Announcing our new partnership with Eunoe Health

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Hopefully, everyone had a restful holiday weekend -- we took a few days off and now feel ready to kick off the fall. And we couldn’t be more excited to announce that our September is starting with an amazing partnership with Eunoe Health to build an immersive mental wellness platform whose first initiative will be supporting healthcare workers on the front lines of Covid19 in NYC.

Even though it’s been almost six months since the Covid crisis started in the United States, we’ve only just begun to scratch the surface in examining the lasting mental health effects it will have on the people who are on the frontlines, treating patients as best they can while facing PPE shortages and dangerous conditions. There has already been one high-profile suicide, that of Dr Lorna Breen, and experts who gave testimony before Congress last month warned of more to come. 

The fact is that the mental health crisis has been brewing in the United States for years and Covid just pushed us over the edge. There already was a massive shortage of mental health professionals who were unable to meet demand and now that demand has gone through the roof. This has taken a huge toll on the medical community with almost 50% of doctors and nurses and 60% of medical students reporting burnout before the pandemic. 

Eunoe is collaborating with world-renowned experts at one of the world’s leading health systems to develop and test the application in a clinical trial this fall in NYC. They believe that their VR platform and its companion mobile web application have the potential to help people cultivate a greater sense of self-awareness, self-efficacy, and resilience by transforming negative thought patterns into adaptive methods of self-management. Given the state of affairs in our world right now, we could all use a platform like this. \ 

We’re also particularly thrilled that Eunoe is a female founded and led company, something we here at Friends With Holograms know a little about.This is also an opportunity for us to expand into work that is beyond our training and entertainment space, while staying true to our mission of creating immersive experiences that have a positive impact on the world. 

Questions? Feel free to drop us a line, and if your organization is interested in creating something that makes a difference, we’d love to work with you. 

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.