Here’s another sneak peak of some new material from our next book, due out in October. Make sure to keep your eyes peeled for a sneak peek of the cover coming soon!
The best reason to use VR for learning is to let your audience experience a situation. If you use VR, the participant will feel like they are part of the experience — that they are actually there and they are experiencing it in real time, leading to them being more prepared when the situation does arise. There are lots of examples of this being successful — in a tragic case, employees at a Walmart had done active shooter VR training only months before an actual active shooter situation. Interviewed in the aftermath, they reported feeling less panicked and more prepared, and probably saved lives.
VR can also be used to simulate human interaction. This is amazing for learning soft skills and communication — the user will feel as if they are actually talking to the person in the headset. This can be incredibly powerful — take the example of “The Last Goodbye,” a VR piece where the user can interact with a Holocaust survivor returning to his camp. If you were learning history for the first time, you’d likely find an experience like this far more impactful than reading words on a page or passively watching a film.
One key thing to note here — using avatars for pieces like this just doesn’t cut it. There is a concept called the uncanny valley — put simply, something LOOKS real but the mind can detect that it isn’t real, and it causes a disconnect. The only way to make pieces like this truly impactful on a mass scale is to use real people and capture them in 360 video or use volumetric capture (although this is a more expensive option). Another note about avatars — to have anything that does look close to real in VR will requite a lot of computing power, which will limit how widely you can distribute a piece. And lest you think using avatars is cheaper, in truth, it is actually less expensive to shoot 360 video.