In recent years, virtual reality technology has rapidly evolved and become far more accessible, providing new opportunities for learning and development professionals to produce immersive and engaging learning experiences we never could create before.
With the ability to simulate realistic environments and situations, VR is already transforming the way we approach training and education. In this article, we dispel some myths about VR and the metaverse, explore the benefits of using VR for your L&D needs, and dive into the three main “flavors” or types of VR that are most useful in our industry.
What’s the difference between the metaverse and VR? Is there a difference?
Before we discuss the various flavors of VR, we need to address the most common question we’re being asked lately: “What’s the difference between VR and the metaverse?” The answer? Well, it has a few twists and turns, which we’ll attempt to straighten out.
The term “metaverse” was coined by Neil Stephenson in 1992 in his popular sci-fi novel, “Snow Crash.’ It describes a virtual space where anyone could go and interact with one another. The metaverse was free and open, and it provided an opportunity for people to communicate outside of the real world.
The challenge with calling VR the metaverse today is that the metaverse doesn’t exist — there is no singular, giant virtual place in which you can construct experiences. That’s not to say we won’t eventually get to something resembling a true metaverse; we may be moving in that direction. But right now, VR experiences are discrete and on a small, on-demand scale, taking the form of games, meeting locations or training spaces.
You can create these small-world experiences using platforms like Engage VR, Horizon Worlds or Arthur. These tools allow you to set up a meeting space, invite attendees who are represented through avatars, share media such as videos and slide decks and offer opportunities for collaborative experiences like whiteboard activities and building workflows in a 3D space. So, we don’t go into a metaverse; we go to specific virtual spaces for isolated experiences.
Another complication to this conversation is that Facebook has rebranded itself as “Meta.” Part of the reason for this is to align themselves with and to create a powerful association between their brand and the idea of a metaverse; but nobody owns the metaverse.. It doesn’t exist yet.
Why should L&D professionals care about VR?
The second question we’re often asked can be boiled down to this: “Why should we care about VR?” The most obvious and direct answer is that it can have a truly transformative impact on learning.
As the creative director (Mike) and the director of technology at GP Strategies (Tom), we both see almost limitless potential when we consider the concept of VR. Whether you need to tell a story for learning purposes, to build brand engagement or to develop the skills of your people, VR provides practically infinite possibilities. It’s like exploring the Wild American West back in the 1800s. We can do anything with this space.
Aside from the practical excitements and possibilities of VR, it brings an enormous amount of fun to the learning experience. And, as learning research has proven, when your brain is enjoying an experience, it operates at peak capacity — it’s a sponge. There’s no fight-or-flight scenario; time evaporates. You become fully engaged and immersed, and that’s the Holy Grail for us in the L&D world — to get people into that flow state. There’s a lot of data coming out to support what we’ve been witnessing, too.
According to the NTL Institute, learners are 75 percent more likely to retain the information presented to them when learning by doing. It is for this reason that VR becomes a powerful tool; it allows learners to practice their new skills in an applied manner.
Will VR learning experiences replace our existing learning technology?
Like with any new disruptive technology that impacts the learning environment, VR is generally not going to replace what currently exists. VR is simply enhancing what we already have. We faced a similar situation with the advent of e-learning. Everyone thought traditional classroom-based learning environments would disappear and that web-based learning would entirely take over, but that hasn’t happened either. We use both classroom-based learning and e-learning for different needs.
With VR, we have the opportunity for learners to practice skills in safe, controlled environments. So, although we’re not building all our training in VR, we may begin creating activities that allow learners to demonstrate important skills while giving them the freedom to fail in realistic yet low-risk environments, which can be very liberating.
On top of learners retaining 75 percent more through the use of immersive experiences, we’re also finding that learners are four times more focused when having these types of learning experiences. It is important to recognize that learners are more focused for more than one reason. First, their head is inside a device that eliminates distractions and the possibility to fiddle with your podcast or music app or check the news. Distractions are muted, but learners are also learning faster than in a classroom-based experience because they are applying their learning in real time.
It’s not about changing all learning modalities from classroom-based to VR. It’s about blending them to create highly valuable and efficacious learning opportunities at large.
About those VR flavors — how can VR be leveraged and applied in the L&D space?
There are three primary flavors (or applications) of VR technology for L&D: hard skills, soft skills, and meetings or events. While they all fall within the realm of VR, each is as unique as French Vanilla is to Chunky Monkey®. (Hey, this is making me hungry. Let’s focus here…)
VR flavor number one: Hard skills
To us, targeting hard skills with VR is like vanilla ice cream. It’s by far the most common application at the moment, but it’s still incredibly tasty (um, effective). With VR, people who work in the technical space can work with heavy machinery and other technical tasks without actually operating a real crane or conducting a real chemical reaction. You can, however, experience things you’d feel in reality — the concepts of height, movement and spatial awareness manifest when moving switches, touching handrails and the like. When people can practice high-stakes tasks within low-stakes environments, knowledge retention and confidence both skyrocket.
Yet another benefit of leveraging VR for hard skills training is that it can bring people from all over the world together in one virtual environment. An expert technical trainer in Dubai can train someone in California in real-time with all the benefits of physical presence. This dramatically cuts the cost of travel and otherwise opens massive opportunities to share knowledge. It’s cost-effective, scalable and improves proficiency at a dramatic rate, whether you need to know how to use a jackhammer or how to service an electric vehicle.
VR flavor number two: Soft skills
If leveraging VR for hard skills is vanilla, then VR targeting soft skills is most definitely the Chunky Monkey® option. Soft skills have become recognized as some of the most valuable skills we can bring to a workplace, and despite the countless soft skills e-learning videos available, nothing quite prepares you for difficult conversations about representation and allyship, for example, like really having those crucial conversations.
In the VR space, we can create any type of experience — from practicing inclusivity to working with an angry customer to conducting an interview. Avatars in the VR space can be set up to recognize and respond to facial expressions, tone of voice, word choice and body language just as a real human would, which means you can engage in virtual role-play, maintaining all the benefits of role-playing through a possible scenario without the awkwardness of pretending Scott from accounting is actually coming to you with a difficult interpersonal problem.
Soft skills can take a long time to cultivate because they don’t seem to truly build unless we have experience practicing them. From emotional intelligence to building empathy, we can truly build new behavioral impulses with these simulations in VR, and the technology is only going to get more advanced as time goes on.
VR flavor number three: Meetings and events
Our third and final flavor of VR, meetings and events, is probably the Neapolitan option of the bunch. After all, it brings multiple flavors together in one place! The way we work has changed dramatically over the last several years, and one of the biggest obstacles to hybrid and remote working is building connections and collaboration. With VR, we can present ample opportunities to not just connect with people on our teams that we may have seen in person every day pre-pandemic, but also with anyone from around the world in real time.
Outside of formal training, really valuable experiences can be crafted to demonstrate products and services. For example, we recently created a learning experience for the retailer network of a global luxury car manufacturer seeking to immerse its dealer culture in its transition to electromobility. To build EV knowledge, we wanted to provide the learners with the opportunity to interact with the brand’s own EV battery, so we created a VR event within the brand’s signature training program that expanded a superscale, 100-foot tall EV battery and allowed learners (who by extension were “shrunk down” to micro-size relative to the virtual exhibit) to physically move through and jump around different parts of the battery to learn about each part’s function. This virtual event didn’t just take place in an office — like space or a plant— it took place in lower Earth orbit to signify the reason for the EV launch in the first place.
If the ability to connect and collaborate with anyone around the world at any time in “real life” wasn’t enough, VR experiences also do so much more than anything a slide deck or e-learning video could. VR revolutionizes our learning capabilities — from providing the opportunity to have a level of presence that fosters more intimate roundtable conversations with people from around the world to interacting with an EV battery in space.
It seems expensive and difficult to use— is it worth it?
The cost and time investment are both things a lot of customers fear, and they simply don’t know where to get started with VR. While VR is typically more expensive to develop than other learning methodologies, keep in mind that we’re not looking to replace other traditional styles of learning, we’re looking to enhance our learning experiences strategically. On the other hand, VR headsets and other devices are also quite accessible now, with many users now utilizing the same equipment their teenagers use recreationally.
The tools for developing VR content are also now becoming highly competitive, with several leading VR authoring platforms aiding with enterprise scale and production efficiency. Of course, very specialized training experiences — like exploring a magnified EV battery in space — may warrant a custom development investment. As we like to say, “form follows function.” High-level programming, engineering and 3D modeling can come into play for scenarios like that, but you do not need to jump into a project of that magnitude right away.
Overall, an investment in VR is akin to the research and development investment associated with a manufacturing cycle: The cost of putting one learner through a specialized VR learning experience may be quite high, but the cost of sending 1,000 students through it becomes very reasonable, which often offers attractive long-term cost efficiencies in the right scenario.
A powerful component in the future of learning
Perhaps the most compelling benefit of VR-based learning is an organization’s ability to provide learners with low-stakes environments in which to explore high-stakes situations. Because of those unusual circumstances, learners often become much more comfortable with the idea of engaging within scenarios — even embracing failure as a valuable learning tool. In practice, we’ve observed VR environments significantly accelerate learners’ paths to proficiency with targeted best practices in both technical and behavioral processes.
VR is unlike anything else we’ve seen before, but it provides so many valuable opportunities for learning through its ability to create immersive, engaging and memorable learning experiences. From creating safe environments for practice to customizing simulations to meet specific needs, VR offers a range of benefits that make it a massively valuable tool — and it is shaping the future of learning.
As a leader of your L&D organization, we encourage you to sample each flavor of VR to see which options suit your personal tastes — it just might just transform your talent development efforts.
