With old fashioned boring training videos (e.g. safety) and training propaganda (e.g. anti-union messages) you could easily look away from the screen. Now they are gluing the screen to your eyeballs so that it's pretty much impossible to look away and not pay attention.
It will probably work. It's probably a good idea from the employer's point of view. It feels very dystopian.
Safety training is there for a reason... anything that helps employees pay attention to that could save their lives or the lives of others, so in that narrow application it feels like a good idea from everyone's point of view.
For me, there are things that might improve outcomes, but would be unacceptable.
For example, drugs that help with information retention. Mandatory memory enhancing brain implants. Drugs that adjust motivation/focus. Wires attached to eyelids to prevent you from closing your eyes.
The reason why VR used for training seems dystopian is that it removes choice. Or at least feels like it does.
I didn’t say it wasn’t. I noted the reasons why it might appear dystopian, and why other activities that could improve safety may also appear less than desirable.
I work in manufacturing. I can assure you our safety training is directly intended to reduce injury frequency and severity. We start each monthly manufacturing leadership meeting with a review of safety results and issues as literally the first topic.
Some of it probably appears foolish to new people, but it’s all from prior or realistically possible safety concerns. If it helps our insurance premium or lawsuit outcome, so be it, but we do it to not hurt or kill people.
Only slightly sadly, at this point in my career, I am corporate. None of us want to see our people hurt.
I get the cynicism, because it’s not wrong in every case of company policy. I’m sure there is a company somewhere who wouldn’t implement any safety policy unless required by OSHA, labor demands, or insurance. It’s not my experience working with, talking to, or being a manufacturing leader that that’s the primary driver in most companies.
If you think you have to glue content in front of their eyeballs, you've got bigger problems than fulfilling your legally mandated requirement for check-the-box training.
And that would be a fair comparison if before trainers were training with death-by-PowerPoint and now they were doing the same inches from trainee’s eyeballs.
However I’m hopeful that this new medium leads to interactivity by default, furthermore there are first mover advantages to be gained from improved engagement while VR is novel to most users.
"Improved engagement" in corporate training materials? I fear that's a concept that only exists in the sales literature of training materials creators.
I feel that improved engagement used to exist as a positive term before marketers took it and added all the marketing garbage that comes with it today. If something makes you less bored with teaching then it's worth looking at.
> Now they are gluing the screen to your eyeballs so that it's pretty much impossible to look away and not pay attention
You could wire a video signal straight into my optic nerves and I'l still tune out if it wasn't minimally engaging. I daydream about things random things, such as a programming puzzle I'm trying to solve, while I'm watching TV shows I love (looking at you Game of Thrones). Does anyone else experience this? Maybe it's an ADHD thing, which I have.
The video may have some parts that are slightly more on the left part of the screen and soma parts that are slightly more on the right side of the screen. If you don't look to the correct side, the system may send a small electroshock, make the video longer repeating the important parts until you pay attention, select a longer version of the video where the repetition is not obvious but they keep saying the same thing again or again, or let the system randomly select you for a voluntary group for a new training video tomorrow.
> make the video longer repeating the important parts until you pay attention, select a longer version of the video where the repetition is not obvious but they keep saying the same thing again or again, or let the system randomly select you for a voluntary group for a new training video tomorrow.
I've already had mandatory training that included all of these in various forms.
Too evil, so invert it instead. If you look at the right part you’re rewarded, and if you don’t the reward is withheld. Now people will fight for the right to stick their heads into the Skinner Box, even though the same reinforcement tricks are at play. I mean, it’s working for game developers.
To answer your question, yes, I do. It makes paying attention to what people are saying very difficult. I have to ask them to repeat exactly what they just said word for word, not because I didn't understand, but because I didn't hear them due to the video playing in my brain.
I'm not allowed to give any details, but I work for a major consulting company on a team where we do nothing but build VR training systems for major retail chain clients. The improvements in engagement, knowledge retention, and reduction in injury are very significant. Again, not allowed to say how much, but basically it's stupid for companies like this to not be using VR training these days. It's too easy to build for too great of a gain.
One more optimistic way to look at it is using VR it'll make the "boring training videos" much more engaging. I.e. I can think of that annoying video on plane which I hate to listen to, but with a VR where I'd actually have to open that door and jump in it'd be a much more engaging experience.
Seeing as how most corporate training videos still sit inside god-awful Flash or Java-applet based "corporate training" sites, and look like they were filmed in the mid-90s, I seriously doubt these poor employees are getting anything other than a basic stereoscopic video.
Eye-tracking in VR headsets is still a bit challenging but is certainly coming in future headsets. Once you have eyetracking in consumer headsets, forcing employees to have their eyes open is bound to happen.
Something beautiful about a company best known for exploiting workers, Walmart, teaming up with an expert is trampling over our personal privacy, Facebook.
Safety training is a good place to start, there’s a great argument for “it’s important and will save lives!”
Makes one wonder where the next stop on the road to our cyberpunk dystopia will be. Rift v2 will probably have eye tracking which will be a godsend to advertisers and if we all have them on our faces employers would love to know what we’re actually paying attention to.
The future is going to be great, awful, but great.
I get your sentiment, but people can still close their eyes if they don't want to pay attention. I would imagine most people find VR more engaging, and when it comes to safety, that is an important feature.
the next step is to tie the employees down to a chair while watching the training material...
Welcome to walmart training camp!, some of you are here because some kind of incident/accident during your usual workflow, please take a sit on this special brainwashing machine while some of the assistants tie you down on the sit... It will last only 12 hours for the first seven days and after that we will have a quiz and you can go back to work.
After trying VR (Oculus Go) for the first time, I am convinced VR maybe the future of education.
Being able to watch something in 3D as opposed to just 2D video is like night and day.
Btw, I'm not talking about 360' videos, I'm talking about the 3D stereoscopic ones. When I watch a video in 3D, I can actually totally relate to what I am watching and it is as if I am actually there. It really helps with perception and understanding the subject.
If your subject benefits from a 3d representation at all. I dare to say: most do not, just as most do not benefit from video.
I think the real revolution in teaching will be when we have enough well educated, well paid teachers. Imagine the level of immersion that could be accomplished with real-time individualized lessons!
True. And VR allows new school models with a wildly different cost structure than today's. You don't need a physical building, no physicial equipment and geographic location doesn't matter.
In addition, because VR makes project-based learning [0] more scalable, a teacher's time can be used more efficiently.
These cost-savings can be passed on to the students and the teachers (in the form of higher salaries). All this while improving average the education quality.
This sounds terrible to me. The process of learning, particularly when young, isn’t just about having the information fed to you. It’s about trying, failing and being shown where you went wrong. Quite literally, falling and being helped up. How do you get help diverse problems like handwriting, getting on with others and the millions of other situations teachers help with? Empathy via Facebook sounds bad.
A big problem with education in my opinion is that everyone who has been to school sees themselves as a teaching expert. The near-minimum-wage teacher who buy school supplies out of their own pockets, they are the experts.
Rant over.
Completely agree. And my whole point is that you can do that better in VR. Instead of meeting in the real world, meet in VR and learn there together with your friends and teacher.
A big part of learning is also in the social interaction. VR, no matter how good, will just never match that. You don't only need information, you also need interactions, real life interaction...
I think VR might help to some subjects, but having an all-VR experience seems an awful thing to me...
I think it's theoretically possible that one day VR might really be as good. But I also expect to be comfortably dead before that happens.
I'll note that TV was seen as the future of education for quite a while. And that videoconferencing has been the future of interaction since the early 1980s. The first never worked out. And although the jury's still out on the latter, it's undeniable that a) it's not as good, and b) it's taken a very long time for the technology to be reasonably useful.
Historically, people seem to confuse "we don't know what X can't do" with "there's nothing X can't do". Technoutopianism can be useful, in that optimistic people will try things out and discover where the limits are. The current wave of VR is interesting, but it's perfectly possible that it will end up in the same place as 1990s VR: a historically interesting wave of hype that turned out not to deliver much value that couldn't be gotten more easily with other approaches.
Yeah it's easy to point at tech that never worked out. But it's also impressive to look at the tech that did work out and no one 50 years ago would have been able to predict where society is now.
It's just more exciting to me to envision a future where VR will work out, and I will keep working on it under that assumption.
I think that's very dangerous. A lot of the tech that worked out only did so because the people working on it put users first, not technology first.
A classic example here is Apple. They did not make the first personal computer, the first MP3 player, or the first smartphone. Those were made by people focused on the tech. Instead, Apple took mostly-existing tech and really focused on delivering value to users.
I think a user-first attitude is important even when making consumer gadgets. But a student-first focus is vital for education. There are a zillion examples of educational tools and methods inflicted upon kids not because they were better for students, but because somebody wanted to prove something.
Yes sure I agree. But if you've spent time with some VR headsets (especially Oculus Go) you know that it feels like magic. And it enables things that without this tech weren't possible before. Sure, it has a long way to go, but I believe that there's path.
I'm sure the engineers at Apple also looked at the tech and were like "holy shit, this enables us to do crazy stuff".
I do know that it feels like magic. But then, so did the 90s wave of VR. I also agree that it in theory enables new things.
But in practice, nobody has demonstrated that those new things deliver more value. Again, consider 90s VR. Or how people were sure that home computers were the coming thing starting in 1970 (and probably earlier). But they didn't really become particularly useful or common until the arrival of the web browser. [1]
The engineers at jetpack and flying car and humaniform robot companies also said "Holy shit, imagine what we can do." We could look at the plans for manned space travel of 1940-1980, none of which panned out. Heck, we could look at 3D movies and TV, which have flopped repeatedly. And even at Apple there were plenty of times that they said that and were wrong. [2]
I'm really not trying to rain on your parade here. I'm happy to admit that this could really be the time VR takes off. But I'd love it if more VR proponents could accept that "feels like magic" is a novelty effect; that the history of 3D "feels like magic" products turning into giant flops goes back at least 150 years; and that this could be just another one of those things that ends up like 3D TV or Smellovision.
You know VR can have multiple people in it, right? Because you're taking a description of a virtual classroom with just as many humans as a real classroom, and declaring there is no "social interaction", and that really confuses me.
We'll never have enough high quality teachers. The more educated the populace becomes, the more demand there will be for ever higher levels of education.
Education is a class separator. What matters is relative education, not absolute.
Only to a degree. For example, a nation without decent lawyers or engineers could never become wealthy. Or, in other words, a nation of 100% illiterate people won't be as wealthy as a nation of 100% PhD, which shows that education is about more than just relative position within the population.
That question is way too broad to be answerable. VR won't be better at teaching you about writing than a book. If you want to teach biology or woodworking VR can be significantly better than a book.
I'm pretty skeptical of that. Books are great at teaching kids to solve integrals and write essays. I haven't seen any evidence to indicate that VR headsets would help with these skills.
VR is just a medium. Why would it not be just as capable at teaching kids to solve integrals and write essays? You may argue that it can't possibly do any better of a job than a book could, but I think it's unlikely that there is anything a book could teach you that a VR headset could not also teach you. After all, you could just digitize the book and read it in VR.
Also, it doesn't matter how good books are at teaching kids to solve integrals if 90% of them won't even give the book a chance, but can't wait to get on their headsets.
I think VR will be the future of a lot of things. I used to think it was sort of fad, like 3D movies but maybe a little cooler.
Then our GIS department bought one and I’ve tried it a few times now. I always feel constrained when I go back to my two monitors.
The interface and technology in general has some way to go, but I think VR will be the biggest tech revolution in my lifetime and I’ve been around since before the refrigerator was a common thing.
I'm really glad to hear that you enjoy VR. I have a similar feeling when using BigScreen to do work. All I really need is like twice the resolution so that text is clearer and we can essentially have unlimited scalable desktops.
Legible text that you can read without squinting and tracked keyboards will be the floodgate moment I think. I'd really like to see how an IDE can evolve in VR space, especially with collaborate features. It could probably make online offices a regular occurrence.
How does keyboard input work? Does it track the position of the keyboard and then show a digital equivalent in VR? Because I think most people can’t touch type essentially blindfolded.
can you elaborate? because nothing you mentioned has anything to do with education. the expected use of VR in education reminds me of the failure of nearly every other forced use of technology in education.
my mom was a teacher, and i clearly remember the required use of powerpoint to be a major detriment to her teaching. as another example, i was horrified recently during a volunteer opportunity at a local high school at the use of chromebooks in the classroom. it seemed like such a blind use that served no purpose other than to further seaparate the students and teachers from social interaction and communication.
i think something like dynamicland is the only technology that has promise to be used as an educational tool.
Just like it's hard to explain how it feels in VR is hard to explain the difference here. I think the big take away is that it lets you simulate tasks physically instead of just watching them being done. Like the difference between watching something being done and doing it. I know with me, physically doing things with my hands cements the material in my brain way more than reading about it.
One thing I can see this being used for is fork lift driver training. You could put the person in the seat of the heavy and expensive equipment without actually risking anything. The user can play around with the controls and make mistakes without the fear of breaking something. That alone would be valuable.
well back when i was studying molecular biology and biochemistry, those high quality 3d animations were extremely useful because not only was it easier to memorize the different stages, it gave me a really good reference visually which I could recall with more ease than bits of written text.
on a side note, it also took my interest to new levels because the 3d animations revealed to me just how mechanical our body is, with a hierarchy of components very much like an integrated circuit.
so I can only imagine what it will be like to conduct labs or teach students using a 3d VR environment. It has a unique edge that not even the best teacher on earth can do-trick its users into believe they are not in lecture, but in a video game like world but with higher productivity.
I don't think it will help much in teaching math or anything else that can be easily learned from a textbook. But you can't learn plumbing or operating a crane from a textbook, and here VR has great potential.
It might also be great for teaching science, since VR can communicate scale much better than drawings.
If you don't have access to a good teacher, a VR session to a remote teacher could be a game changer.
At my high school somebody asked the calculus teacher why he was the calculus teacher and not another teacher. "We drew straws and I lost so I went to the training".
I don’t think you can treat “tech” as a general category. VR headsets are totally different from smartboards which are totally different from graphing calculators. Maybe VR headsets will be useless too, but I don’t think you can extrapolate that.
I played with VR a few years ago, and found the notion of an immersive virtual environment to be profoundly different from looking at something on a computer screen.
Some technology absolutely helps with learning. Pencils and paper are technology that help us write down our thoughts. School buildings and chalkboards are technology that make it easy for us to meet and collaborate.
Computers too can provide an opportunity for us to play with abstract concepts. Immersive VR could be a way to better understand certain concepts. With the right presentation, I think VR could be a more effective way of learning than other methods.
Anything that requires hand/eye coordination is waiting on a good VR implementation.
I would totally pay $60 for a VR game that has you building a house from the ground up or doing woodworking in as much detail as possible (even if it's individual stages and tasks without a proper physics sandbox).
For building a house it should then also include the role playing aspect of dealing with building departments, inspectors, and contractors that don't show up or drill into wires that electrician had just installed. ;-)
This implies having children using these headsets for extended periods of time. I hope the (auto?) calibration of future headsets gets real good, otherwise I fear there are some risks, messing with the eyesight of children.
I would be interested to see what you say after a couple hundred hours. VR has a very strong novelty effect. I thought it was incredible and amazing the first times I used it. And then, as it became no longer novel, I just gradually stopped.
I'll note that "3D is the future of education!" has a long history. Stereoscopic photos were the future starting in the 1850s. During WWII, the US Department of Defense bought 100,000 View-Masters and millions of reels because 3D content was more effective and engaging for training. But somehow those futures never happened. This one could well end up in the same historical category.
I'm curious whether it will be a deeper problem for propaganda, though. Would it affect memory even more to be able to recall visceral memories of an event as seen in VR, when that event has never actually occurred, say?
VR is not dying. It's a new technology that is under active development.
Magic Leap just released their first dev kit last month. StarVR has a new HMD coming out with 210 degree FOV. Oculus is working on a standalone wireless HMD. Things are actually progressing much quicker than anyone thought back in 2014 when the "VR renaissance" got started. We now have wireless HMDs, eye tracking with foveated rendering, perfect sub-millimeter inside-out camera based tracking, and the first multi-plane displays (on Magic Leap One).
None of that tech even existed 4 years ago, or if it did it was in a university research lab. We're now less than 5 years away from having a slim, lightweight, wireless device that you can put on your face and have 100% nonstop presence. There are still things to solve like haptics and locomotion which will be decades away, but the visual component is totally solvable with current tech.
As someone who develops VR on a daily basis, I'm skeptical that 3D over 2D is the key. When I first tried on a headset, and watched a video from up high, my fear of heights kicked in. Now I'm almost completely immune to that effect, but I still routinely do things like try to set a tool down on a virtual table. I suspect VR will be good for hands-on training (where it's more about the sequence than the "feel" of it) and psychological training (how to deal with an angry customer), but maybe the psychological benefit wears off like my body's reaction to being up high in VR.
Have you tried to test your fear of height in real conditions recently? I'm wondering if the desensitization you experienced in VR have effects in real life.
I just went on a zip line for the first time, and climbing their tallest ladder was pretty unnerving. I don't have a great fear to begin with, but my the wow-I'm-really-hear effect has definitely gone down. Maybe if I had done that exact zip line in VR, it would have helped? I do believe VR can help with phobias and PTSD (http://www.virtuallybetter.com/), but I wonder if its benefit goes down with exposure (complete speculation!).
I wonder whether they have planned for VR-induced nausea. With such a large number of headset, the absolute number of affected people will be at least in the hundreds. Some people just can't use VR at its current stage.
I’m someone who is hyper sensitive to motion sickness. I’ll throw up after maybe five minutes of reading my phone as a passenger in a car. Mass transit is a boring hell, and it seems to be cumulative with a long recovery time. I went to Disney World last year and each day it became more difficult to ride the relatively tame rides without measured breathing and a lot of breaks.
With all that said, I can handle VR as long as it doesn’t interfere with my proprioception. That is, no movement of the camera independent of my actual head moving. As long as that holds true, and the system doesn’t lag (fixed by “time warp”, thanks John Carmack). As long as those conditions are true I can play VR without breaks for several hours at a time.
I'm not sure what you mean by VR but if you have not tried HTC Vive or Oculus Go, I suggest giving it a try. Everyone I know who has issues with motion sickness or traditional VR can play many games comfortably in modern VR.
There's a pretty wide range of sensitivity. I'm also a VR developer and relatively insensitive to nausea (I was happily playing unreal tournament on the DK2 which made other people want to vomit pretty quickly). I almost never experience any nausea these days, even after extended sessions in games with a lot of motion. I hate anything without 6 dof tracking though, not because it makes me sick but because it completely lacks immersion.
I've never heard anyone bring up lighting as a factor in nausea before. There's certainly a lot of room for improvement for visual quality but it's not something I've heard anyone discuss as a factor in simulator sickness before. What do you think might be going on there?
As a data point, our enterprise / healthcare customers (not particularly technical and not generally gamers or previous VR users) don't bring up nausea as an issue despite or training experiences lasting 15-20 minutes at times.
I did great with my friend's Vive until an apparently software bug did an unexpectedly fast zoom... instant nausea! I was disappointed bc I was having fun. It went away after about two hours.
Compared to reality or ray tracing, the lighting and shadows of most games are just terrible.
It'd be interesting to see how VR sickness triggers are distributed in the population. How many people actually get nauseous from bad lighting, how many get nauseous from forced camera movement etc
I think VR would be a great way to practice giving talks, especially in front of bigger audiences, etc. To practice being comfortable in that environment.
First publications in academia on that front were more than 25 years ago. First apps trying to do that were actually quite a few years ago, but they're quite obscure because they're quite scary, oftentimes.
Except it’s all very anti-cyberpunk. Mostly because the vitriolic and perhaps self destructive (aka: the “punk” part) rejection has been very anemic so far.
“Punk” as self destruction to express disdain for norms is a requirement, otherwise the future is merely “Cyber” and in that sort of septugenarian congressional “Information Superhighway” privatized by Enron interpretation of the word.
It’s not really “cyberpunk” until cruising for back alley bionic implants becomes a reality.
AR, and overlaying "ghost scenes" over objects in front of you (e.g. a "ghost engineer" showing you how to repair iMacs) will be super useful, especially considering the "rewind" factor that doesn't exist in reality. You could learn skills remotely that would require the presence in an apprenticeship.
This might be a big source of income for companies specialized in mechanical engineering. They'd sell those ghost videos on a marketplace..
True, education was also one of the oldest uses of 3D, well before it became economical for games (3d simulation technology was later ported to some arcade machines), since the early 1980s. For ex, simulations for training first with the military and pilots.
But this takes it to another level and doesn't require a specialized set up for tooling or being in a particular location (custom simulation room).
"Ghost engineer" sounds like AR skeuomorphism. Why have a ghost engineer showing you how to repair iMacs, if you can have your AR headset just show you on the iMac which part to replace and how?
In AR or in a "real" 3D environment, skeumorphism could make a lot of sense for manual tasks imo. On 2D screens it's a different story, but even there it helped people to understand technology.
You're training hand eye coordination, and other than the instructor or your master in an apprenticeship, you don't have formed habits through practice. You stand in front of an object you want to interact with, and the ghost basically directs your movement, showing you how to hold or lift components and the ideal posture.
It will probably work. It's probably a good idea from the employer's point of view. It feels very dystopian.