You’ve Just Run Out of Excuses for Not Training in Virtual Reality

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Tell your employees to clear out a space in their home office. Send them a VR headset. Have them plug it in and charge it up. Now they’re ready for an afternoon of discovery and learning in the new world of virtual reality.

Yes, it’s that easy.

If you choose to use the new Oculus Quest, it’s only $299 for 64GB of RAM; it weighs under two pounds. But you don’t need to know RAM from ROM to use and enjoy the new headset. All your employees have to do is point and click some controllers to start learning, even if they’ve never put on a VR headset before.

Once they’re in the headset, a well-designed VR training makes it easy for your team to jump right in. The interactions should be intuitive and mimic real life; the design should be clean and straightforward. And as they go through the training, the programs we create can sync up with your LMS so you can see results quickly.

You can work with us to create a dazzling array of training programs and experiences, using voice, gaze, and controller based interactions to teach skills and create a sense of empathy. VR training works for simple tasks like correctly stocking a grocery store shelf all the way to complex human interactions like interviewing families in crisis.

But VR is so much more than just another delivery mechanism for information. Multiple studies show that VR leads to greater retention of content, better preparedness for difficult conversations, and massive decreases in worker turnover and all sorts of associated cost savings.

Right now, we at Friends With Holograms are thinking about ways to create even better experiences and deploy them at scale. What other behaviors can we allow users to practice? How can we create more impact and make worker’s lives better? How can we improve productivity and cut down on training time?

We are designing experiences to grow with your workforce as their skill sets expand. As technology evolves and changes, we will continue to innovate while keeping the story and the results at the heart of everything we do.

Write to us today for more information.

This piece, if you weren’t around in the eighties or recently watched the Steve Jobs documentary on Hulu, is based on an early Apple II ad. Just think what would have happened if you’d invested in Apple then.


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. ⚡️