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Caption: Walmart worker trains on Oculus VR headset
Virtual reality hasn’t exactly revolutionized the video game industry, like many predicted it will. The chicken-and-egg problem of a small user base and few compelling software titles, together with the incontrovertible fact that the physical weight of top-tier headsets discourages users from multi-hour sessions, has cooled a number of the excitement.
But as that momentum has slowed, VR has found a brand new growth area, one which’s expanding faster than anyone imagined: corporate training facilities.
Several Fortune 500 corporations, corresponding to Boeing, UPS and Walmart, are folding VR into worker-education programs on a large scale. And some have been happily impressed with the outcomes.
“We find that [drivers] are … learning the verbiage much faster, and its the identical verbiage they must use when out on the road with their supervisor,” said Laura Collings, training manager at UPS. “Virtual reality has unlimited possibilities. We’re every opportunity we are able to without delay.”
UPS uses HTC Vive VR headsets to assist drivers spot potential hazards when ‘driving’ down a virtual road. It’s a training exercise that previously involved a touchscreen, but the corporate realized that in using that tool, it was sending the message that it was OK for drivers to take their hands off the steering wheel.
The training takes place in the corporate’s 11 Integrad driver-training facilities around the globe. Over a five-day period, latest drivers are taught in a classroom setting, given demonstrations, then put in a VR environment. Since adding the VR component, the retention rate has climbed to 75 percent.
“You can train people faster, and folks learn faster in a VR environment,” said Collings.
Canada’s Queens University and SimforHealth are counting on that as well. The two recently paired with HTC to open a VR training facility for medical students, letting them get experience in an environment where mistakes won’t be fatal to patients. The facility will open in January 2019.
“Virtual reality offers exciting … opportunities for us to realistically simulate a big selection of clinical situations,” said Dr. Dan Howes, director of the Queen’s Faculty of Health Sciences Clinical Simulation Center. “We want learners to make all their beginner mistakes within the virtual environment, not on real patients.”
The facility’s first scenario has students taking good care of a virtual patient affected by chest pains. To save him, they must follow the fitting steps and order the fitting tests. The 8,000-sq.-ft. facility will eventually be used for other scenarios, including postgraduate training.
The latest corporate-training tool
Walmart, though, is arguably the leader in terms of VR training. The retailer began using VR at its 220 Walmart Academies across the United States last 12 months. Those were tethered devices, meaning employees needed to travel to the academies to utilize them. But VR has develop into more mobile recently — and now Walmart is rolling its VR program out to roughly 4,600 stores nationwide, to assist train greater than 1 million associates.
Life happens in 360, not 2D video. We test our associates on the content they see. Those associates who [used] VR as a part of their training scored higher than those that didn’t.
Brock McKeel
senior director of digital operations at Walmart
More than 17,000 Oculus Go standalone headsets are being sent to those stores, letting employees utilize the identical academy training scenarios to learn latest technologies, improving customer support and compliance. And the corporate quickly discovered, during its early testing phase, that this system engages staff unlike anything it’s done before.
“We had associates standing in line to get trained,” said Brock McKeel, senior director of digital operations at Walmart. “That never normally happens. So we knew we had something.”
Like UPS, Walmart has seen retention rates increase once it used VR as a training tool. Test scores at its academies have increased 10 to fifteen percent when students use VR.
“Life happens in 360, not 2D video,” said McKeel. “We test our associates on the content they see. Those associates who [used] VR as a part of their training scored higher than those that didn’t.”
Walmart is working with Strivr — a Menlo Park, California-based VR training company that’s on CNBC’s 2018 Upstart 100 list — to develop its training scenarios. The company, which has worked with skilled sports teams, raised $16 million in funding earlier this month to fuel its employee-training software development efforts.
Walmart is using Strivr’s virtual reality training modules on Oculus devices to coach 1 million employees who work in its 4,700 stores but are unable to attend Walmart Academies for in-person instruction. Among training topics: disaster preparedness and dealing at a store on Black Friday (and how you can handle those crowds).
(Those scenarios, for now, remain exclusive to associates who attend Walmart Academy, but may very well be added to the in-store lessons in some unspecified time in the future.)
Strivr CEO Derek Belch left a dream job coaching football at Stanford to assist others train for theirs
JetBlue, United Rentals and Fidelity are also using VR to help with worker training. And Tyson Foods credits a 20 percent year-over-year drop in injuries and illnesses to its VR-based general safety/hazard awareness training.
Boosting productivity with augmented reality
VR is not the only technology getting used by corporations today. Augmented reality is the favored approach by Boeing, giving technicians access to hands-free, interactive 3-D diagrams as they install electrical wiring in its aircraft. That has resulted in a 40 percent improvement in productivity, the corporate says.
Walmart’s consdering AR, but without delay, said McKeel, VR seems a greater fit.
“We are looking and starting to know our place in augmented reality … understanding what efficiencies are there and really attempting to be a part of the space, [but] AR has a bit to go before it gets to scale before people know where they need it to be,” he said.
Both fields seem set to proceed growing at a healthy clip. ABI Research predicts the entire AR market value will reach $116 billion by 2023. Research and Markets estimates the entire VR market will stand at $32.9 billion.
Increased retention rates are actually reason enough for corporations to be enthusiastic about using VR as a training tool, but it surely has an additional advantage as well: cost. Training facilities cost lots of of 1000’s, if not hundreds of thousands, of dollars to construct. Sending out-of-town employees to them racks up travel expenses. And the lost time for training is considerable.
A pc able to running a VR headset costs as little as $1,000 today, though. And a Vive, which lets trainees explore the physical space within the VR environment, costs $499.
An Oculus Go, meanwhile, retails for just $199 and may be used with an iPhone. That’s, partly, why SuperData Research believes the corporate will sell 1.8 million units over the following nine months.
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