requires a smartphone with the right so�ware so that you can view the world through the screen where the extras are visible, or an expensive, enterprise-only headset. These headsets are usually in a glasses-inspired form factor, much like Google Glass.

Mixed Reality is the real world blended with the virtual

Halfway between a view of the real world with content added to it, and a completely virtual world, is Mixed Reality. This is distinct from AR because it the MR system tracks and interacts with the space around the use and the content behaves as a part of that environment. Whereas AR typically means you've overlaid information on an object and is usually tagged to that object, Mixed Reality uses more advanced sensors to map the room, and uses that map to locate objects that are real, and virtual, and allow them to co-exist.

MR currently requires a specialized headset that is different from a VR or AR headset. These MR headsets have the benefit of allowing users to see the room they are in, which allows for interaction with real people. However, it also means that presence, which adds so much to VR's uniqueness, is less a part of the MR experience.

Three things have been found by Mel Slater, another top VR researcher, to drive embodiment:

1. The scene is displayed from the users' point of view

2. The user can make things happen in the scene

3. The users body matches their movement.

Interestingly, multiple researchers have found that photorealism is not necessary for presence, but natural movement and human-sounding voice are – researchers term this “signs of sentience,” where we are tolerant to bad rendering, as long as we know there's a person behind it all.


VR is all artificial

Virtual reality is the replacing of both the foreground, and the background experience, with artificial, or “virtual” content. The players, the objects, and the world they're in are all either created, recorded, or sometimes streamed from another location.

VR always requires a headset to allow the user to become fully separated from the real world, and thus able to be completely immersed in virtual environment.

Each of these uses some similar technology, in that a 3D representation of a space is created, objects and people interact with in that space, and entirely new ways of interacting with content and experiencing the world are created.

Clay Bavor, VP of VR at Google wrote a nice piece on his vision for VR & AR, and explains the respective roles of AR & VR:

“VR can put you anywhere, and AR can bring anything to you. VR can transport you somewhere else. AR leaves you where you are and brings objects and information to you, in context, making them seem like they're there with you. They both give you superpowers.”

He further distinguishes VR & AR and the controversy over which technology will be more important, a controversy that I frankly think is not an interesting discussion if you're not a VC:

“… that question suggests two competing, mutually exclusive technologies. But it's a false distinction. VR and AR are more like two points on a spectrum� —� a spectrum of how much computer-generated imagery gets woven into natural environments. VR completely replaces the real world with computer-generated imagery, for instance to transport you to inside a virtual representation of the Louvre. By contrast, AR adds pieces of computer-generated imagery to your environment. If you were at the Louvre in real life, AR could overlay digital footsteps on the ground in front of you, leading the way to the Mona Lisa.”

Each of these “realities” has its own strengths and weaknesses. For the purposes of keeping this primer a manageable length, I've chosen to focus solely on VR. Future primers will expand on both AR, and MR.

How does VR Work?Virtual reality is the illusion that you are in a scenario different from your real surroundings. To achieve this, we need to block out any disconfirming evidence, and that currently requires a headset that looks a bit like a scuba mask. Each eye has its own separate display, which allows the VR system to create a full 3D experience.

The Experience

Virtual reality creates a sense of 'being there,' which we refer to above as presence. Presence is an illusion, a psychological effect of the total immersion that VR creates. The degree of presence


that VR can create is truly unique, and is dependent upon the interplay of both content quality and equipment sophistication..

Equipment

In Q1 2018, there are three broad types of VR equipment: Tethered, Mobile, and Standalone. These differ in quality, mobility and expense.

Tethered

In 2013 Oculus kicked off the current VR industry. Oculus sought to create a highly engaging experience with compelling graphics, and the best way to do that is with a gaming computer. These rely on expensive graphics cards to beef up the computer's ability to generate the 90-120 frames per second (fps) needed for higher end VR. A gaming computer is then connected to the headset by a data cord, or tether.

In the market now, there are a number of excellent tethered headsets, that range from lower cost units from Dell ($300) to higher end HTC Vive units ($600). Two key issues to be aware of:

1. System requirements: Microso� created the “Windows Mixed Reality” headset kit that has allowed everyone from Dell to Lenovo to Samsung to create low cost headsets that can operate at lower quality levels on any Intel I7 or better computer (most new desktops are this good).

In contrast, a Vive, Oculus and many of the emerging higher end systems will require a computer optimized for VR, with the addition of a graphics card (machines can run from $1,000 t $3,000 for VR-ready laptops).


Figure 1-1.The HTC Vivehttps://www.vive.com/us/product/vive-virtual-reality-system/

https://www.vive.com/us/product/vive-virtual-reality-system/

https://www.vive.com/us/product/vive-virtual-reality-system/

b. Inside-out tracking: Microso�'s “Windows Mixed Reality” headsets, of which there were 5 in the market at the time of this writing, all use inside-out tracking, meaning no external sensors, and easier setup. Because all the room sensing happens in the headset, there are no issues with setting up multiple units next to each other. The downside to inside-out tracking is that the controllers can be less stable when used behind the body or are blocked from the headset's line of sight

2. Roomscale: The Oculus and some other tethered machines allow the body to move a bit, and have fantastic controllers for arm movements, but do not allow the user to walk around in space. This can be a serious hindrance depending on your simulation or scenario, though in many other cases it won't matter.

Roomscale is achieved in two ways: External reference points, called “lighthouses” or sensors on the headset. Here's what you need to understand about each:

a. Lighthouses: HTC Vive pioneered the use of two fixed boxes that shine signals that the headset picks up, and uses to identify where it is. This means the boxes need to be set up and an area cleared & identified each time the set is used. It is not terribly difficult, but means more time & complexity for setup. However, it also means better tracking of the user's hands & gestures through the controllers.


Figure 1-2.The Samsung Odyssey Mixed Reality Headsethttps://www.cnet.com/news/samsung-odyssey-windows-mixed-reality-leak/

Figure 1-3.Google Cardboard Mobile VR Viewerhttps://www.amazon.com/Google-87002822-01-Official-Cardboard/dp/B01L92Z8D6

https://www.cnet.com/news/samsung-odyssey-windows-mixed-reality-leak/

https://www.cnet.com/news/samsung-odyssey-windows-mixed-reality-leak/

https://www.amazon.com/Google-87002822-01-Official-Cardboard/dp/B01L92Z8D6

https://www.amazon.com/Google-87002822-01-Official-Cardboard/dp/B01L92Z8D6

Mobile VR is usually either a special app that gets downloaded, or it can be done with WebVR, a lightweight way of creating VR based on web tools. Mobile relies on some externally bought viewer, like the Google cardboard. Viewers like these are cheap and easily purchasable via Amazon or directly – expect prices to range from $7-30, depending on comfort and other features.

Mobile is usually a much cheaper way to distribute a VR experience at scale, as you can simply send the app or URL to everyone you want to include in your course. They will need to either buy or be supplied with viewers, but again that cost is nominal.

However, Mobile VR has a number of drawbacks, the first of which is quality. The screens of smartphones are less suited to VR than most of the higher-end VR headsets, but more importantly, their onboard processors pale in comparison to the graphics chips that a high-end HMD requires. As a result, the experience will be limited in terms of graphics and responsiveness.

Mobile solutions also do not allow the user to move around – they are simply a single point in space, like sitting at a desk unable to get up. You can still look in 360 degrees, and up & down, and enjoy fully immersive 3D scenes.

Mobile also doesn't usually allow for hand movements or controllers, which are key for many simulations, and the creation of presence. Samsung's GearVR is an exception, and there are other solutions with limited controller use, but generally they are not available or very limited.

Mobile is good for specific use-cases like experiencing a 360 video simulations (like Aquinas Microsimulations™), and short VR experiences.

Standalone

An emerging class of VR headsets is a step up from mobile, but not quite at the high-end. Oculus Go, HTCs Vive Focus and a number of others combine the lower cost of mobile with higher specifications to create an experience with better graphics and overall performance.

These are new and difficult to elaborate on as of this writing, but future updates to this handbook might expand on standalones and their advantages & disadvantages if they prove successful in the marketplace.

Don't we get sick in VR?

Almost never. Older systems had two problems that created sickness issues: the screens weren't good enough, and movements in reality lagged behind those in the VR experience. Both have significantly improved now, and modern headsets perform to the point where very few experience any discomfort. In the case of the screen quality, a key element of all screens is that they rapidly refresh the picture, creating the illusion of motion. The standard was 28 frames/second (fps), which is too slow for a display that is inches from the user's eyes. Smartphones have frame rates of 60 fps, which is the lower


limit of acceptability. Higher end VR units o�en have frame rates of 90-120 frames/second, and this makes a big difference in perceived quality, especially where the scenario includes fast changes & movement.

Headset factors:

The industry is moving forward very quickly, and improvements are being made that will make the overall experience better and better. Some factors to keep in mind:

1. Field of view (FOV): early headsets were like scuba goggles – they only let you see a limited 'window' into the virtual reality world. This reduces presence somewhat, and is a compromise that is being addressed. As an example, a Vive has a 100 degree FOV, out of a total of about 210 degrees that both eyes can see. This sounds more restrictive than it is, as we only really see about 30 degrees of arc at any given time.

a. Headsets with 160+ degrees are coming onto the market, and we can expect that field of view will no longer be a question in 1-2 years as the industry settles on a value that works for everyone.

2. Degrees of Freedom (DoF): refers to the freedom of movement of a body in three-dimensional space. We refer to 6DoF as the standard. Specifically, the body is free to change position as forward/backward, up/down, and le�/right movements in three perpendicular axes, combined with rotation about these three perpendicular axes, o�en termed yaw, pitch, and roll.

In virtual reality, three degrees of freedom (3DoF) usually means the three rotational movements. A good example of this is the Google Cardboard, while it permits the viewer to look in every direction around them in the rendered scene, there is currently no capability to move about the scene by moving in real life. When people think of virtual reality, they usually think of it with six degrees of freedom. Allowing the user to not only look around, but also move around the virtual world and look from above or below objects. To have a true VR experience, the hardware must provide all 6DOF and provide both orientation tracking (rotational) and positional tracking (translation). The Vive is a good example of this.


Figure 1-4. 6DOF: Six Degrees of Freedom

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_degrees_of_freedom




3. Video Quality: the Oculus and Vive both have the equivalent of one HDTV per eye, which is why they still need to be tethered. This generation is already being eclipsed by a new generation of “4k,” and higher resolution. This will matter because as the resolution improves, the experience improves, and users can read text, see textures, and the overall illusion of being somewhere else becomes more real.

4. Roomscale: The Vive is likely continue to use external sensors, but expect to see more and more units that work without the need for them. These will continue to improve in accuracy and get better and better at tracking and thus representing gestures and non-verbal communication.

5. Eye-tracking: A key draw back in all VR at the moment is you cannot track what the user is looking at beyond where their head is pointed. This is being addressed in 2018 as a number of quality solutions come onto the market. Eye tracking matters because where we look is a good indicator of what we're paying attention to, and as L&D departments integrate VR into their learning programs, this new ability to understand what's being attended to will be one of VR's major contributions.

6. Audio: Many uses of VR at the moment skip over audio, which is a mistake. Audio is usually an easy way to build presence, even if it just ambient. This is true both because it can block out disconfirming evidence of the primary VR illusion, but also because audio can actively support that illusion.

a. Spatial audio: a subset of the audio question is whether the audio sounds like it is happening in the VR scene. Methods existing for capturing, or creating, true 3D audio that make the experience even more compelling. The cost is o�en not prohibitive, and should be part of the content creation discussion.

Next we turn to how we create content. Like hardware, the technology is moving quickly, as are the techniques for using that technology. An interesting phenomenon in the US market is that we find hardware and core so�ware are o�en emerging from Silicon Valley, while the twin media capitals of Los Angeles and New York are frantically working to build content and tools to make businesses in those core systems.


Creating ContentContent creation for VR can be relatively simple, for example when we produce 360 video that you simply watch and experience. Or it can be quite complex, as it is when we create a whole new world, populate it with interactive avatars, and include speech recognition and other advanced interactive techniques.

- 360 Video: we can record and produce 360 video with a camera and standard video editing equipment, and for many early learning solutions that's what has been chosen. This has the benefit of photorealism, relative speed and lower cost. However, true interaction isn't possible, apart from the addition of some elements for control in the VR scene.

360 VR video is distinct from 360 video in that it is a true three dimensional recording, vs. a flat, but 360 degree, recording. A more expensive camera is needed, one that will capture two perspectives in each direction. The editing process is more complex, but the sense of presence can be much more compelling.

- Rendered experiences: a fully rendered experience can be created a lot of ways, the most common of which is by creating and collecting visual assets from modeling so�ware and stores (these work just like Getty images), and placing them into a gaming engine. The most popular of these is called Unity, with something like 70% of VR being produced in Unity. A second brand worth knowing is Unreal Engine, which is notable for its superior graphics. All gaming engines provide a 3D environment, the ability to include physics and easily create motion and scripts and so on. They all require so�ware development skills, and quality of the developer can vary widely.

Five benefits of game engine based rendered experiences:

1. Total control of the environment. Unlike photos, you can include, and exclude, anything you need to make the learning experience effective.

2. Built-in interaction. They are made for interaction, so have lots of pre-set tools.

3. Huge community of developers. At times it might seem like developers are hard to find, but in this case there are a LOT of Unity and Unreal Devs. The development community is growing rapidly as VR takes off.

4. Social experiences. 360 assumes you are in the middle of a bunch of people doing things, but you cannot interact with them. Rendered experiences allow that interaction to take place.

5. Room-scale. This is impossible in 360, and increasingly common in rendered VR.

Three common drawbacks of rendered experiences:

1. Realism. It is impossible to get photorealism without massive budget.

2. Expense. It doesn't have to be very expensive, but easily can be.


3. Non-verbal communication. An aspect related to realism, we are unable to detect or portray eye movements, expressions and nuances of non-verbal communication with current modelling & game engine technology. If these are important, explore 360 or hold off using VR for now.

WebVR

WebVR is a newer way to create VR experiences that has the potential to make distributing and managing experiences much easier. WebVR uses the same tools as website development, like HTML and a little javascript, and essentially creates a website that displays Virtual Reality. The benefits of this approach are that, instead of a heavy download, experiences can be sent via URL, which means distribution, especially now when much of the infrastructure for VR is being built, is much easier.

Developers for WebVR are not as readily available, though Aquinas and our partners run WebVR meetups and events in NYC and SF to help remedy that. The core tech is rapidly improving, which means some key functions are there but need improvement, such as quality of avatars and ability to create complex interactions.

We include WebVR in this primer because it is likely that most of the Virtual Reality you consume and create in the future will be WebVR, so familiarity with it now will help later.

AuthoringWhat kind of authoring you'll be able to use to create VR content will depend on what sorts of training you are looking to create. As you'll see in the below case studies, much of what is created are simulations of scenarios where something physical is being ingrained into the learners. These can be thought of as a video shoot, with the storyboards, scripting and graphics creation that video requires.

The big difference with VR is that you need to actually use it during the creation process – in that sense it is more like product development. You, as the L&D professional, should insist on the ability to try out early prototypes so you can better understand things like movement, and the experience of putting the headset on and starting the experience.

Case: Creating Simulations for a Tech company

Aquinas proposed to one of our clients that we pilot a simple simulations product that augments a learning reinforcement program we were already running. This reinforcement program comprises a weekly series of mobile notifications that a training cohort receive, each of which reprise a key idea from their new manager training.


Much of what that client is training its new managers to do more effectively relates to performance in a meeting. As such, Aquinas created short VR vignettes to viscerally illustrate each of their key training points.

The process was simple: We developed a set of scripts with our client, selected talent, and shot these short vignettes in an appropriate setting with a Samsung Gear360 camera. The client reviewed the footage, then we encoded these into a WebVR experience that includes key reminders & graphics to ensure that the important ideas are highlighted. These experiences are then sent via the above notifications to learners throughout the company who are program participants.

The process worked like many video creation projects do, and was relatively painless for the client.

Content AnalyticsA big issue with any form of experiential learning is how to do you track what's working and what's not? How do you ensure that your efforts are leading to the intended outcomes?

Many readers will be familiar with SCORM, the standard for data & information that most learning management systems (LMS) are using. The problem with SCORM for almost anything experiential is that it is not designed for learning that is not highly structured (i.e., primarily written tasks, tests & quizzes), and thus misses much of the interesting and important details that experiential learning should be able to track.

An example of this point is a standard quiz. SCORM will record who took it, and each of their scores. However, SCORM cannot record that most people took three times longer to answer question 3, or that half the learners changed the answers on question 5 more than any other. These are important details that can help L&D departments to understand their materials, its effectiveness and their learners understanding of the material.

Taking this example further, much of what we want to teach our learners in simulations and so�-skills training in general isn't as simple as scores on a quiz. We want to know whether and how o�en they look people in the eyes, or if they can make it through a scripted sales pitch without glancing at the script.

Taking it into entirely new territory, VR learning will increasingly incorporate AI-enabled capabilities like voice analysis to see how learners are performing, gesture analysis, and heartrate analysis to see if, when & how o�en learners are nervous as they progress through training, and an infinite array of not-yet-discovered measures that will help our people become their best.


SCORM was not built to capture this kind of data, which is why the VR Learning community are so excited about xAPI, a new data standard from the same people who developed SCORM decades ago. xAPI is a much more flexible way to record and analyze what happens in essentially any learning experience or environment. We did a webinar with one of the leading providers of xAPI services, Yet Analytics, in late 2017, you can find it

“What is Virtual Reality learning good for? One great use is practice and simulation for high risk tasks.

- Sherry Nolan Larson, President, Learning IDeologies


here.

https://www.yetanalytics.com/blog/vr_ar_xapi-tracking_next-gen_learning_webinar_recap

https://www.yetanalytics.com/blog/vr_ar_xapi-tracking_next-gen_learning_webinar_recap

VR for LearningSECTION 2

In developing this eBook I interviewed over 20 VR learning practitioners, academics and creators. In our questions, I were looking for real-world perspectives on where and how Virtual Reality might make for better learning outcomes, and came up with some interesting responses.

Marco Faccini, one of the more interesting folks you'll meet in learning and head of PerVRmance Group, stated provocatively – “Start with what is currently not working in Learning, and ask if VR can help. An obvious example is diversity training.”

Amy Peck, CEO of EndeavorVR, has recently completed some fantastic simulations for Raymond corp, a maker of forkli�s, suggested that VR is particularly good at physical movements & skills. She recounts how, a�er designing a simulation for training forkli� operators, one of their Unity devs blew everyone away by operating a real one flawlessly without ever having sat in the real thing. That is powerful.

EndeavorVR is also working on a VR application for firefighters to help train how to drive such large vehicles. She has shared that the strategy is to use off-the-shelf hardware and a curriculum built in Unity utilizing Google Street View.

Aside from more effective and safer training, firefighters will learn on the very streets on which they will be driving in their respective neighborhoods.

Training is concerned with creating competencies, and these come in many types. The same type of training will not apply to all competencies, nor will the same type of virtual reality work for all competencies. We next turn to a framework that can help us think of different competencies through the lens of VR learning.


Competencies & Learning: A First FrameworkTraining can and does encompass everything we do at work, from how we coach to how we assemble machinery. A proposed distinction to start our framework development is between what we'll call “skills” and “behaviors.” As is always the case with framework building, we're simplifying the world and using these words to name a category. Some readers will object that behaviors imply skills, and skills require enactment through behaviour, and of course that is correct. However, as we look at how we will use VR in learning, these two categories help us because they imply different requirements of the VR media.

Skills vs. Behaviors

Some competencies are physical, like operating a forkli� or crane. Others are more behavioral, like how to run a meeting, diversity training, or negotiation. There are a few reasons why this distinction between skill-based and behavioral competencies matters. The first of them is whether or not non-verbal communication are important. In the case of most physical skills, we are looking for macro movements of the body and some piece or pieces of equipment. In contrast, reading faces, gestures and other non-verbals is o�en a key part of behavioral training. In both cases, interactivity can help, but it is absolutely necessary for physical skills, whereas a simulations that teach behaviors can o�en be done without interactivity.

We care about this because when designing VR training, the decision of whether to invest in fully interactive, rendered scenarios vs. a 360 video simulation is among the first things discussed.

For an example of this, StriVR, a company founded at Stanford University that specializes in VR simulations for training, has chosen 360 video for their football training simulation. They made this choice because they found that the finer details mattered for quarterbacks, things like non-verbals and small shi�s in the offensive line that allowed them to learn more about how & when to react as they executed plays.

At first glance most would assume that a football simulation should have heavy interactivity. For novices, this is probably true, but for elite athletes in college and professional programs, it is the tiny differences they learn to notice and act upon that make them elite, and these details are prohibitively difficult to program into a simulation. Instead, StriVR records real players, with real movements, to capture those nuances.

Specific vs. General

Some skills are going to be specific to a company or product, and other skills are more general. Again, taking the forkli� vs. running a meeting example, while it is possible to train some of the general skills of operating a forkli�, in practice most of these simulations are built by the companies that produce a specific machine. In contrast, while there may be some specific management practices taught by a given company, much of what comprises new manager training, or public speaking, or negotiation is generalizable across different companies.


As the VR Learning industry continues to grow at a rapid pace, this distinction will help L&D departments decide whether to build simulations on their own, or search for outside solutions.

As an example, there are a growing number of VR tools on the market for public speaking. These offer different sorts of scenarios, levels of practice and analytics, and other variables, and it is unlikely a company will benefit from building their own. In contrast, as noted above, a forkli� simulation will be quite specific, and it is better for the Raymond Corps of the world to build their own simulations, so that their specific machines and special capabilities can be included accurately and compellingly.

Now that we've got a framework to discuss the different kinds of training, and the photo/rendered and build/buy decisions, let's get into why Virtual Reality can be a better way to drive learning and performance.

“VR is good at opening up opportunities, experiences they would never have had…”

-Bonnie Riedinger, Director of eLearning, University of New Haven

VR Benefits

VR Benefit: More Complete Engagement

Virtual reality ensures that distractions are minimized, completely engrossing the user in the experience. This distraction free environment provides a level of engagement that no other medium can provide.

Looked at more deeply, though, our engagement in VR can lead to a feeling that we are the virtual character. The presence effect we've discussed above creates a sense of embodiment, in part because the human mind is very good at assimilating new information about our physical


presence – think for a moment about how quickly you are able to make a garden rake or other tool into an extension of your hands, or even how quickly you can forget you're wearing a hat, or big jacket. VR can take advantage of that in the form of full engagement with the character we are playing within the VR scene. Again no other medium can come close to this.

Let's look at a quick list of times where that engagement makes an impact.

Five instances where that additional engagement can really make a difference:

1. Diversity training: Through a well-known phenomenon in VR is the “proteus effect,” embodying an avatar of a different ethnicity creates greater empathy (see below)

2. Anti-Harassment training: Similarly, the Proteus effect creates a lasting understanding of how it feels to be the subject of harassment, leading to greater empathy.

3. Heavy Equipment: Training in equipment is expensive, so much of training is with cheap videos and, believe it or not, o�en with printed pages. Engagement means we think of the nuances of operating that equipment in ways videos & text do not facilitate.

4. Public Speaking: Research has shown that speakers get just as nervous in front of a virtual audience as a real one. We are engaged in, and believe the illusion of, the VR scene where we are speaking.

5. Dangerous Situations: The realism & engagement of VR make simulations of dangerous situations, like oil rigs, much more compelling and are useful for safety & training.

“VR can show the consequence of mistakes. Imagine showing the result of texting & driving, from the first person”

- Anders Gronstedt, President, Gronstedt Group

VR Benefit: Learners as Protagonist

Above we talked about users in VR being the protagonist. This cannot be overstated as a benefit. No other training can offer this without going to great lengths with actors & in-person simulations.

For a start, studies from Jeremy Bailenson's team at Stanford have shown that, by making the learner the center of attention, more is retained.

Interconnectivity

It is difficult to understand how the world interconnects when we are imagining scenarios based on written descriptions, or even in videos. Virtual Reality allows learners to really be in the scenario and both train, and be assessed, on their ability to operate in what can be a confusing, real-time scenario.


Two examples of this are crane operations, and an operating room. In the first example, Industrial Training International, one of the world's premiere crane operator training & assessment companies, has created a large and growing number of crane simulators that are specific to given models of cranes. What is key is that they are able to put crane operation trainees into a realistic scenario where the wind is blowing, the crane arm is moving, and things go wrong, all at once. That sort of reaction is impossible to train any way other than by putting someone into a simulation.

BoonVR, a VR startup in the SF Bay area has created a solution for the training of medical equipment. In this instance, it is not so much the complexity of the situation as the critical nature of getting things right. BoonVR touts their solutions' ability to demonstrate and train the key interplay of different team members in the Operating Room.

Though we might love some movies, most of the time we watch a video we're not going to get anything like the impact of being there, and are almost never going to get emotionally affected by it.

Virtual Reality simulations can be a somatic marker machine in that we can routinely create direct experiences where the learner is the center of the action, the protagonist. In this role, the everything we're presenting to the learn impacts them directly.

VR Benefit: Learning Impact

Not all learning is, or should, entail emotion as commonly understood – and learning of a list, or a formula, probably doesn't really benefit from VR anyway.

However, much of what we do want to learn is emotionally relevant – whether it's how to conduct a meeting, or how to create a weld. This is true because emotion is both more and less than we typically think. Emotions are not just the feelings we have about them, the two are distinct processes. Emotions are nonconscious, whereas feelings are usually conscious. Emotion, as currently understood, is actually the body preparing for what it thinks is coming next. It is a program for action, neither 'good' nor 'bad.’

these preparatory changes, like shallow breathing, increased heart rate, rush of blood to the head, and so forth. So when we think we're about to fight, we get angry. Our heart rate goes up, we start breathing hard, vision narrows, and adrenaline spikes. Similarly, when things are looking very good, we feel happy. Our heart rate slows, serotonin is released and we notice more details, are open to suggestions and new experiences. In each case, those changes cause a feeling, which is what we notice.

Those feelings teach us what is important, because they are the subconscious mind's reaction to what's going on, and when we react emotionally, it tells the rest of the brain that something is important.© 2018, Aquinas Learning, Inc 21

Feelings are what happen when we recognize

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/528151/the-importance-of-feelings/

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/528151/the-importance-of-feelings/

In his work on emotions and feelings, Dr. Antonio Damasio coined a term, to refer to the mark that an emotional episode has, and its powerful effect as a recall cue. Somatic markers are aspects of a memory that result from emotional episodes, and are why we have vivid memories of past events that made an impression.

As we consider why Virtual Reality will be a better way to learn, we should also consider the power of fully engaged emotional reactions. The sort of reactions that come from the brain thinking that something is really happening to the you.

As we consider why Virtual Reality will be a better way to learn, we should also consider the power of fully engaged emotional reactions. The sort of reactions that come from the brain thinking that something is really happening to the you.

When something is happening to someone else, or in a video, we can imagine how it is relevant to us, just like a story. But this is a more abstract relevance that doesn't penetrate quite like personal experience.

In contrast, when learners are in a VR simulation, surrounded by stimuli that tell them this experience is real, and is really happening to them, there is no doubt about the relevance of what's being experienced. Suddenly an entirely new level of learning can be achieved, as if we were experiencing it in the real world.

But unlike the real world, where things o�en happen in a confusion of competing stimuli, in VR we can create experiences that are cleaner, designed to focus the mind on what we're trying to teach. We can dial up the emotional content, for example by showing what happens when things go horribly wrong, in a safe environment.

And we can do one more amazing thing. We can experience these things as someone else. Research into the by Jeremy Bailesen and Nick Yee has shown that when we embody someone of a different race, or different height, we take on that persona, and can be impacted accordingly. This promises to be nothing short of revolutionary for development of teams and managers.

Imagine the impact on a manager's development if their diversity training involved spending a half hour as a minority overhearing off-color jokes, or as a woman enduring inappropriate teasing and proposals. The degree to which any of this behavior would be tolerated would drop precipitously.

Virtual Reality has potential to dramatically speed up how certain skills are learned, and deepen the degree to which those skills are learned. Above we've explored some of how and why that will be true.

“Make sure to really understand tasks, the gaps & processes you are looking to improve, because VR can show them in context, very specifically”

- Chad Udell, Managing Partner, Float


“proteus effect”

“somatic markers,”

https://vhil.stanford.edu/mm/2007/yee-proteus-effect.pdf

https://vhil.stanford.edu/mm/2007/yee-proteus-effect.pdf

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatic_marker_hypothesis

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatic_marker_hypothesis

VR Benefit: Exactly Replicate Simulations

The power of repeatedly experiencing the same experience is unique enough that it takes some explanation to fully appreciate. There are three key ways a repeatable simulation add unique value: Pattern learning, assessment and optimization.

Pattern-learning

Most of what matters in business and life happens relatively rarely, so the best we can do is tell stories or maybe watch a video. The ability to put someone into one of these normally rare scenarios over and over means they will be prepared for when it actually does happen. To illustrate this point, imagine if you could create a simulation for any of these 10 things, and have your team go through them 20 times, or 30 times? Their command of the situation would be incredibly improved

Ten Simulation Use Cases (Eric Marcus, Professor of Organizational Psychology at University of New Haven)

1. Giving Feedback

2. Giving Negative Feedback

3. Conflict Resolution

4. Self-reflection

5. Creating effective teams

6. Team Conflict

7. Evaluating performance of white collar work

8. Creating space for teams to work together

9. Sales training

10. Negotiation

Each of these is difficult, and each has real risk if handled poorly. As you can imagine, this list could be as long as we want, but it represents a reasonable snapshot of how many different 'moments' in the course of business we encounter where doing a good job is worth the time & effort to practice. Virtual Reality provides exactly that opportunity.

Yet without feedback, practice is much less powerful. And practicing in VR should be possible without someone else there coaching & providing feedback – we should be able to automate much, or all, of it.


Assessment

Across a workforce, it can be very difficult to ensure competencies are adequate and improving. Creating a common simulation that everyone goes through has the benefit of ensuring a common understanding of key ideas and a common set of criteria against which to assess current capabilities and benchmark growth over time.

Assessment in VR is a big deal. You're not always teaching, sometimes you want to see workers in action. Not everyone who passes a written exam is suitable for things like driving a crane.”

- Pinky Gonzales, Producer, Industrial Training International

This is especially important for behaviors, like negotiating or coaching, as these typically involve so many factors in a real-live scenario that assessments are difficult.

Optimization

As companies learn to use simulations for enterprise-wide training, they will also learn more and more of what works, and what doesn't. VR simulations will allow for optimization of training beyond anything previously imaginable, because we can control everything in the experience, and track all off it. Which means we can vary different elements to improve the simulation over time, and against different sub-groups.

This brings us to the next thing VR is particularly good at: tracking.

VR Benefit: Everything can be tracked

For any training, any practice that happens in the real world, it is very difficult to apply any but the most narrow of metrics. We can tell if someone did something, if they said something, if they answered questions, though having a digital means of capturing even these measures can be invasive and impractical.

Regardless of what we have in the room, we cannot easily track movements, or voice, or gestures. In VR, everything that is seen or heard has gone through a digital system, and can be tagged, tracked, and analyzed.

“Key point of VR simulations is the 'extra actions,” the things you wouldn't see on a flat screen. For example, a trainee looks ahead when turning a crane, which they wouldn't do when

watching a flat screen. You really move in VR, you don't in any other medium.”

- Kevin Barrett, Executive Director, Serious Labs


This new capability will take us some time to fully exploit, even as the technical ability to sense more and more of what users do in VR means that we can both represent more, and thus analyze more, of performance. This is as relevant to a CEO addressing a board as it is to a construction worker installing an electric socket. In both cases, there are best practices, understood 'best ways to get it done' that can serve as benchmarks against which performance in simulations can be matched.

The digital nature of VR also means that we can re-experience well done performances, including those of others. In fact, companies like have created a platform for doing just that. Imagine how powerful social learning becomes when you can show off well done simulations to your peers, as well as a coach or trainer.

“VR is uniquely positioned to collect analytics, setting standards for performance on a deeper, more specific level than in the past, and driving improvements over time.”

- Rod Recker, CTO, the Glimpse Group

xAPI and analyticsAnything we want to improve, we need to track. In the past, that meant tests and grades that were neatly arranged into rows, like an excel spreadsheet. The problem is, so much of learning happens outside of these tests and quizzes. At first, it might seem like we can just add more columns to our spreadsheet to include watching videos, or reading articles, or practice pitches, and so on. The problem is, none of these inherently have numerical scores, and every time something new happens, you would need to add a new column. But what if a lot of different things only happen once or twice?

The above scenario was played out in the media industry about 15 years ago, when tracking of media went from “did they watch this show, or that show,” to where did they click, where did they over, what did they say, etc. In similar fashion to the explosion of learning options that L&D teams face, marketing faced an explosion of consumer interactions that revolutionized the field of marketing.

Figure from https://experienceapi.com/overview/This is where the term “big data” comes from. It doesn't mean “a lot of data,” though of course that's usually true too. Big data refers to data that comes from unstructured sources. Instead of neat rows & columns like TV ratings or SCORM-based test & quizzes, data can come from any action the learner takes.


Vreal

Figure 2-1. xAPIhttp://www.experienceapi.com

http://vreal.net

http://vreal.net

http://www.experienceapi.com

http://www.experienceapi.com

We do this with a simple tagging process that boils down to “Subject,” “Verb,” “Outcome” – like “Jim read a book well,” with the addition of other meaningful tags on the end so that datapoint can get aggregated later for analysis. (more on xAPI syntax )

This sort of tagging and unstructured data creates mountains of datapoints, or what they call a 'data lake,' because you don't just add columns to get results. You run searches for tags, than analyze what comes back. The same datapoint could be involved in multiple different searches.

All of this is important because we have the incredible promise of these new learning-centric data lakes. And today's L&D industry has something the marketers really didn't have 15 years ago – powerful machine learning services that can take these data lakes and find patters simpler analyses could never find.

Building on our idea of simulations you can exactly replicate above: Imagine for a moment if your organization created a virtual reality simulation that every new manager had to experience. In fact, you mandated a certain number of hours before that new manager could formally give constructive feedback, or salary negotiations, or some other critical performance. Now imagine if every one of these performances was coded, and correlated with their performance over time as managers. In short order your organization would have the ability to improve that simulation, but also identify new manager that had higher potential, and optimize the instructions you gave to new managers. The impact would be enormous.

Now imagine that same sequence applied to sales people, or HR recruiters, or negotiators, or senior executives in media training. Similarly, what if every welder, every crane operator, every forkli� operator had to undergo the same sort of sequence.

This is just one way that the unique features of VR promise to completely change organizational learning at all levels.

“What is it like to walk in someone else's shoes? Books allow us to imagine it and movies allow us to see it, but VR is the first medium that actually allows us to experience it.”

- Nick Mokey Digital Trends Journalist

What's the state of the market now?Above we explored the hardware and so�ware that comprise the VR offerings available now. But what about VR Learning? Who is out there, how much are they doing, and what are we learning?

A deepening bench

VR learning is new enough that anyone in it hasn't been in it long. Many of the players, however, have been in eLearning for some time, and/or in 3D production for a long time. Indeed, we can


here.

https://xapi.com/statements-101/

https://xapi.com/statements-101/

look at four general 'types' of firms offering VR learning solutions:

1. Consultants

2. VR Startups

3. Production Houses/Agencies

4. eLearning specialists.

Each have their own approaches that make them appropriate for different client needs. Let's look at each briefly.

Consultants

There are a number of business consulting firms, from EndeavorVR to Accenture and others who start with the business problem and provide custom solutions that are considered, usually optimized for the client, and overall of the highest quality. These companies are o�en introducing virtual reality solutions as part of a larger engagement, and will o�en seek to create assets that “can be leveraged and therefore amortized across multiple business lines” lines” (Amy Peck, EndeavorVR).

VR Startups

There is always a flow of young companies who have identified something, like medical device training, or public speaking, where VR can add value. These solutions are not usually as polished as those coming from consultants, but their singular focus on the problem means they'll o�en involve technologies and features that might not occur to a generalist consultant or eLearning company.

Some of them design their so�ware to connect to L&D systems, and most can be assumed to be willing to adapt their systems as necessary.

“companies ask for everyday processes – unloading a truck, assembling something, standard training. O�en we're replacing role-play simulations, many of which are expensive”

- Dave Arendash, Senior technologist at Global Consulting Firm

Production Houses/Agencies

Many gaming production companies have a deep bench of VR-ready developers, because VR can be created with the same gaming engines these production houses use – primarily Unity3d and Unreal Engine 4. These companies have been branching into learning, creating experiences they sell as generally available “apps,” or custom solutions.


Production houses are o�en contracted by consultants, and their solutions are usually technically first class, with the quality of the VR experience depending on their client/partner to supply the contextual know how to ensure that experiences are accurate and provide good training. A great example of this sort of partnership is between ICI, a premiere crane operator training company, and Serious Labs, who act as a production house with strong L&D capabilities. Their crane simulators are top-notch and really push the boundaries of realism and effectiveness.

eLearning Companies

eLearning and Learning companies like Float, and PeVRformance Group bring a clear sense of how things are actually learned, and understanding of the L&D process and concerns, that others o�en do not, and can either have in-house development resources, or outsource some processes, while usually keeping the architecture and strategy in-house.

Good eLearning companies, like Aquinas, are first and foremost about learning, so tend to avoid the 'tech for tech's sake' concern that VR can sometimes bring, and usually recommend that virtual reality be part of a full course design vs. a stand-alone experience.

“VR is like the Matrix, you don't understand it unless you are in it”

- Marco Faccini, CEO PeVRformance

A couple of years ago, as VR was still new and unproven, there was concern that it was just another gimmick, and would go the way of “3D TV.” The technology world has had many examples of seemingly earth-moving products that turned out to be hype.

The thing that makes VR, and to a lesser extent AR, different is the experience itself. In abstract, just talking about it, L&D teams will not understand both the importance, and the permanent shi� in learning that VR represents.

Be careful to avoid using technology that's not advancing learning.”

- Colleen Bevenour, Consultant, Synchron8

The first real answer to how to get familiar with VR is to get into a headset and experience it. Go to a library, a Microso� store, a VR arcade, or a Best Buy and try it. In any on of these commercial venues, you have the opportunity to challenge the staff to impress you, to show you the coolest, most mind-blowing experience. Do so and you'll understand the impact VR can have.


What Can L&D professionals do to get familiar with Virtual and Augmented reality now?

A�er you've tried it yourself, you have the choice of how much time & effort you want to spend. In this eBook we've collected the top companies in VR Learning, and you can dive into almost any of their websites for white papers, blog posts, and case studies. Start with ours:

As you get more and more comfortable, ask yourself what problems in your company have not been solved. What skills are difficult or impossible to train & improve? VR is the total control of experienced reality by your learners – does VR present an opportunity to address these challenges?

Especially in Manufacturing, where there's a lot of rote skills-based knowledge transfer, VR provides a cost effective, customzable and collaborative platform.

- Shauna Heller, President North America, AiSolve Ltd

Deeper Look: Why VR WorksAbove we've discussed what VR is, how it works, and some of how it impacts our experience. Here I'll ask the reader for just a few pages of indulgence as I take you through some deeper ideas about how the mind navigates & operates in the world. This gives us a strong basis from which to consider more carefully how Virtual Reality might be used to impact learning.

Learning Is About Mental Representations

Every thing we think about, every concept we learn, must be represented in our minds. This is a big idea, because it means that things 'out there' must be represented 'in here,' and it turns out that the way we represent the world in our minds is based on our sensory experiences. Your past, from the time you were a baby, until now, has given your mind the building blocks of every concept you've ever known, or ever can know. Every idea, no matter how abstract, at some point relates to a physical sensation for its meaning.

This idea is known as or “embodied cognition.” There are a couple of key implications of this, so let me restate what we mean when we say that thinking is grounded in physical sensations in another way.

All words, ideas, sentences, concepts are related to other ideas & words, and are o�en either more specific versions, or more general versions, of the same category. Think of the difference between “home run,” “baseball,” “sports,” and “exercise.” Each of these is related to each other, with “exercise” at a higher level of abstraction from the lower-level “home run.” The reason this matters is because “exercise” has meaning to us not because of some words or pictures, but because at a deep level, our minds will represent that word with real sensations and activities that we've experienced. The same has been found to be true of everything from animals to job descriptions to higher math.


http://www.Aquinas.io/blog

“grounded cognition”



http://matt.colorado.edu/teaching/highcog/readings/b8.pdf

http://matt.colorado.edu/teaching/highcog/readings/b8.pdf

That we think in terms that are connected directly to experience underlies a new claim I'll make about virtual reality learning.

Through VR, we can provide new experiences that form the basis of ideas.

Virtual Reality is not the same as watching something, it is an actual experience of that thing. As a result, we're able to create experiences that replace the basis of ideas, add to them, or modify them.

As an example, earlier in my career I spent time in China as an advertising executive. We would frequently have meetings about campaign strategy that were marvels of confusion. 4-6 people would be in a room, earnestly trying to solve a problem, stymied by a lack of common ground. We would have smart people from the UK, the US, India, Hong Kong, Malaysia, and of course China, and what we thought of as 'brand equity,' or 'strategy' vs. 'tactics' were o�en different enough that we would spend lots of time just agreeing on basics. We would have to go down to specific examples, just as described by grounded cognition, so that everyone could understand the same thing.

In a similar vein, the difference between an expert and a novice is in part the sophistication of their mental representations, or Experts have experienced whatever the subject matter is many more times than novices, so have the chance to draw deeper conclusions and understand the subject at a higher level. Expert negotiators have seen “every trick in the book,” usually a lot of times. Senior sales managers have seen hundreds of sales situations.

Because we tend to build these higher-level ideas a�er a great deal of experience, and more to the point, a�er a great deal of experience that we've thought about and analyzed, we have an interesting opportunity with Virtual Reality: we can create situations that are experienced rapidly, with previously impossible levels of feedback from both the VR system and a coach or peer.

Next Generation Business Case Studies

About a century ago, business professors at Harvard adopted the case study method from their law school colleagues as a way to provide more realistic examples of key concepts. The idea of this approach is to give students 'experience' approximating the real world before they go out into it. And for many subjects this will remain a great way to think through issues such as contracts, law, financial projections and the like.

Virtual Reality offers a new version of the case study: we can now create simulations that match or exceed the complexity of a written case, but are executed in real-time, allowing the learner to experience the one thing a written case cannot: the confusing fog of anxiety & felt pressure while facing competing priorities.


knowledge structures.

Replacing Reality

Our minds are remarkably susceptible to the environment as we see it. Though we all believe we know what reality is, and feel we've got a firm connection to it, experiments have shown that this is much less true than we believe. Three examples develop this point: optical illusions, priming research, and influence studies.

1. Illusions: How we see the world can be more unstable than we'd like to admit. We've all seen optical illusions, where what we think we see either isn't really there, or is open to interpretation – Escher made a career of fooling the eye. This is important because it shows something fundamental in the human mind and how it views the world: we o�en think we see something because we expect it. The mind does what it can to make sense of the world, imposing sense where sometimes there isn't any.

2. Priming: But how we react to the world is o�en just as malleable. For example, decades of research have shown that a simple phrase or image, flashed at a subject, can reliably impact their behavior for some time a�erwards. For example, introducing the concept of 'old' will make people walk more slowly. Or introducing the idea of cheating can make people much less generous, even when the idea was introduced without the subject knowing.

3. Influence: how we act in the world in ways that are much less reliable than we'd like to believe. Studies have shown that the influence of others can make us doubt our own senses. For example, in 1951, Solomon Asch conducted a famous experiment that involved a number of subjects who were presented with two lines of equal length. Asch first introduced one experimental assistant who acted as if they were a subject, who declared that these two lines were not in fact the same length.

One person did not make a difference, but as the experimenters put in more and more assistants who, playing subjects, insisted the lines were different lengths, they began to see that some of the subjects, against the evidence of their own eyes, would agree that the lines are of different lengths.

Different people had different thresholds, and some never budged. The point to be made here is that our minds receive everything they know through senses that can be deceived. We have no direct line to reality, we must rely on our senses of what the world presents us.

Which brings us to the single most powerful thing virtual reality can do: it can re-define reality itself. We have seen a fantastic example of this in a set of experiments conducted by Nick Yee and Jeremy Bailenson at Stanford's Virtual Human Interaction Lab, in the Proteus Effect mentioned above.

In these experiments, subjects were put into VR, and given full bodies. Yee and his team then had the subjects do various activities that made them increasingly feel like these bodies were their own – they 'embodied' the avatars that they were inhabiting in the virtual world.

What was different about this experiment, though, is each of these subjects were put into a body that differed from their own. They were taller, more beautiful, or a different ethnicity. The


experiment then had others interact with the subjects to see what they would do, and what happened next was an amazing illustration of how malleable our very self-image can be.

The subjects took on the traits they associated with their new avatars. Taller avatars induced a sense of confidence. More attractive avatars created a sense of approachability, a less inhibited social style.

These changes came about because virtual reality does something no video or role-play can do: it allows a total immersion of the brain in the illusion you are trying to create. There is no other medium, or technique, that can do this, and the impact can be incredibly powerful.

Imagine the power of harassment training if you can put everyone through the experience of being the object of inappropriate behavior. More powerfully, imagine the impact if, when experiencing this behavior, the learner has already 'embodied' an avatar of a more vulnerable group.

It is said that virtual reality can be the ultimate empathy engine, and it works its magic because our minds are susceptible to illusions of entirely different realities, and VR makes those realities possible.

Sensemaking & VR

Apart from the fact that our minds can be tricked, they our minds are masters of making sense of the world. In fact, some of the methods above are in fact because of how we make sense of the world. When confronted with the constant barrage of events & stimuli, our minds look for patterns (e.g., illusions), early indicators of what to expect next (e.g., priming), and help understanding the world from peers (e.g., influence).

Using these tools, we make sense of the world over time by distilling real experience into concepts. These concepts in turn grow more and more sophisticated and abstract, and allow us to predict what might happen when we see a new situation, because we can classify it as a member of some category we've created. This makes a great deal of sense when we think of the brain as something that evolved to help the organism survive in the world. Better that all of our thinking be anchored in reality than any other alternative.

Almost everything about how our brains work makes sense when viewed through evolution, so let's look there for another interesting quirk about how our minds work. There are two broad classes of thinking: conscious and non-conscious. The diligent reader will have heard of Daniel Khaneman's “Thinking Fast & Slow,” or perhaps some other mention of what has become a well covered idea. The key point is that our conscious mind is slow, deliberative and very limited in its capacity. That's important, because it means we can fully concentrate on a few things, but as a practical matter it also means when distracted by our thoughts, we can miss important things in the environment.

Our minds deal with this by always trying to minimize how much thinking we do. We are mentally 'lazy' in that the mind will seek shortcuts, or heuristics, wherever possible. This


extends to using tools whenever possible to help with thinking. Ever since humans learned to represent numbers with groupings of rocks, we have 'outsourced' some parts of our thinking to the environment. I don't need to convince you that we do this now, as most modern people barely remember their own phone number, cannot navigate without GPS, and rely on the calendars utterly to keep time straight.

VR simulations give us the ability to add to the evidence, so to speak. Our categories can become richer, and our ability to make sense of the world grows more sophisticated. Indeed, each of the three ways we were fooled above can become less of an issue through the practice that a VR simulation can provide. We can better learn patterns, better understand what to expect, and rely on faulty peer opinion less.

How patterns can help with managerial decision making is what we turn to next.

Recognition-Primed Decision making

Expertise is the ultimate goal of all training, and the most difficult expertise to impart is that of decision making. Most decisions are made in messy circumstances that are hard to replicate, and whatever rules we try to teach almost always fail to work in practice.

A researcher named Gary Klein decided to understand decision making, especially under great stress, and spent years interviewing and studying first responders and military leaders. In time he would generalize what he learned to business leaders as well. What he found about decision making was striking.

Business schools try to teach decision making as a summary of all the pro's and con's. If asked how best to make a decision, many leaders with some business education will insist that is how they do make decisions. However, when Klein looked into it, he found what many consumer psychologists have found: almost no one makes decisions based on pro's and cons. Instead, we rely on simple rules of thumb, on fast processes that allow us to arrive at a 'good enough' answer.

What Klein proposed is that the key to effective decision making is to recognize what sort of situation you're in, search for what has worked in the past, then simulate in your mind whether that solution will result in disaster. If, a�er simulating the solution it appears to be low risk, that's the course of action the decision maker will pursue.

The point is that the key process of decision making is recognition of a scenario, then internal simulation of potential solutions. And this is where all that we've learned about VR comes into play. Business simulations can be constructed that ensure more managers experience key scenarios more o�en, and are armed with ideas about how to solve them.

In fact, because we can use the same simulation for every manager, we are able to ensure that everyone has the same baseline experience, and thus we mean the same thing when we refer to key words and concepts. These simulations are able to be paced, and in fact can be faded


examples as we discussed above. The final result is that companies have, for perhaps the first time, a scalable way to give their new managers, high potentials and “VP-track” candidates a series of experiences that can be repeated an unprecedented number of times, to teach them fast and sophisticated decision making processes.

We have, for the first time, the ability to build superior pattern-recognition in managers, so that they can learn what to do in a broader and more challenging set of circumstances. We can aggregate experience faster, vary its details more broadly, and include the requirement to reflect and consolidate learning in a way that real world experience simply doesn't allow.

Imagine, for example, a short VR simulation where a difficult employee conversation has to be managed successfully. The new manager can practice different approaches, have things utterly fail repeatedly, and experience success as they learn to navigate the situation well.

“The first thing an L&D pro should do is ask 'What competencies or issues is past training just not solving?' In many cases VR can offer a unique solution to these problems.'

- Marco Faccini, PeVRformance Group

Assessing VR Learning: A Second FrameworkIn the coming months and years, L&D teams will be encountering more and more ideas and proposals about using VR for learning. Let's look at a way to make sense of that, leveraging what L&D professionals already know, combined with what we've learned so far. In my talks about VR, I'll frequently present a simple grid framework to match what we know as strengths of VR, and a learning theory. I am fond of three theories of learning that bear on virtual reality.

1. Cognitive Load Theory

2. Situated Learning Theory

3. Multi-media Learning Theory

Each of these deserves its own book, and in fact some very good ones are out there, so please forgive the brevity of their treatment here.

Cognitive Load Theory

Above we discussed how the mind has limits. We now understand those limits better, and can thus create learning experiences that allow for these with the goal of improving learning speed and effectiveness. Cognitive load theory (CLT) breaks down the types of load the working memory might have to deal with into three types:

1. Extraneous load: distractions and irrelevant details. These should be minimized as much as possible.

2. Intrinsic load: the learning task itself. This can be more, or less complex. It is important that the task not be too difficult, or the learner will not have mental capacity to think about


what's being done and thus learn from it.

3. Germane load: The process of thinking about what we should be learning, and integrating new ideas with old ones. This is the core of effective learning. Reflecting on what we're learning requires three things: opportunity, ability, and motivation

a. Opportunity: do we have time? Do we have mental bandwidth? This is achieved by managing extraneous and intrinsic load.

b. Ability: Do we have the knowledge to really understand what we're doing? Two kinds of knowledge are relevant – is this the right difficulty for the learner, and does the learner know how to learn?

c. Motivation: Is the experience compelling? Have we made learning fun, but not so fun as to be distracting?

As we think about where VR can help, it is useful to look again at the things we know Virtual Reality is good at, and marry these to the key ideas of CLT.

Learning Theory VR Factor

Authentic Context Peripheral Practice Socially Constructed Knowledge

First Person Much more authentic when it happens to you

Presence “Being there” creates authenticity

Modeling is facilitated by being there

Conversations can be more compelling when learners are ‘there together’

Control over experience

VR experience can have unlimited authenticity of features & scenario

Recorded experiences of experts can be replayed for enhanced modeling

Digital experience can include others as observers, replay each others experiences, and include chat functions

Real time, immersive 3D

Real-time simulations add to authenticity

Blocking out the world

Authenticity can be total – no ‘disconfirming evidence’

�


As we can see from the above, not everything VR does well translates into better learning, some times it can distract. Indeed, the idea that any medium will be universally better than others isn't helpful, despite all of the excitement about new technologies. VR, and for that matter AR & MR, will all add value in some ways, but sub-optimize in others. It is our job to decide when those pluses and minuses matter most.

“…evolution has favored on-board capacities which are especially geared to parasitizing the local environment so as to reduce memory load, and even to transform the nature of the

computational problems themselves”

-Andy Clark, Supersizing the Mind

Using the VR Environment for Faded Examples

It turns out that the mind prefers to outsource items of memory and mental processes, for the reasons I mention above. As long as items & processes are outsourced to trusted tools that we know we have fast access to, we are o�en more comfortable with committing these items to a written list than trusting our o�en sketchy memory.

Most of the time, this outsourcing is a bit slow and cumbersome. We o�en get used to a notebook, or voice notes on our phone, etc. The trouble with these general tools is they're generic, not specific to a learning task, or a work task for that matter.

Here is where this concept of outsourcing helps us with learning, and how Virtual Reality provides a unique version of the tools we would otherwise use. For in VR, every single element of the experience is digitally controlled – everything you see & hear in VR came through a computer. This means that we as learning architects can create experiences where learners are able to 'offload' some of the learning task while they are working through whatever that task requires.

Instructional designers will tell you that o�en the best way to teach something truly new is to show the learner a fully worked example – show the skill being performed from beginning to end. Then we have learner do one part of the skill, then two, and so on until they're performing the whole thing. This is known as 'faded examples,' and was designed with cognitive load limitations in mind.

A virtual reality environment is perfect for worked examples, as we can show the learner exactly what we mean, in fact can have them experience what we mean, then allow them to take over in steps.

Aquinas does this with new manager training, where the learner is able to experience both sides of a coaching conversation, negotiation, and many other key managerial 'moments.' The


system allows us to include reminders and visual cues that help the learner offload some of the things they would normally need to remember.

However we've just scratched the surface. There are a growing number of tools and techniques that allow the virtual reality experience to include notes in mid-air (cf. Ken Perlin's Chalktalk), have coaches insert comments, and so on.

Situated Learning Theory

Most learning doesn't happen in a classroom, but happens when we're either watching someone or learning by doing. But how does this happen, and what are the important parts of the in-person learning experience?

In recent years, Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger have proposed the idea that learning happens in a location, that we learn best when we are situated in the environment where our subject matter is normally used. Bankers learn best in banks, managers learn best managing, welders learn best by welding. If this sounds like apprenticeships, that is the point. However, Lave & Wenger went further to dissect Situated Learning, as they called it, into some key elements:

1. Authentic context – knowledge needs to be presented in settings & applications that normally use that knowledge

2. Peripheral practice – learning of knowledge by novices from experts in a gradual process. This happens through a process of 'modeling' what experts are doing to capture important non-verbal process knowledge.

3. Socially constructed knowledge – while lists can be memorized, useful knowledge is o�en complex and includes elements that cannot be written down. We help each other learn these more complex knowledge structures through discussion and mutual discovery.


Learning Theory VR Factor

Authentic Context Peripheral Practice Socially Constructed Knowledge

First Person Much more authentic when it happens to you

Presence “Being there” creates authenticity

Modeling is facilitated by being there

Conversations can be more compelling when learners are ‘there together’

Control over experience

VR experience can have unlimited authenticity of features & scenario

Recorded experiences of experts can be replayed for enhanced modeling

Digital experience can include others as observers, replay each others experiences, and include chat functions

Real time, immersive 3D

Real-time simulations add to authenticity

Blocking out the world

Authenticity can be total – no ‘disconfirming evidence’

�

As we can see, Virtual Reality is made for situated learning, as we can recreate environments with much greater fidelity and authenticity than any other method, invite others to view, replay key experiences of our own, and performances of experts.

“VR allows us massively influence the amount of novelty the brain is receiving by controlling the statistical correlations of incoming sensory input, which in some cases induces extra

plasticity and increases learning abilities.”

- Sarah Hashkes, Co-founder, Virtual Bytes

So let's try our framework one more time:


Multimedia Learning Theory

The final learning theory I'd like to share is more of a collection of ideas & observations from multi-media learning. A few key ideas in Multimedia learning theory give us guidance for VR.

As we think of how to create great learning experiences in VR, lessons from earlier media help us, and many of these are not articulated o�en enough.

Before we dive into the top ten Multimedia learning principles, a higher level point has been discovered by Multimedia researchers – expertise matters. People who know more about a domain respond to media differently.

Specifically, experts tend to benefit much less from graphics than do novices. This is assumed to be true because experts already have images and representations of their own for a given domain, so supplying these for them requires that they spend time reconciling the supplied imagery with their own.

More generally, we find that experts react better to abstract lessons than they do to concrete, examples-based instruction. And for novices, the converse is true: novices react better to concrete, step by step examples than they do to abstract instruction.

This has important implications as we think of what sorts of VR learning we might create, and how we will leverage elements like social learning and graphics.


Ten Key MultiMedia Ideas That Help Us With VR Principle: Applicability to VR:

Multimedia principle: People learn better from words and pictures than from words alone.

Look to combine modalities in VR. It is easy to focus on just one, but the more ways we represent something, the more it will be learned.

Split-Attention principle: People learn better when words and pictures are physically and temporally integrated

Just as with video, create unified experiences.

Modality Principle: People learn better from graphics and narration than from graphics and printed text

VR is not currently a great medium for printed words, and this supports the use of narration vs. printed text.

Redundancy Principle: People learn better when the same information is not presented in more than one format

This moderates the above multi-media & split attention principles – we do not want to show identical information, but rather complementary information at the same time.

Signaling Principle: People learn better when cues are added that highlight the key information and its organization

This is more important in VR than in 2D video – the 3D environment can be confusing and we often need to signal to learners where they should be looking.

Segmenting Principle: People learn better when a multimedia message is presented in learner-paced segments rather than as a continuous unit

One of VR’s most important assets is the agency, the control, that we can give learners.

Pre-training Principle: People learn better from a multimedia message when they know the names and characteristics of the main concepts

VR allows us to repeat the same experience over and over, but we are also able to give learners some pre-reading before VR experiences.

Voice Principle: People learn better when the words of a multimedia presentation are in conversational style rather than formal style, when the words are spoken in standard-accented human voice rather than a machine voice or foreign-accented human voice

This will apply in VR just like in video

Image Principle: We learn better when on-screen agents display humanlike gestures and movements; People do not necessarily learn better when the speaker’s image is on the screen.

Two points here. The first is that avatars are not always needed, the second of course is that when they do, they should display the ‘signs of sentience’ we discussed above.

�


ConclusionIn the past two sections we've covered a great deal about what VR is, how it works, how it is being used, and how to make it work for you. The biggest takeaway we'd like to leave is that Virtual Reality is a known quantity, it is already being used by a large number of companies, and is ready for your organization.

We are learning how to use it more and more effectively, and the number of options for L&D continues to grow. VR is not, however, as integrated with everyday L&D as it will be, for now it is similar to a business simulation or other valuable but non-LMS learning experience. Unlike some of these other learning experiences, however, Virtual Reality learning can take full advantage of xAPI and the growing LRS ecosystem that will make VR integrate seamlessly with the learning experience platforms and LMS-successors of the future.

We invite you now to review the 25 case studies we've collected. Each of these are a fast overview, with links to learn more about the companies that are offering these products and solutions. .


Case StudiesSECTION 3

Company Problem Solution Reference URL Aquinas New managers are

often trained in how to run & manage meetings. Most materials are abstract, or difficult to process vignette videos.

WebVR simulation that is distributed via mobile for learners to experience the points being made first hand.

Volkswagen Sharing of knowledge & know-how across different business units

10,000 global staff to use VR-enabled simulations & instruction

Industrial Training International

Cranes are expensive, having many kinds is difficult, and showing ‘failure’ isn’t an option.

Virtual Reality simulations that include physical controls from real cranes. They have three published, with a further nine planned in 2018. Each of these comes with 350 scenarios to train for every eventuality.

EndeavorVR Forklift Simulator: Forklifts are common and companies have many operators who need assessment, training, upskilling and refreshers.

A flexible forklift training program that is used on the actual forklift, without the need for expensive bucks. Raymond markets the VR training to its customers as a value-added service to existing training programs.

�

This section is a collection of cases, presented very briefly, for two purposes. The first is to illustrate just how much is going on, the second is to spur ideas for your own use. We present the problem, the solution, and screenshot.


http://www.aquinasvr.com

https://www.vrroom.buzz/vr-news/business/volkswagen-train-10000-staff-vr-2018

https://www.iti.com/vr

https://www.raymondcorp.com/news/2017/raymond-announces-launch-of-virtual-reality-simulator

https://www.raymondcorp.com/service/training/virtual-reality-simulator




http://www.vrroom.buzz/vr-news/business/volkswagen-train-10000-staff-vr-2018


















PeVRformance (UK)

DHL airplane loading: DHL loads many airplanes per day, and unskilled loading operators will often waste space. Airplanes are too expensive to ground just for training, and building a mockup doesn’t allow the distributed workforce to all receive training.

Creation of a two person, roomscale VR experience where operators can practice stacking boxes inside of a virtual plane.

InMarSat

Desert uplink assembly Simulation Problem: Inmarsat routinely sets up satellite uplinks in desert and other difficult environments. These inaccessible situations were difficult to train for.

A multiperson, voice-enabled simulation environment where learners could be coached while they assembled the uplinks.

BoonVR Medical Device Training: new surgical procedures often involve a mix of new hardware and processes. These are difficult to train at scale, and videos often don’t reflect the complexity their use entails.

360 video-based VR training, with key interactivity in a ‘choose your own adventure’ flow.

Accenture/EON Reality

Mining: Rio Tinto wanted a way to show what the future, “smart worker” would be.

Accenture/EON created a VR experience that allows the user to navigate a virtual mine, with many of the same decisions & pressures as a real worker.

Lincoln Electric Unions, large metal fabricators and others need to assess and train large numbers of welders, but welding pieces can become expensive.

VR simulation of welding with Lincoln products.

�© 2018, Aquinas Learning, Inc 43

http://bit.ly/2ryKopG

https://vimeo.com/237379928

http://www.boonvr.com

https://www.eonreality.com/portfolio-items/virtual-reality-indudtrial-application/

equipment/pages/vrtex360.aspx















https://equipment/pages/vrtex360.aspx



PeVRformance (UK)

DHL airplane loading: DHL loads many airplanes per day, and unskilled loading operators will often waste space. Airplanes are too expensive to ground just for training, and building a mockup doesn’t allow the distributed workforce to all receive training.

Creation of a two person, roomscale VR experience where operators can practice stacking boxes inside of a virtual plane.

InMarSat

Desert uplink assembly Simulation Problem: Inmarsat routinely sets up satellite uplinks in desert and other difficult environments. These inaccessible situations were difficult to train for.

A multiperson, voice-enabled simulation environment where learners could be coached while they assembled the uplinks.

BoonVR Medical Device Training: new surgical procedures often involve a mix of new hardware and processes. These are difficult to train at scale, and videos often don’t reflect the complexity their use entails.

360 video-based VR training, with key interactivity in a ‘choose your own adventure’ flow.

Accenture/EON Reality

Mining: Rio Tinto wanted a way to show what the future, “smart worker” would be.

Accenture/EON created a VR experience that allows the user to navigate a virtual mine, with many of the same decisions & pressures as a real worker.

�



https://www.boonvr.com


https://www.eonreality.com/portfolio-items/virtual-reality-industrial-application/















Lincoln Electric Unions, large metal fabricators and others need to assess and train large numbers of welders, but welding pieces can become expensive.

VR simulation of welding with Lincoln products.

RealityWorks Guideweld

Students need ‘safe’ experience before using an arc welder, and these experiences are difficult to scale for all students.

A virtual reality welding experience for students that is cheap but effective.

US Navy Ships require a large number of workers who work with expensive equipment. Training and assessing in a faster, more agile manner gives cost and speed benefits.

Creation of large scale VR system to train across different equipment

Schneider Electric

It dangerous and expensive to train workers in medium voltage applications

A VR experience that simulates key skills

British Police Domestic abuse situations are often the most dangerous for police

Simulate different scenarios and train for appropriate responses

Vantage Point Sexual Harassment training is often ineffective

Use VR simulations to create real empathy and drive change

�


http://www.lincolnelectric.com/en-gb/equipment/training-equipment/pages/vrtex360.aspx

https://www.realityworks.com/products/guideweld-vr-welding-simulation

https://blog.schneider-electric.com/services/2018/02/22/use-virtual-reality-medium-voltage-equipment-safety-training/

http://www.bbc.com/news/av/uk-wales-43121253/police-use-virtual-reality-to-help-tackle-domestic-abuse

https://www.cio.com/article/3254188/it-skills-training/how-vr-can-improve-anti-harassment-training.html

https://www.nsrp.org/project/virtual-reality-training-2015-410/





































Lowe’s Staff need to understand what’s needed for DIY projects

VR simulation to illustrate different DIY scenarios

Walmart Christmas holidays are often difficult to train

Creation of Virtual Reality scenarios

�


https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/314066/lowes-extends-virtual-reality-training-from-shopp.html

http://newsok.com/w

almart-says-virtual-

reality-training-is-a-

hit-with-its-

staff/article/5573001








http://newsok.com/walmart-says-virtual-reality-training-is-a-hit-with-its-staff/article/5573001






ContributorsSECTION 4

I spoke with a number of amazing companies and professionals in the VR Learning industry. That industry is growing quickly from a solid base of production, eLearning expertise and learning sciences generally. Some of the smartest among them cannot be listed here as we didn't want to pursue internal corporate clearance for use of their brands.

Name Organization URL What They’ll Help You With

Kevin Barrett Serious Labs Design & production of VR training experiences

Fabien Benetou Lucid Web WebVR players for brands & companies

Colleen Bevenour

Synchron8 Strategy & business consulting, strong L&D practice

Stephen Dornsife

Leading Digital Payments Company

Accomplished L&D professional

Marco Faccini PeVRformance Aquinas UK Partner: VR training consulting & production

Alice Formwalt StreetSmartsVR Simulations for police departments

Pinky Gonzales NetRush Podcaster, communicator, thoughtful training pioneer

Sten Hallock Aquinas Immersive training platform, design & production of Virtual & augmented reality training

�© 2018, Aquinas Learning, Inc 47

http://seriouslabs.com/

https://www.lucidweb.io/

http://www.synchron8.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephen-dornsife-0371b311/


http://netrush.com/


https://www.streetsmartsvr.com/













http://netrush.com/

http://netrush.com/



http://www.streetsmartsvr.com/

http://www.streetsmartsvr.com/

Sarit (Sarah) Hashkes

Virtual Bytes Intersection of neuroscience, VR and learning.

Damon Hernandez

VR pioneer, founder AEC Hackathon WebVR & 3D Web evangelist

Sherry Nolan Larson

Learning IDeologies

Instructional Designer, eLearning consultant

Jacob Leowenstein

Samsung Next Media thinker, venture capitalist, VR enthusiast

Eric Marcus University of New Haven

Professor of Organizational Psychology at UNH, leadership thinker, business consultant

Amy Peck EndeavorVR Tech consulting, design & execution of XR programs & solutions

Kristin Rainville Sacred Heart University

Learning specialist, learning theory

Rod Recker The Glimpse Group

All things VR, co-organizers of NYVR Expo (with Aquinas). Training design & production.

Bonnie Riedinger

University of New Haven

eLearning expert,

Sarah Schwab The Experience Accelerator

Products aimed at leadership training

Chad Udell Float Overall elearning production & design, xAPI pioneers

Andrew Downes Watershed Learning Analytics on VR and other learning data aggregated using xAPI.


http://virtual-bytes.com/

http://www.aechackathon.com

http://samsungnext.com/

https://www.newhaven.edu/

http://www.endeavorvr.com/

https://www.theglimpsegroup.com/


https://theexperienceaccelerator.com/

https://gowithfloat.com/

http://www.sacredheart.edu

https://www.watershedlrs.com/























Getting Involved: the SIMs Group

For almost a year, a global group of academics, instructional designers, VR companies and enthusiasts have been meeting monthly for a call to discuss developments in virtual reality simulations, primarily for learning. This group is also designing and fielding a series of experiments that will begin to uncover when and how much different factors make VR effective. These including factors like photorealism, interactivity, audio, and more.

Please contact me for more information at

About Aquinas Learning

Founded in 2015 by your fearless author, Aquinas is dedicated to improving learning outcomes through technology. We have chosen to focus on producing learning systems for Virtual Reality, and later Mixed Reality, as learning because they genuinely make a difference. We lead efforts such as the NYC VR Learning meetup, the NYVR Expo, and the SIMs group above because we believe the potential of VR/MR is just now being explored. We hope that this book helped you understand some of what VR can do, and look forward to seeing you on the journey ahead.

And of course if you need some VR done, we’ve formed a partnership with PEVRformance of the UK and provide some amazing services... give us a ring at 203.524.9539 or [email protected]


[email protected]



Call us, or visit to discuss your VR/AR training needs – consultation is free!




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A Primer for Learning & Development - Aquinas Learningaquinas.io/wp-content/uploads/VR-Learning-Primer... · weak sense of presence, and I've seen extremely compelling content in