Gear up for training

Thoughts on how the Samsung Gear VR can help us train people

from_the_workbench_01With computing, I go back more than a little bit in time.  When I was in college, I used to go by the computer science room and briefly glance at the “compositional” posters hanging on the wall… made by dot matrix printouts and arrangements of dots and special characters.  Usually there was a feminine shape involved.  It didn’t hold a lot of interest for me at that point, if that was all you could do.  Of course, I read a lot of science fiction back then and knew there had to be more…

Later, when I moved to university, I took classes in Fortran.  I remember quite vividly working at a punchcard “typewriter” manually writing lines of code…  then, with a stack of punchcards in hand,  standing in a long line of people at the feeder unit.  There were two students, wearing white lab coats, standing in a raised center area.  Down below, we coders stood in a row and shuffled forward until we could give the upper students our stacks of punchcards.  In between was a conveyor belt.  The students on top separated each bundle of cards with a metal divider, and the cards rolled on into the computing machine (which dominated the center of the room).  Probably the reason why my memory is so vivid is because one small punch-in error would result in a broken line of code… and you would have to start over.  Doing that enough times is both maddening and instructive.  You quickly learned to become extremely detail-oriented.  I then started working part-time for the Dean of the program in which I was enrolled.  He had a special project underway with Canada’s National Research council, using a computer language called Natal-74.  My job was data entry, for a project that was composing a set of drill questions to help people test their knowledge of punctuation and grammar.  That was my first taste of using computers to help educate people.  And in one way or another, I’ve been on that tack ever since.

I’ve worked or used basically every computing format that can help people learn, starting with early Apple IIs…  My friends had IIe units, mine was the Apple IIc (still in my garage; still worked last time I checked).  I’ve used early PCs, floppy disks of all sizes (8”, 5.25”, 3.5”), 3M laserdiscs, CD-ROMs, and then in the late 90s, we moved onto the web with LMS and LCMS systems and now into our palms on tablets and smartphones.  And so you can probably predict that I get pretty excited about new technologies and how they can expand our ability to access information and training.

While the Oculus Rift is still being groomed as a hard-wired gaming platform, the joint venture between Oculus and Samsung has resulted in quick iterations of the Gear…  first the Innovator edition and now the Gear VR which is now widely available.  (And yes I have one, and no, it is not in my garage.)
So here’s how I’ve spent my time with the Gear VR so far.  (And I would estimate I’ve spent 7 to 8 hours with it on me or on others.)

  1. Exploring the Oculus store for its already-wide-variety of apps, videos and “experiences”.
  2. Sharing this “experience” with family, friends and co-workers.
  3. Talking with them about how to extrapolate from some of the demonstrations you can download… to real-world training scenarios.

To put this in historical context, the immersive experience is very much an extrapolation of the foundation that QuickTime VR first created.  In 2003 – 2005, we were using QuickTime VR to create immersive experiences for such tasks as identifying faults in equipment… and exploring hazardous situations that could be safely “staged”.  And of course professional and amateur photographers have been creating spherical photos for just as long (or longer).

What’s new now?

It’s the much much greater sense of sensory immediacy.  You can don the Gear VR and stand on the top of the Eiffel Tower… stand 5 feet from Paul McCartney in a concert… and because of the total visual “load” (hopefully not overload), you are there.  You are really there…!  When you see the Jurassic dinosaur nosing forward to you, it’s real.  I watched one co-worker wearing the Gear VR giggle like crazy because he thought a Tyrannosaurus Rex was going to suddenly leap up from behind him in the Jurassic app.  That didn’t happen, but that was OK.  You can explore a home in Maui by going from room to room.  You can play a game of defusing a bomb which involves one person wearing the VR and solving the problem with other non-VR teammates who have the defusing codes.
And then you can ramp up the sensory load further by putting in sound-dampening earbuds so it’s just you and the virtual experience.  Jump onto a surfboard in Tahiti… spin around a fantasy spaceship on the Syfy channel.  It’s a much much much more powerful personal experience than QTVR…  and it’s a big evolutionary step forward, no doubt.

From a training perspective, my thoughts begin in similar directions as a decade ago, and then build from there.

  • Orientation (go places, especially places that would require travel and time; do this in spherical photos or videos).  Imagine making this part of an employee orientation program.  Since you shouldn’t spend more than 30 minutes looking at a VR, if an orientation is happening with a group, it could be scheduled in periodically through the session.
  • Safety training (explore operations or facilities that would normally require hazardous environment certifications).
  • Orientation + assignments (explore this scene as a role model, then go to this scene and locate the five defects)
  • Team-build by working together to solve problems.  Companies like GE have used Second Life for training with teams and multiplayer digital Avatars.  Some of the Gear VR games are multiplayer.
  • Combine technologies.  For example, use photo- and video-realistic scenes and then create cutaways or peelbacks that take people inside, behind, under, etc.

It’s always been my experience that new technological solutions give us the opportunity to create better and better training options.  From our perspective, as an IBM Business Partner specializing in LMS and LCMS, we’ll be exploring creative ways to link this technology to reportable data.  For example, one simple way to do that would be to use the “orientation + assignment” concept.  Use the Gear VR environment for orientation and assignment… then come back into an LCMS course and answer questions about their observations.  From the learning design perspective, the questions would have to be very closely tied to what the learners should have seen… and rigorous enough that people couldn’t guess their way through.

One additional note of caution: I found the Gear VR (especially when you have earbuds in) to be very isolating.  This can be helpful in some cases, but designers will need to factor this in especially if they are considering a group experience such as an orientation.  I’ve had the buds in and people literally have to tap me on the shoulder to break me out of my “immersion”.
Let us know what you think; we’d love to hear from you… and work with you… on this topic!