Immersive learning has become one of the world’s most rapidly growing verticals and an innovative method for upskilling many workers simultaneously. Major corporations like Accenture, Bank of America, Coca-Cola, and others have adopted immersive learning tools to train their staff at scale and on the fly.
Companies such as Motive.io, Moth+Flame, CGS, ARuVR, GigXR, CoSo Cloud, FundamentalVR, and many others have raised the bar for immersive learning worldwide. Their solutions have created lasting change for companies seeking to upskill their workers efficiently and quantifiably.
In addition, firms are lauding the value of XR learning and the attention economy, which spans virtual, augmented, and mixed reality (VR/AR/MR) devices.
XR Today was pleased to interview Tom Symonds, Chief Executive, Immerse. Symonds has worked in XR training for over ten years and focused on spaces where immersive technologies can empower learners.
Immerse currently trains some of the world’s largest enterprises, including Shell, Nestle, DHL, Mars, BP, and GlaxoSmithKline (GSK).
In our conversation, we discuss the massive potential of VR training for learners, the need for training solutions for heavy, high-risk industries such as mining, and Immerse’s expansive catalogue of digital assets.
XR Today: Can you share the most recent upgrades to the Immerse platform and explain how it assists learners in achieving their goals?
Tom Symonds: One of the things we passionately believe in is the creation of an open ecosystem and solution that gives our clients the maximum freedom of choice. When we look at what we can offer customers today, there are really three options.
We can build and customise highly sophisticated content for certain clients as a team. Increasingly, however, we want to be seen as the facilitators of content creation on our platform.
Secondly, companies can build or import content straight on the platform. This is especially for companies that have already built something in VR or have a favourite pet agency with whom they have a great relationship. Also, some hire their own Unity or Unreal Engine developers or licenced out those software developer kits (SDKs).
The third option we think is very exciting is the marketplace we launched last year. It’s really the home of ready-made VR training apps. We’ve spent considerable time curating those who we think are the leading players in the space.
It’s a global footprint: they come from all over the world but are companies with an often specialist niche. It could be vertical mining content, oil and gas, medical, or content specific to cultural training, gender bias, presentation skills, and others.
Today, our marketplace houses about 150 titles from around 25 companies, and it’s growing month on month.
This allows companies not yet ready to dip their toes in the XR waters to receive 10,000 to 20,000 [assets], rather than spending money on custom content [that’s] ready-made. This choice is a central part of our strategy going forward, and we’re looking to foster this growing content ecosystem.
XR Today: Can you explain the findings from Immersive’s use case with mining giant Anglo American?
Tom Symonds: Anglo American operates in an environment of very high-risk, dangerous procedures, especially if processes are not followed or equipment fails to operate correctly.
When we look at the number of companies in VR, we realise Anglo American really leads the pack by entering VR early on. They didn’t wait around and began building content using over 50 local content creation companies.
However, those companies used content developed by seven to eight different companies, and the content sat on various servers. There were no common standards, approaches to data capturing, or linking to a central learning management system (LMS).
So although they made significant progress at the regional level, they couldn’t [join up their capabilities].
As a result, they couldn’t take advantage of economies of scale or share their content very easily. When we entered the market, we explained that we could migrate all of the content using our Unity SDK, as most of the content is Unity-based. After doing so on our platform, clients could integrate it with their LMS and begin at a point of global visibility, where they can share training assets in different mining operations rather than sitting in siloes.
Some of the barriers all players in the VR training space have are cost and efficacy. The only want to prove it is by clearly measuring the ROI on captured data among a few or multiple people in an experience. I think we feel that we’ve offered Anglo a very strong basis to create new kinds of training.
This is about establishing a more powerful blend of training that maximises all the amazing things that XR can do. I think our solution with Anglo American has set them up very well.
To do that, Anglo has used content from the marketplace, which gives them new options. They can now test some of the soft skills and content they hadn’t considered at a very economical price point.
XR Today: As an end user of Unity and Unreal Engine, how do their tools help you to create this kind of content? What does the average workflow and time to deployment look like for training modules?
Tom Symonds: I can tell you from my expertise that when we built content pre-VR, we had a small group of brilliant Unity developers that still work with us today. The Unity gaming engine has been fundamental to how we’ve developed content. What we’re trying to do with our Unity SDK is give new content developers or existing content creators the benefits of all our experience building bespoke client assets.
One of the central objectives of our SDK is to speed up content creation and grant people access to libraries and scripts. This means they won’t have to do everything from scratch. We don’t want our content partners to waste time, so I think Unity has been an integral part of how we’ve developed as a content creation company.
The other new departure for us is our very recent Unreal Engine SDK launch. This is very exciting and allows us to open up to new content creators delivering across new verticals like automotive, where it’s quite prevalent.
The third SDK we’re launching is a JavaScript SDK, which allows us to go further with web-based VR content. It supports our strategy of facilitating content creators in whatever medium they create their content.
XR Today: Which metrics have you noted about Immerse’s learning platform, and how have they helped clients like Anglo American reach their learning objectives?
Tom Symonds: One of the great guiding principles of moving companies towards XR-based training or evaluation models is that many have measured skills with a very subjective, binary approach.
Oftentimes, you will have a person with a clipboard observing learners, which is highly subjective and open to bias, among other things. What we try to do and inform our potential and current clients of is their ability to capture extraordinary amounts of data, allowing them to move from subjective to objective measurements.
The amount of data a person can capture as someone moves in time and space, where you can verify whether a person can perform a task. You can see the educational process. We’re trying to move people away from this very binary approach [to] precisely measure when someone presses a button, measuring by the millisecond.
That will allow [firms] to establish, beyond any doubt, whether someone is competent or not. Part of what we’ve baked into our Unity SDK is a reporting system out of the box that allows content creators to integrate those steps into the learning process.
With over 100 trainees completing this specific process, we can really begin to understand trends informing us about whether or not employees can complete the task. Instructors can also determine if the process itself requires adjustment after everyone gets one step wrong or if another takes too long. This kind of educational process doesn’t happen very quickly.
However, we’re working with our Unity and Unreal SDKs to encourage people to think very carefully about the data being captured during this process. You have incontestable data about the efficacy of the approach.
XR Today: What are your thoughts on the attention economy?
Tom Symonds: We’re trying to get people to focus on data capturing as the main issue is speed to competency. Can we get a machinery operator to an objective quicker?
We could see across the board that typically, for an operational type task, we’re looking at improved speed to competency ranging from 35 percent to nearly 60 percent. At scale, that is highly significant.
Early on, when we were initially building content, it was harder to get people to focus on the data initially. Now, we urge people to do so and say, “Look, if you really believe in this technology, we need to help prove to your budget holders that this is a good investment. When people focus on [ROI], the results are always fantastic.
XR Today: What can you tell us about VR’s ability to reduce error rates and save companies millions?
Tom Symonds: That’s why as a mining company, Anglo American is one of the most advanced because they know that the cost of failure, especially in underground environments, is extremely high.
The stakes [in the mining industry] are high, and that constant repetitive learning, building muscle memory, and other things are recognised in the industry and prized by companies in those sectors.
XR Today: Any closing notes about trends in the XR industry?
Tom Symonds: Most of us in the sector have been hoping that Apple might bring out a device at some point. I think people would have expected slightly faster pickup, but now we’re beginning to see momentum building.
We went with our existing blue-chip clients way beyond the experimentation phase. They’re now thinking about scaling and broad distribution. This is very exciting for us because we designed our platform to do just that.
That continuous offering of choice related to content has resulted in more and more high-quality content companies that are entering the market. Our marketplace offering is also becoming increasingly sophisticated with a significant amount of choice. We’re now looking at sectors that are really beginning to take off rapidly, especially in the life sciences, healthcare, and others, where we’ve noted very good progress.
