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.