Ice Storms and Origin Stories

AlwayS go OUT in an Ice St0Rm.❄️

In January of 2005, I ignored dire weather reports and went to see a friend’s band play 🎶, only to run into an old colleague who wound up making me a LIFE changing job offer that night.

10 years later, I braved the cold to go see EMA, an indie musician, play a show at MoMA PS1 in Queens 👸 as part of the performance, members of the audience put on an Oculus DK1 and did a short VR experience. After leaving the show and walking back to the subway, I couldn’t get the images from the piece out of my head — at one point, I could have sworn I saw a snake 🐍 from the piece slithering around the train floor (then again, it is the G train, anything is possible).

I spent the next year learning about VR through the lens of the music business, a place where I had spent the bulk of my career. In 2016 I was on a panel at SXSW with a VR director named Kevin Cornish; a few months later I joined his production company. After a year with his amazing team, I decided to strike out on my own. ✌️

As I searched for the name of my new venture, my mind looped back to a talk I gave at VRDC and a subsequent interview with the New York Times. In my talk, I posited that bleeding edge technologies would eventually converge and allow people to have realistic relationships with holographic beings — and that would change the way we thought about intimacy dramatically. A few months later, the Times reached out to me for a story on Facebook and artist chatbots, but I went way down the rabbit hole during the interview and wound up quoted in the paper of record saying that one day we’d all be Friends with Holograms. Hence the name.💥

Getting it off the ground was a slog, with some projects that got within a yard of the finish line before falling apart. But then we had the opportunity to work with Accenture on a ground-breaking social worker training piece, and I leapt right in. The kickoff coincided with a long-planned trip to Japan, and I got up at 3am every morning to be on calls with the US and even did a call a few hours after I fainted in an emergency room while dealing with a kidney infection! But it paid off when, as I trudged through another freezing NYC winter day to get to a meeting, my phone lit up with the news that we’d won Best VR/AR at Mobile World Congress. A month later, the piece was a finalist for a SXSW Innovation Award, and it also led to an 18% decrease in caseworker turnover when used by the state of Indiana. 👏

As we grew and shifted, my vision became clearer. Worker training is so vital and so under-resourced; my goal is to bring a cinematic edge to VR training projects that leads to better learning outcomes and shows workers that we respect their growth 💯.

We’ve worked with award-winning directors and groundbreaking creative technologists to create these pieces for Fortune 100 clients, and we are also starting to expand into social impact pieces to be shown at festivals. No matter what we build, we want to push creative boundaries and tell excellent stories. ⚡️

VR and AR for Social Justice and Change

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We decided to take things in a different direction this issue, and highlight some of the great social justice VR and AR projects that are available right now. We also want to point out that safe, effective training is a social justice issue -- making sure people are trained around diversity and inclusion and micro-aggressions, as well as sexual harassment, creates a better and more positive environment for everyone. Additionally, training frontline workers, many of whom are BIPOC, to be able to do their work in a safe and empowering way is a win for all. 

The first piece we want to showcase is Nancy Baker Cahill's Liberty Bell, which is accessible via the 4th Wall app in six cities. The piece is connected to historical locations in each city, and reimagines the bell as a pulsing, changing mass, representing the continued evolution of the American experiment. 

We also want to highlight the work of NYC based AR collective Movers and Shakers, who have used AR to reimagine monuments and produced an AR project about Christopher Columbus, called "Columbus the Hero?" The group was also involved in the recent Occupy City Hall movement and we'll surely be seeing more amazing things from them soon. 

Finally, Felix and Paul's stunning VR piece, Traveling While Black, is now available on Oculus devices and is a must watch. It's one of the most interesting and immersive pieces we've seen in a long time, and the user feels so present to the stories they are hearing and the situations around them. 

We'd love to highlight more examples in the coming weeks -- if you've seen any amazing VR pieces around social justice and change, please let us know. 

How VR Can Save Your Organization Money

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As we write this on Thursday afternoon, the market is taking a nosedive and economic reports are becoming increasingly grim. Unemployment remains sky-high, and many workers will be returning to roles that have been radically changed since March. Companies everywhere are looking to cut costs, and now doesn't seem like the ideal time to be investing in new technology.

Unless, of course, that new technology results in significant cost savings. While there is an upfront cost associated with VR -- buying headsets and creating content -- the savings that will result far outpace the upfront spend. PWC has released some new research about the benefits of VR training, and we'd love to share those with you.
 

  • Employees trained in VR require less time to learn. VR-trained students required 53% less time than classroom training and 33% less time than e-learning to learn concepts and demonstrate significantly higher learning outcomes. That means employees will spend far less time learning and more time producing. 

  • VR learners are less distracted; the study found that they were 3.35x less distracted than e-learners. That leads to faster learning and better outcomes -- a distracted learner who doesn't absorb information can become a huge liability.

  • VR learning scales and works for distance learning. VR is 58% less expensive than classroom learning, and let's face, none of us are really dying to sit in a crowded classroom right now anyway.

We'd love to help your organization start saving money. Drop us a line and let us know how we can be of service. 

How Virtual Reality Can Enable the Hard Conversations We Need to Be Having

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Here's what we know: there is a desperate need to train people around bias. There is a desperate need to train people to have difficult conversations about race. There is a desperate need to train people in de-escalation tactics. And right now, there is no safe way to do that in a large, in-person group. 

We have built several award-winning VR projects centered around building empathy and communication skills and letting people feel exactly what it is like to be marginalized and disempowered. We want to continue this important work and help our clients build pieces that let people train safely and at scale to combat prejudice. 

At Friends With Holograms, we have always been committed to inclusion and diversity. We are a female-founded and led company with a 50/50 male/female and 40/60 non-white team. We believe in the power to virtual reality to drive social change. If you're interested in joining us and making a difference, drop us a line.

How VR Can Help You Reopen

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Finally, life is showing signs of getting back to normal, as stores reopen and business resumes in most parts of the US. But even though more locations might be open, people are doing business in a radically different climate than they were a few months ago. What once would have been a simple situation -- say, a new employee forgets how to enter something in a register and calls a manager over to show them how -- is suddenly fraught. How do you demonstrate something from six feet away?  How do you deal with a difficult customer who refuses to wear a mask or keep distance? And how do you let customers learn more about a product if they can't touch it?

Luckily, virtual and augmented reality offer solutions to all these problems. VR training allows employees to learn and practice new skills in a scaleable, socially distanced manner -- and because VR training is shown to have higher retention rates than traditional learning, workers will likely need to ask fewer questions. 

VR training can also let employees practice having difficult conversations with customers who don't understand or refuse to follow guidelines. Letting workers practice diffusing a tricky situation can make them more comfortable and willing to stand up for themselves if someone is harassing them, and keep a situation from escalating, as well as keeping shoppers safe. 

Finally, augmented reality allows customers to get more information or virtually browse without actually touching a product. In the UK, some grocery stores have implemented policies that forbid people from touching goods and then putting them back on the shelf -- but what happens if someone just wants to see nutritional information or an expiration date? A great augmented reality app could allow them to scan an item and then look at the information they need without having to pick up the product, keeping everyone safe.

Things aren't back to normal yet and won't be for quite some time, but as you navigate this new world, we'd love to help you. Let us know what you're dealing with and we can come up with a custom VR or AR solution for you. 

We Say Value Our Workers -- Why Doesn't Their Training Reflect That?

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I went to the grocery store at the height of the pandemic, and it was, frankly, a mess. Half the employees were wearing masks, and half weren’t, and that was reflected in the shoppers as well. There were lines taped on the ground to signify...something, but no one was quite sure what it was. When pressed, worker after worker said the same thing -- “I don’t know, they didn’t train us.”

Read the whole piece here

Want to win innovation awards? Let us help!

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The National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO) has awarded Indiana Department of Child Services Chief Information Officer, Kevin Jones, with the association’s 2020 Technology Champion Award. Kevin’s nomination submission described him as the “epitome of CIO as problem solver with a personal leadership style grounded in empathy for the 25,000 children in his care and the 4,000 family case workers who support them.”

Indiana Child Welfare is currently undergoing massive transformation and Kevin is leading a holistic approach to change that focuses on people, process and tools. He is leveraging innovations like virtual reality training that simulates a home visit with a vulnerable family. This technology, steeping in immersive learning, is better preparing caseworkers for the field. It is also being used in hiring to determine whether a candidate is a good fit for child welfare. The agency has already seen an 18% reduction in turnover resulting in a cost savings to the state.