You want to onboard new employees, or train blue-collar workers to operate complex machinery without any risk to their safety or your resources. You need platforms that negate language barriers and short attention spans, and isolate people in stimulating and transportive learning environments. Maybe, you want to cultivate a greater sense of teamwork, so that abstract designs can be visualized in ways that maximise productivity.
Virtual Reality
VR enables immersion bereft of external distraction by immersing users inside a digital (or photographic) world with a head-mounted display. The use of controllers, which use real-time tracking, enables users to interact with precision, and have total control of the digital world. Not only does VR boast higher levels of engagement than traditional media or other digital platforms, but it enables improved learning with higher levels of retention. With the opportunity to replicate training experiences at scale with reduced cost, and have trainees run simulations over and over, VR has proven it’s not just a gimmick.
Augmented Reality
If you want to fuse the real with the virtual, augmented reality is a technology that offers situational context improved with digital assistance. Anything that is an image can be a trigger, so pre-existing training materials or installations can be updated with more media like 3D models or videos. Objects can also be recognised by computer vision, so your machinery, for instance, can have a digital counterpart with interactive annotations.
VR
You want trainees to have the agency to act freely, to think on their feet, and to experience the consequences of their actions from a first-person perspective, making them responsible and self-aware.
The power to create any conceivable scenario is yours, and you have a specific learning goal in mind. By gamifying your training course, learners have clear objectives to achieve, and leaderboards to climb. They must prove their understanding in dynamic testing environments, and you want to see the results. You want to understand where they look, the speed of their response, and the object of their focus.
You want to fast-track their understanding of complex concepts, increase the efficiency of your workforce, and minimize human error.
You want to give people a memory, so that they can learn from it. The only way they can be prepared to handle the unique emotions of an uncommon event is to have experienced it before. The uncertainty of being in a new environment, or meeting a high-profile person, or responding to a crisis, is substituted with confidence and certainty.
You want people to step outside of the training centre, without leaving the room.
AR
You want to leverage the power of digital immersion without learners leaving their place of work. You need to explain the specific details and usage of specific hardware inside of a specific environment.
Learners need to carry on as usual with as unobtrusive a teaching aid as possible, and they need to see exactly how to perform a task, and exactly what tools to use.
You want experts to advise on processes in real-time, and guide learners without them having to demonstrate by example.
