Pt.3? Make sure you’ve read Pt.1 & Pt.2 first ideally as I continue to look back over the past 9 years I’ve spent in and around VR, as I prepare to start a new role.
Getting Interpersonal
Everyone and their dog has made some form of VR prototype around construction or health and safety, the nature of the technology naturally aligns to these kinds of experiences for hard skills. However it was when we first met members of the L&D team from Lloyds Banking Group when we first dipped our toes into what is now the biggest sector for immersive learning experiences — soft-skills, or interpersonal skills training.
They really liked the idea of using VR but weren’t sure where and how finance could utilise it effectively. We eventually agreed with them to build a short concept experience around some of their existing training content, having a difficult conversation, to allow them to pilot, measure and build internal awareness of the possibilities.
Suffice to say it was a success and three more projects were signed off over a couple of years, growing in complexity and length with each release. From 15 to 150 to 1500 lines of dialogue of branching narrative, from one to four main characters featuring, these were rolled out on Oculus Rift initially but scaled when the enterprise Oculus Quest was released in 2019.
Dealing with empathy and embodiment, these experiences pushed the team in terms of pipelines, design and eventually led to the studio creating their own processes for scripting, character mo-cap and animation to ensure efficiencies in development allowed for more time budget to be spent on the scenarios and learning outcomes. These are continuously being enhanced and improved to pass those efficiencies onto the clients and budgets.
After his first appearance in one experience, the character Jonathan (who was having a really bad day) had to have a cameo via a telephone call with the learner in a follow-up project. So many people had connected with him and empathised with his situation, but the training content hadn’t provided an outcome for him as part of the narrative. To give them closure, we scripted a call from Jonathan to cover-off how his life had improved and he was back on the right track, after his earlier interactions with the learners.
Being big fans of Mel Slater’s work at the university of Barcelona, and subsequently Sylvia Pan’s at Goldsmiths in London, both around virtual humans, empathy and embodiment, we took this a stage further for the experience created for Severn Trent Water. By swapping characters and hearing internal monologues and perspectives, Coaching was a powerful piece nominated for a few learning awards.
One of the good things to come out of The Drawing Board, which had been setup as an internal R&D skunkworks and the first ventures into understanding productisation and creating off-the-shelf content, was D&I Perspectives. Developed in partnership with a global financial institution, using four real world stories from their staff, D&IP allowed the team to experiment with low-cost live actor capture and playback in VR, as well as exploring how more traditional elearning illustrated animation art styles would work in VR. Wrapped by a framework of an hour-long session on microaggressions in the workplace, it’s a powerful discussion starting point experience, now available on the Quest App Lab Store to try out.
Standalone
First there was the tether. Then we stuck our phones into Cardboard, or plastic, but that was a bit crap and put a lot of people off VR (although it was super cheap and accessible for those looking to get into VR development from less-affluent backgrounds). Then bits of phones were put into all-in-one devices to at least remove the faff of putting a mobile phone handset in, but it will still 3DoF and didn’t do positional tracking. Then we (they) stuck cameras on the sides of the 3DoF headset and lo! they became 6DoF full VR devices.
Tethered VR was always full of pain and friction points; external sensors to plug in, HDMI cables, USB3 ports being good enough, trip-hazards, tripods, faff faff faff and barriers to adoption at scale. The benefit of tethered VR of course is the powerful PC it’s attached to, capable of rendering far greater detailed scenes and geometry than the current standalone device chipsets can only dream of, but with the same level of interaction possible, for many, the drop in graphical finesse wasn’t so important.
When standalone devices first started appearing commercially in 2019, a lot of our conversations suddenly got a lot easier with enterprise clients. All the pain points above were gone, although a new set of their own were added (more later), and the costly PC necessary to drive experiences made VR suddenly a lot more appealing, to home users too. With a much lower price point, although as suspected and recently confirmed, some devices were undercut to enable market domination, hiding the true cost of devices or making others look more expensive in comparison.
This also meant new audiences were picking up VR for the first time. They might have tried it here and there at events or trade shows, or even in a VR arcade with the kids, but as shown in recent talks, whole new non-techy, non-early-adopter audiences are buying standalone VR headsets. This means devs have to cater for these audiences or risk alienating them or their experiences if they don’t know what to do or how to do it, if it’s their first time in VR on your app.
The early-adopter hardcore VR user was typically into gaming and had a high-end gaming PC already or upgraded their graphics cards (until recently for a spell, at great cost) and was able to figure out this new medium and input. Typically the early focus was on gaming, rightly or wrongly, which initially labelled VR as a thing only for gamers or techie nerds to the rest of the world.
Thankfully, although we’ve lost Oculus Share and whilst there are 3,000+ SteamVR compatible titles (although many are little more than a tech demo), places like SideQuest and now AppLab exist to allow devs to release other experiences beyond just games to wider audiences beyond the tightly curated Quest Store. Of course there’s Viveport for PC, Vive Focus 3 & Flow (although it supports all other major headsets too) and PICO are building their own consumer offering with Neo 3 Link standalone device and storefront.
The world is starting to really wake up to the potential of VR for a variety of use cases; it took a long time coming but once “we” stopped pushing games front and foremost, traction started happening across all verticals.
From a work / enterprise perspective, being bits of computing kit, we had to do a lot of work and education to IT and security teams about how these things could be managed and operated safely and securely within the corporate networks. After a couple of false starts, and unfortunate sunsetting of some services, enterprise management of standalone devices has matured somewhat with a range of 3rd-party MDM tools out there to pick and choose from, treating devices like corporate mobile phones, laptops and PCs, locked down and secure. But still, we’re a long way from it being an easy path of onboarding for many organisations and studios are still having to do a lot of hand-holding and sales on the behalf of the hardware manufacturers to enable adoption at greater scale than a couple of devices for a pilot or PoC.
