From imagination to integration
From the 1992 cult classic The Lawnmower Man to the latest Iron Man movie, access to immersive worlds through a virtual interface has often been a staple of science fiction movies.
However, for some industries, this technology, known as extended reality, is more fact than fiction thanks to accessible price tags and wider uptake.
A 2019 PWC report predicts that virtual and augmented reality has the potential to add US$1.5 trillion to the global economy by 2030, opening the door to gains in productivity in verticals such as healthcare, engineering, logistics, retail, and entertainment.
The technology creates "a new and even more intuitive way to interact with a computer," says Goldman Sachs, which expects the market to be worth US$95 billion by 2025.
Both predictions were made before the pandemic, which has since pushed extended reality into the mainstream and leading to many benefits.
Seeing is studying
Simply put, the fact that a company can custom create a digital virtual ecosystem that can be integrated into in-house platforms and corporate intranet ultimately helps to engage employees and enhanced the cultural workplace whether it be internal communications, news, or training.
Conventional training in high-risk environments has been traditionally been delivered using highly sophisticated simulations, but the main drawback to this approach has been the high costs involved. However, in recent years, as new technologies emerge and mature, many multinational companies have started to seize the opportunity to exploit this innovative technology to train in a much smarter and more cost-effective way.
Experiential learning allows a trainee to consolidate memory by practicing realistic procedures and events, which is why high-risk activities in dangerous sectors have been carried out over the years in realistic simulators, e.g. flight and engineering. The recent emergence of extended reality as a key technology has allowed companies to start building some of these immersive experiences at a much lower cost and has enabled them to offer their customers and stakeholders lower barriers to entry.
Effective training is vital to the success of any enterprise. It enables team members to learn, grow, and properly do their jobs. Strong team collaboration is also necessary for the growth of any business. It enables the sharing of ideas and the development of new ones and more and more companies are realizing that they need to be at the forefront of these initiatives to be able to prevail.
One such example of a company embracing this technology is the Spanish Utilities company Naturgy which has already started to complement real-life training for wind turbines maintenance training procedures with an alternative based on virtual reality and accessed through everis’ own extended reality NAKA platform. Such example can be seen here
Digital schooling
By integrating extended reality and cloud computing into a single collaborative platform, NAKA helps enterprises access engaging large-scale immersive experiences. With user-friendly access to a variety of immersive enterprise-level and custom training scenarios, collaborative environments, and business-specific processes, NAKA allows companies to build and scale in a unique, secure, and flexible virtual space with ease speeding up time to market from ideas to integration.
The “virtualization” of a training or shared learning environment which offers a “real world” hands-on experience as well as all the benefits of real-life learning is essential to successful learner retention.
NAKA considers this by allowing users to access customized gamification, grading, certification, as well as integration to in-house LMSs.
As a result, some clients such as Naturgy have found a significant increase in speed and accuracy from their trainees using their custom-built mixed reality solution on NAKA over hands-on face-to-face training.