Enterprise VR

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Strivr Enhances Immersive Learning With Generative AI, Equips VR Training Platform With Mental Health and Well-Being Experiences

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Strivr, a virtual reality training solutions startup, was founded as a VR training platform for professional sports leagues such as the NBA, NHL, and NFL. Today, Strivr has made its way to the job training scene with an innovative approach to employee training, leveraging generative AI (GenAI) to transform learning experiences.

More Companies Lean Toward Immersive Learning

Today’s business landscape is rapidly evolving. As such, Fortune 500 companies and other businesses in the corporate sector are starting to turn to more innovative employee training and development solutions. To serve the changing demands of top companies, Strivr has secured $16 million in funding back in 2018 to expand its VR training platform.

Research shows that learning through VR environments can significantly enhance knowledge retention, making it a groundbreaking development in employee training.

Unlike traditional training methods, a VR training platform immerses employees in lifelike scenarios, providing unparalleled engagement and experiential learning. However, this technology isn’t a new concept at all. Companies have been incorporating VR into their training solutions for several years, but we’ve only recently seen more industries adopting this technology rapidly.

The Impact of Generative AI on VR Training Platforms

Walmart, the largest retailer in the world, partnered with Strivr to bring VR to their training facilities. Employees can now practice in virtual sales floors repeatedly until they perfect their skills. In 2019, nearly 1.4 million Walmart associates have undergone VR training to prepare for the holiday rush, placing them in a simulated, chaotic Black Friday scenario.

As a result, associates reported a 30% increase in employee satisfaction, 70% higher test scores, and 10 to 15% higher knowledge retention rates. Because of the VR training’s success, Walmart expanded the VR training program to all their stores nationwide.

Derek Belch, founder and CEO at Strivr, states that the demand for the faster development of high-quality and scalable VR experiences that generate impactful results is “at an all-time high.”

VR training platofrm Strivr

As Strivr’s customers are among the most prominent companies globally, they are directly experiencing the impact of immersive learning on employee engagement, retention, and performance. “They want more, and we’re listening,” said Belch in a press release shared with ARPost.

So, to enhance its VR training platform, Strivr embraces generative AI to develop storylines, boost animation and asset creation, and optimize visual and content-driven features.

GenAI will also aid HR and L&D leaders in critical decision-making by deriving insights from immersive user data.

Strivr’s VR Training Platform Addresses Employee Mental Health

Strivr has partnered with Reulay and Healium in hosting its first in-headset mental health and well-being applications on the VR training platform. This will allow their customers to incorporate mental health “breaks” into their training curricula and address the rising levels of employee burnout, depression, and anxiety.

Belch has announced that Strivr also partnered with one of the world’s leading financial institutions to make meditation activities available in their workplace.

Meditation is indeed helpful for employees; the Journal of the American Medical Association recently published a study that showed that meditation can help reduce anxiety as effectively as drug therapies. Mindfulness practices, on the other hand, have been demonstrated to increase employee productivity, focus, and collaboration.

How VR Transforms Professional Training

With Strivr’s VR Training platform offering enhanced experiential learning and mental well-being, one might wonder how VR technology will influence employee training moving forward.

Belch describes Strivr’s VR training platform as a “beautifully free space” to practice. Employees can develop or improve their skills in a realistic scenario that simulates actual workplace challenges in a way that typical workshops and classrooms cannot. Moreover, training employees through VR platform cuts travel costs associated with conventional training facilities.

VR training platform Strivr

VR training platforms also contribute to a more inclusive and diverse workplace. Employees belonging to minority groups can rehearse and tailor their behaviors in simulated scenarios where a superior or customer is prejudiced toward them, for instance. When these situations are addressed during training, companies can protect their employees from these challenges and prepare them.

What’s Next for VR Training Platforms?

According to Belch, Strivr’s enhanced VR training platform is only the beginning of how VR will continue to impact the employee experience.

So far, VR training platforms have been improving employee onboarding, knowledge retention, and performance. They allow employees to practice and acquire critical skills in a safe, virtual environment, helping them gain more confidence and efficiency while training. Additionally, diversity and inclusion are promoted, thanks to VR’s ability to simulate scenarios where employees can tailor their behaviors during difficult situations.

And, of course, VR training has rightfully gained recognition for helping teach retail workers essential customer service skills. By interacting with virtual customers in a life-like environment, Walmart’s employees have significantly boosted their skills, and the mega-retailer has implemented an immersive training solution to all of its nearly 4,700 stores all over America.

In 2022, Accenture invested in Strivr and Talespin to revolutionize immersive learning and enterprise VR. This is a good sign of confidence in the industry and its massive potential for growth.

As we keep an eye on the latest scoop about VR technology, we can expect more groundbreaking developments in the industry and for VR platforms to increase their presence in the employee training realm.

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Talespin and Pearson Usher in the Future of Work With Ambitious Storyworld

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Talespin is known for using VR in enterprise education – particularly for developing soft skills. Pearson, “the world’s leading learning company,” identified a need – specifically, helping business leaders understand the emerging future of work. Together, the two companies created an elaborate “storyworld” guiding learners through over 30 interactive education modules.

To learn more about “Where’d Everybody Go? The Business Leader’s Guide to the Decentralized Workforce,” we talked with Talespin CEO Kyle Jackson.

The World is Changing

The decentralized workforce is one of those trends that has, to a degree, always been there. With improving connectivity and ever-more portable hardware combined with an increase in the number of “knowledge workers” it’s been growing for a while now. The pandemic accelerated it as businesses that had remained centralized suddenly saw their workforce distributed.

Many workers like the opportunity to work largely when and where they like. Developments in culture and technology generally are making it more appealing and more practical, for example, with new approaches to financial technologies that encourage and facilitate independence – a sort of technologically driven take on rugged individualism.

Some companies have leaned into this massive shift as it can reduce overhead and even increase productivity as well as morale. However, some business leaders have been less able to really attach themselves to the idea which at the same time is becoming increasingly difficult to avoid.

“What we’ve broadly seen in the XR space is lots of single-module learning journeys,” said Jackson. “People just couldn’t do that with this topic.”

Where’d Everybody Go?

To address these challenges, Pearson – with AI analytics company Faethm, which Pearson acquired in 2021 – put together a list of “future human capabilities” that would be required to navigate this new direction in work. Working with Talespin helped to determine the direction of the project early on.

“We looked at that list and overlaid this concept of just how fast work is changing,” said Jackson. “Everybody is leaving jobs and no one can hire anybody – so where did everybody go?”

The experience currently consists of over 30 modules in four thematic tracks:

  • Applying Web3 to Business Strategy and Operations
  • Management and Upskilling
  • Equity and Values of the Modern Workforce
  • Practical Thinking.

There is also an introductory track, which helps learners choose the content that they’re going to work through. The whole experience might take a learner around seven hours to complete, but they don’t need to do it all at once. They don’t even need to do all of it.

“In that intro track you get a kind of choose-your-own-adventure overview,” said Jackson. “If you want to have your leadership team take just one of the tracks, that’s perfectly fine.”

Pearson and Talespin

The “choose-your-own-adventure” aspect comes in through the complex “storyworld” through which the content is delivered. Learners are essentially playing an interactive roleplaying game that helps them practice the topics of each track.

“Learners take on the protagonist’s role of a city commissioner,” reads a release shared with ARPost. “The learner must help local startups and enterprises navigate challenges that real-world businesses face today, like leading hybrid workforces, exploring the adoption of new technology, and instilling equitable workplace practices.”

The experience drew from the expertise and insights of both Pearson and Talespin, who worked closely to create the tracks and modules.

“It’s been very collaborative. Both teams have been in the trenches as a single team,” said Jackson. “We’re definitely more than just the platform in this case where in other cases we’re just the platform and the company is on their own.”

Creating the Experience

The level of involvement from Pearson was no doubt partially enabled by Talespin’s use of their own user-friendly creation tools. These also helped to allow the incredible speed with which the momentous project was realized.

“The idea formed in the middle of last year. Because we built a no-code platform, we really accelerated the product pipeline,” said Jackson. “Our North Star was how do you get the ability to create content into the hands of people who have the knowledge. … The no-code platform was built in service of that but we decided that we had to eat our own dog food.”

Jackson said that for the back-end team that were masters of their previous toolset, using the no-code version was initially frustrating. However, the platform played a large role in launching the experience, which has become a model for future long-form content from Talespin.

“This is the first of several of these that we have coming,” said Jackson. “Even though it’s a new concept to do a storyworld for an immersive learning experience, we’ve had a lot of interest.”

Demystifying Decentralization

Thanks to Talespin, virtual reality – one of the technologies playing a role in the decentralization of work – is helping companies navigate the future of work. This is a big moment for work as we know it, but it’s also a big deal for Talespin, who may have once again revolutionized immersive storytelling as an enterprise education tool.

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Onboarding in the Boardroom: Starting the Conversation on Enterprise VR

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Gaming and social experiences are great uses for virtual reality. However, enterprise VR is also making huge strides to solve big problems in the world of work. Companies that do things like manufacturing, retail management, advertising, and just about anything else have a lot to gain from enterprise VR. But, they don’t always know where to start.

Everyone who runs a business making enterprise VR solutions has to have a decent pitch on why companies should sign on, but there are also some organizations that make onboarding their companies part of the experience.

Finding Direction With Endava

Endava is a tech services provider that helps companies use new technologies to solve problems, increase efficiency, and grow their business models. They aren’t exclusively interested in emerging technologies like extended reality and the metaverse, but they’re seeing a lot of client interest in those fields. And that’s a good thing.

“Don’t wait until the need or the use case is defined because by then you’re just chasing everyone else,” said Scott Harkey, the Executive Vice President of Financial Services and Payments at Endava.

Where to Begin

This often means that companies that do actively want to develop an enterprise VR strategy can be stuck in the awkward position of feeling that they should do something without knowing where to begin. That’s the point where working with a consultancy can help.

“Figuring out where to start is often one of the biggest parts of it,” said Harkey. “That, of course, is different for each organization. But, generally, thinking from a consumer experience perspective helps you focus on what is the problem that you’re actually trying to solve.”

Working with the entire company can help to keep the enterprise VR project on track. Uncertain executives might want to put everything in the hands of their builders, but that can lead to an over-developed and underperforming solution. Putting too much on the executives instead of the builders might hobble the project before it’s begun.

“Individual engineers often get really excited about new tech,” said Harkey. “As you get more senior in the organization, I think they tend to have a more pragmatic view of the technology… they tend to be more conservative with new technologies and want something that is more proven.”

Before proving something, it needs to work. From there, the learning can really begin.

“First it needs to work… It needs to solve the problem. If it’s cool, that’s great. But, does it work?” explained Harkey. “There’s definitely a desire to be experimenting with new tech.”

Gauging Success

Determining whether or not an emerging technology project is successful is a challenging task in enterprise VR. Some in the XR space have even suggested new metrics for XR experiences on the grounds that the way that we track engagement with more conventional media doesn’t do XR justice.

“Definitely experiment. Definitely play with things. There’s no better way to understand how this can impact your business than to play with it,” said Harkey. “But, set the expectations upfront if that’s what you’re doing… If you’re misaligned on the objectives, that’s when you can have a failed experience.”

Those expectations might be things like “engagement” – how many people are accessing the experience, and how long are they using it? However, it can be just as important to understand what they’re doing while they’re in the enterprise VR experience. According to Harkey, some companies use “investigation” as their only metric.

“If I’m doing anything in VR right now and I’m anyone other than Meta, and this is probably true for them too, I don’t really know what I’m doing in VR and I want to see what people engage with,” said Harkey. Harkey added that sometimes experimenting leads to an idea for a more practical or goal-driven solution. “A lot of the time, you’ll see those use cases start to emerge.”

Putting on the Headset With Morpheus

Morpheus is an enterprise VR engagement platform. It started off as a VR events coordinator using AltspaceVR, but has developed into a full-service solution provider with its own virtual world platform and headset distribution arm. And headset distribution is still a big deal.

“We looked at the market and were like, ‘no one has headsets’ so that’s one – that’s the first thing we need to tackle,” CEO Jeffrey Chernick told me during an in-world interview. “We actually send teams headsets and teach them how to use VR. We do one-on-one onboarding with everyone on a team.”

Upon entering the world, before the interview started, COO Jennifer Regan led a “grounding exercise,” acclimating to being in VR. “We are really focused on the least common denominator, which is the first-time user but we also want to make sure that we’re creating enriching spaces for advanced users,” said Regan.

Morpheus enterprise VR platform

Chernick believes that in the next couple of years, as headset adoption picks up, things like hardware distribution will shrink as a part of their business model. Morpheus also works on desktop and mobile devices, and they’re planning on expanding the availability of their enterprise VR application, which is currently only in Quest’s App Lab.

“A huge piece for a lot of corporate HR teams is the employee benefit of giving a headset,” commented Regan. “A Quest 2 gives them access to Supernatural, other fitness apps – there’s other programming that they can at least conceive of using.”

Exploring a Morpheus World

Users can bring their own enterprise VR content into Morpheus, or work with the team to create bespoke worlds. However, the available worlds in Morpheus have a lot to offer already. Some of the settings speak to their earlier days as a “one-off experience” platform but different areas can be built onto one another via a portal system to create vast multi-venue virtual worlds.

“Space is the most valuable tool and we try to maximize its power,” explained president Mikhail Krymov. Krymov is the “chief architect” behind the Morpheus worlds which include sunny knolls, rock gardens, firefly caves, lounges, lecture halls, and ethereal forests.

Interactions and assets come alive in the worlds as well. A hands-in interaction triggers fireworks. “Unofficially the best drinks in VR” slosh in the cup and clink during a toast. A minigame initiates between two avatars wearing boxing gloves. Speakers have their choice between holding a microphone or using a floating microphone that follows them as they move.

“Once you’re in the world, what do you do that’s not just a novelty?” asked Chernick. “No one’s coming in here for a four-person board meeting that they could just do on Zoom.”

These interactions aren’t just fun – they’re exercises in embodiment that help users get comfortable with the feeling of being in virtual spaces. As Regan pointed out, there’s still an “intimidation factor for newer users.” It’s easy to imagine familiar objects, whether fun or practical, helping users feel at home.

Enterprise VR Beyond “The Officeverse”

Enterprise VR solutions that do little more than add depth to a video call have been dubbed “the officeverse.” While those kinds of experiences are a natural way for enterprise companies to dip their toes into the immersive waters, they’re by no means the end of what companies are exploring or what builders are creating.

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VR Training Company Gemba Secures $18M Series A to Expand Enterprise Metaverse

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Gemba, the corporate VR learning platform, announced it’s closed an $18 million Series A funding round, which the company says will be used to continue expansion into Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and North America.

The latest funding round was led by Parkway Venture Capital, now valuing the UK-based company at $60 million.

In 2017, Gemba grew out of executive training company The Leadership Network, which was founded in 2013 by CEO Nathan Robinson and Chairman Victor Lewis. At the time, The Leadership Network was focused on cross-industry leadership training which, through its executive masterclasses, let senior execs from non-competing companies go hands-on at the state-of-the-art facilities of global giants like Toyota, Tesla, Google, BMW and Amazon. 

Now the company is all-in with VR training platform Gemba, which also still holds masterclasses, albeit in virtual reality. The platform also focuses on immersive skill transfer, including things like on-the-job VR skill training, simulated factory walks, and live training events in VR.

Image courtesy Gemba

Gemba has since worked with 4,000 executives from more than 675 companies, including Philips, Pfizer, Nike and Dell.

Its most recent success story involves Aptiv, a leading automotive supplier. Gemba says its VR training enabled Aptiv to increase skill transfer efficiency by 80% when compared to real-world training programs. In the first year of working with Aptiv, the company also saved $2 million on travel expenses alone.

“As an educator, we know that 90% of learning is about engagement,” says Frankie Cavanagh, Gemba’s Chief Technology Officer. “Gemba allows users to learn and train in a whole new way. With higher engagement levels than traditional teaching and the combination of unprecedented levels of realism and a customized learning experience, it’s a revolutionary teaching tool.”

Gemba says its Series A will accelerate the development of the platform, enabling people and companies to access Gemba on a subscription basis. It’s also set to expand its offering of immersive training simulations, tools and learning experiences, all of which are accessible via online app stores.

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