Chapter 6

Immersive Environments Refine Learning

“Virtual environments can provide more dimensions than physical environments and more social, nuanced ways for people to learn from one another as they face complex challenges.”

—Kevyn Renner

Senior Technology Consultant, Chevron

At a Chevron refinery, executives from around the world meet to talk about the future leadership of the organization. They discuss how the next generation can learn from the current leaders and how this will shape the workforce of the future. People from the organization development team sit along the periphery of the room, listening in and occasionally offering insights. Chevron is deeply committed to creating an innovative workplace, and this meeting is a vital step.

Then the unexpected happens. At the refinery where they sit, a major processing unit where gasoline is made has an unscheduled shutdown. The executives need to move from dialogue to action, making rapid decisions to determine what effect this shutdown will have on the facility, their people on staff at the refinery, the oil in the pipeline, and the environment. The facilitators stand by, recording as much as they can, because this could inform all aspects of their scenario planning.

Every minute counts. Every decision has a potentially global impact. Making the best decisions possible is job number one. There is no time to do anything but work together to respond. The executive team does so again and again, demonstrating the experience and decision-making ability that led them to their positions at Chevron.

They do so from their desks, in some instances thousands of miles from one another, though it feels like they are side by side. The oil refinery is in a virtual immersive environment created by Chevron to study, among other things, how company leaders make critical decisions and pass them on.

At refineries, they may not be able to move pipes or vessels quickly, but they can move information fast. For example, a refinery can be accurately depicted in three dimensions (3D), serving as a proving ground for cutting-edge techniques and experiential learning.

 

 

Kevyn Renner, senior technology consultant at Chevron, drives the company’s efforts to apply new information technology in industry-changing ways. In Chevron’s virtual environment developed by Renner and his team, participants can work in safety while facing authentic and potentially dangerous situations. Their actions can also be captured, analyzed, and learned from by others. In the refinery shutdown instance, up-and-coming leaders can go through the shutdown scenario to learn on their feet and can then talk with the executive team about how to refine their practices. In this case, the upcoming leaders can make tactical decisions that the senior team can learn from. These social interactions can enhance Chevron’s operational performance.¹

Real-time sensor information fed into the model creates, in effect, a constantly updated 3D learning environment. With this intelligent model, experts from around the world, using avatars, can interact as if they were working in the same room.

Renner explains the value of the environment by way of analogy, showing a graph of sudden improvements in high jumping over the past 100 years, due to radical changes in technique from the scissors, to the western roll, to the straddle, and culminating in the famous “Fosbury Flop.” This demonstrates the way innovation and new ideas mature. Often a spark of innovation leads to gradual evolution until the next spark. Sometimes the establishment will push back, but as the workplace fills with people who have always known immersive environments, the establishment will change.

New technology can enable dramatic improvements in outcome. That’s especially true with immersive environments because they can provide far more dimensions than real environments. Every industry can find benefits in digital models, especially high-dollar manufacturing, infrastructure, and energy industries where working together in a realistic environment can be dangerous or impractical. It’s as if a new planet is being constructed, and people can learn there immediately.

Renner talks about the virtual environment his team is piloting using the terminology of the oil refinery—not that of social media or language created for the 3D Internet. He describes it as a living environment, a lab where people work and learn together. He uses words that convey what people at work can do with the technology. For Chevron and many other organizations using similar techniques, these are collaboration spaces, operations centers, and building blocks rather than virtual worlds and objects or files in a 3D environment.

Practicing in real time in a realistic setting is vital for people development and learning in every company. The oil industry has at least one more reason to value such practice. The industry as a whole suffered a downturn in the 1980s and early 1990s and therefore didn’t hire many people for a decade. This resulted in a talent and knowledge gap. As experienced team members retire, there is a shortage of people with long-term institutional knowledge to replace them.

The next generation of workers is coming into the workforce with networking and multiprocessing skills and a global mindedness their elders never would have imagined. Constant experience in the networked world has had a profound impact on their approach to problem solving and collaboration.

Renner uses the analogy of the kaleidoscope to describe the many perspectives that people experience when working in virtual spaces. It fits with the organization’s mandate to have the right people in the right place with the right talent, so they can get work done in a timely and reliable way. The largest private producer of renewable energy and the sixth-largest company in the world based on revenues, Chevron takes education very seriously, consistent with its “Human Energy” philosophy.

 

 

Chevron wants its focus and activities to attract, develop, recognize, and retain people who help the organization produce top competitive results as the internal and external environment changes. Climbing into a virtual world allows them to do that realistically, safely, and repeatedly. The virtual environment supports remote collaboration, real-time immersion, and expert knowledge capture. It is the application and approach to innovative technology that gives Chevron one of its competitive advantages.

“We have a very complex environment in the refining industry,” says Renner. “The next-generation control room provides a collaborative work environment for making better decisions based on situational awareness, which affects safety, reliability, and overall performance. Cloud computing and virtual immersive environments help provide a contextual view of the operating plant. Oil and gas firms can derive actionable information from multiple data sources and thereby lay a foundation for a proactive and predictive operating philosophy.”

Get Together Virtually

People increasingly need to work and learn together even when they can’t physically be together. Sometimes asynchronous communication is enough. You write email, then you send it to someone who reads it and responds, or you post a tweet or something new to the online community. Other times, a real-time interaction works best. Trouble is, traditional tools such as audio conferencing, videoconferencing, and web conferencing usually provide a significantly poorer experience than face-to-face interaction because they lack some of the sensory dimensions people rely on to read situations.

Technologies are emerging to create the illusion that people are physically together in the same place at the same time. The best examples are telepresence and virtual immersive environments.

Virtual immersive environments are a category of emerging technologies that encompass virtual worlds, gaming, and simulations that have a social component and closely mirror working with someone in the same physical space.

“This is an umbrella term for whole categories of tools that overlap and blur in feature design and technical functionality,” points out Koreen Olbrish, CEO of immersive consultancy Tandem Learning. “What makes them unique is that each represents a different type of experience. Virtual worlds mirror a universe around you, simulations offer goal-based activities, and games feature layers of competition. The lines are blurred when simulations are games, or virtual worlds contain games or simulations working together to create an immersive experience.”²

Immersive refers to a sense of surrounding ourselves in something, a space in which we are present. We can immerse ourselves in a sport, a hobby, work, or an environment. The degree of immersion is important because the more we feel like we’re in the environment, the more likely we are to feel engaged. What makes virtual immersive environments unique is that we emerge from them with real-life experiences we’ve actually participated in, not just imagined.

 

 

“Think IMAX movies, surround sound, and World of Warcraft applied to the web and business applications,” says Erica Driver, industry analyst and cofounder of ThinkBalm. “What these all have in common is that they engage—even engross—the people using them.”³

Virtual Worlds

Virtual worlds are online representations of reality you step through as you would the physical world. They can also stretch the usual bounds of the real world, providing an opportunity to glimpse what’s going on behind a wall or across the globe.

Virtual worlds have become second homes for millions of people worldwide. And they aren’t just for kids. Businesses use these environments for training and recruitment. Conferences and reunions are held “in world.” Ideas are tested. Debates play out. People learn to work in a virtual space where they can innovate, connect, reorganize, and redeploy hundreds or thousands of people around specific activities, enabling them to self-organize based on interests, objectives, or skills.

These environments can be the stage for other social media tools, or they can be features within online communities or media-sharing sites, adding an immersive and engaging visual element to a two- or three-dimensional experience.

Like the Star Trek holodeck, virtual worlds are a clean canvas where designers can create a digital simulated experience in which people interact with their environment and with other people in the virtual space. The designer’s challenge is to figure out what to create and where people can interact.

Virtual worlds are particularly useful when people need to engage in multisite meetings or multiparty conversations, especially when visual cues and nonverbal communication are particularly important. They prove quite useful for “virtual field trips” and offsite meetings and don’t require ever leaving the building. They are also a natural choice when you need to show 3D data-like models of buildings or parts to go into manufactured products or molecular structures, or when people need training for work in hazardous environments.

John Seely Brown, visiting scholar at the University of Southern California and former chief scientist at Xerox, and Douglas Thomas, who teaches at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and edits Games & Culture: A Journal of Interactive Media, believe at base that these are learning environments. “This kind of learning is radically different from what we traditionally think of as learning: the accumulation of facts or acquisition of knowledge. They involve the experience of acting together to overcome obstacles, managing skills, talents, and relationships, and they create contexts in which social awareness, reflection, and joint coordinated action become an essential part of the experience, providing the basis for a networked imagination.”⁴

Virtual worlds enable a physical sense of being together, working together, interacting in real time, seeing one another, and sharing space. In that sense, virtual worlds are similar to other new social learning approaches that provide a means—in this case a place—for transferring knowledge among people in organizations, allowing them to understand a situation, and even constructing an idea or a structure together. The activities within these virtual places make coordination and interaction possible and necessary.

 

Games

Some virtual environments take the form of massive multiplayer online role-playing games (MMOG). Not just fun, these multiplayer online games help players develop and exercise skills closely matching the planning, learning, and technical skills increasingly needed in the workplace. Playing can require strategic thinking, interpretative analysis, problem solving, formulating plans, team building, cooperating, and adapting to rapid change.

Tony O’Driscoll, executive director of Fuqua’s Center for IT and Media at Duke University and co-author of Learning in 3D, was part of a research team in 2008 that found that the skills necessary to lead in games closely resemble those necessary to lead in the real world, identifying and leveraging our organization’s competitive advantage while making quick decisions based on large amounts of fast-moving information. For example, the U.S. Army offers a 3D virtual video game called America’s Army, which lets participants crawl through obstacle courses, fire weapons, and engage in paratrooper actions—without leaving their chairs. What feels like a game is actually an army recruiting and training tool.⁵

Simulations

“A simulation is a digital model that represents situation or process. When a story gets wrapped around it and people are asked to do something in the simulation, you have a scenario,” says Clark Quinn, author of Engaging Learning: Designing e-Learning Simulation Games and an upcoming book on mobile learning.⁶ Simulations provide opportunities to track decision making in realistic environments and show the repercussions of those decisions in a risk-free environment.

Traditionally, simulations have consisted of a single character navigating through scenarios such as flying a plane or making project management decisions. Live simulations incorporate actors playing roles and can be as elaborate as full disaster response training to a terrorist attack. With technology, simulations can also be conducted as group experiences in a classroom, with teams or an individual entering their decisions into a computer as the simulation proceeds. The key to the simulation experience is a debrief discussion afterward when people reflect on their experiences. Simulations not only provide the opportunity to learn from our experiences but also to reflect on our decisions to gain greater insights and improve on what we do.

Out-of-This World Experiences

Virtual immersive environments present truly unique ways to work, think, and learn socially. According to Koreen Olbrish, who has focused exclusively on this space for a decade, immersive environments are most useful when they create an experience that we couldn’t otherwise have because of physical or geographical constraints, high expense, or outright danger.⁷ Think about experiences you and those in your organization need to have in real life but can’t because of some limitation. These experiences are where organizations should start applying the value of virtual immersive environments.

See the Knowledge Around You

Because of the sheer volume of customers it serves, Defense Acquisition University (DAU), part of the U.S. Department of Defense, is building a 3D virtual immersive environment called Nexus, where students will learn acquisition processes through the eyes and locomotion of their avatars. Nexus will run in a browser and give many more people than could ever travel to a physical location access to courses they need for certification.

Mark Oehlert, an anthropologist who works as an innovation evangelist at DAU, is technology advisor for the project. He figures out how to use game technology, simulations, virtual worlds, and other types of social media to create better learning experiences for DAU customers.

He began asking, “What if you, in the person of an avatar, could literally walk through an acquisition process? What if you could change your viewpoint and look at it from a 10,000-foot level or drill deep into it?”

From that seed of an idea, DAU began thinking about creating a spatial way to represent knowledge. It already had communities of practice and knowledge management tools, but what if its new virtual classroom could accrue the wisdom of everybody who passed through it? That classroom would become a knowledge repository where people could access what people who came before them knew and learned. Students could also come back to access it again after class. The class notes there could be built upon, modified, and improved.

Nexus won’t replace other forms of e-learning at DAU, but as it improves and more people access it through browsers, it will probably subsume online conference tools because the space is a natural forum for meetings and collaboration. It will also eventually affect the way DAU delivers courses. People at DAU’s physical campus will also be able to go into an immersive virtual world to take or augment a class or lesson. They can go there a couple of weeks before a class and see virtual representations of the people they’ll be with.⁸

Learning by Doing Complex Work

Researchers have long known that learning by doing is the most effective means of learning certain kinds of things; yet it’s often hard to create a safe environment for people to learn new roles on the job. Some scenarios and opportunities are simply too expensive, dangerous, infrequent, or impractical to do in real life. In virtual environments, people can fail safely and create memories that improve performance when recalled later.

Virtual environments, especially simulations and games, have already become an important part of training for emergency responders. A group of trainees can be immersed in a massive simulated airplane crash and then be trained to search for and evacuate survivors, suppress fires, start field triage, and address the media and the FBI. Not only would it take hundreds of person hours and huge expenditures to conduct a live drill of the same magnitude, but there is always the danger of someone getting hurt.

Experts agree simulations can never replace the experience of being surrounded by an actual fire and carrying rescue gear, but these simulations are valuable supplements.

Loyalist College, a mid-size community college 200 kilometers east of Toronto, Canada, uses immersive environments in its Customs Border Services Program.⁹ Prior to September 11, 2001, students spent three weeks closely observing a Canadian immigration and customs agent on the job. Increased security concerns then prevented people, who were not bonded from working at the border, so on-the-job training was terminated. When students reverted to the classroom for role playing, exercises fell flat. Second Life, the online virtual world, provided a realistic and immersive solution.

 

 

Kathryn deGast-Kennedy, coordinator of the program, said, “Even though I have been a Border Services Officer for 28 years, I felt the same level of anxiety in the virtual border crossing as I did 28 years earlier. The virtual experience made me a believer that working within Second Life was as real as it could get.” She sees the program expanding into topics such as the anatomy of a motor vehicle search, scans for miniscule yet telltale signs of trouble, and conflict management and dispute resolution.¹⁰

Loyalist’s Customs and Immigration training simulation includes a simplified version of the Thousand Islands, Ontario/Watertown, New York border environment. Some students practice riding across the border as civilians while others play the role of border agents validating identification against records and conducting interviews. A script within the virtual environment generates information from the virtual license plates on the cars passing through the border and displays the information in the guard booth. Certain events are programmed to pop up inside the guard station—just as they might in the real world—such as problem driving records, stolen car warnings, or other red flags. About 5 percent of the license plates are programmed to generate a flag message on the booth monitor, consistent with the statistical probability at real border crossings.

The realistic environment requires students to improvise and think on their feet as they work together—just as they need to do at a real border crossing. “Because it is improv,” Ken Hudson, Loyalist’s head of Educational Technology, says, “the students have no idea what to expect.”¹¹

Students who complete the program consistently have a 39 percent higher success rate at testing milestones than those who do not complete work in virtual practice sessions. They also score better grades—roughly 30 percent higher—than their counterparts who receive only classroom training. They excel in giving bilingual greetings, asking mandatory questions, assessing resident status, and exhibiting overall professionalism.

Understanding From Authenticity

Although an avatar is any image that represents a person in an interactive exchange, it does represent an actual human being, and avatars in virtual environments represent many facets of that person. When people interact with other avatars, context can be conveyed and understood through facial expressions, gestures, posture, and position in an environment.

Although many people who promote virtual environments say it’s important to make avatars look realistic and reflect to some degree your appearance in the real world, a growing crowd takes an opposing view. One contrarian is Mark Oehlert, the innovation evangelist at DAU, who in real life is a down-to-earth, somewhat intellectual-looking anthropologist. Picture him wearing a photo ID around his neck and a dress shirt.

In Second Life, one of the virtual worlds where Oehlert interacts, he’s a seven-foot-tall Celtic warrior named ChuckNorris Mission, who sometimes sports wings and lives in a tiki beach house with an Elvish tower and Roman furniture.

Oehlert explains that his avatar’s appearance tells others more about his personality than the way he looks in real life—and he argues that the same is true of everyone’s online persona. Common wisdom says that when people have the ability to be anything they want to be or appear to be, you can’t trust their representation. He contends that when you remove physical and economic constraints from the way people present themselves, what you may be looking at is actually the truest version of how people see themselves and how they most want others to see them.¹²

At IBM, which has a large presence in Second Life, employees interact as avatars of all types. “You can come to a meeting as a fish,” points out Chuck Hamilton, virtual learning leader for the Center for Advanced Learning at IBM, which trains employees across IBM in virtual environments such as Second Life. Hamilton’s avatar sports a kilt, a connection to his heritage and the Celtic band he plays with in Vancouver.¹³

Tandem Learning creates 2D and 3D scenario-based simulations that mirror the interactions of pharmaceutical sales representatives interacting with physicians and other healthcare professionals. These simulations allow sales representatives to practice selling and communication skills to ensure they aren’t inadvertently violating Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulations through the language they use to promote their products’ use. Other simulations allow sales representatives to view interactions between physicians and patient to better understand how physicians make treatment decisions for their patients. This type of practice provides sales representatives with skill in highly clinical and heavily regulated conversations.¹⁴

 

Seeing Through Other Eyes, Literally

Psychotherapy helps people change behavior by working to pull people out of themselves—to see their behavior from the perspective of a loved one, for example, or to observe their own thinking habits from a neutral distance.

What if you could experience first hand the reality of mentally ill people with more compassion and understanding? What if you could feel what it’s like to be a person of another gender, color, or nationality?

Now, neuroscientists have shown that they can make this experience physical, creating a “body swapping” illusion that could have a profound effect on a range of therapeutic techniques. The brain, when tricked by optical and sensory illusions, can quickly adopt any other human form, no matter how different, as its own.

“You can see the possibilities—putting a male in a female body, young in old, white in black, and vice versa,” says Dr. Henrik Ehrsson of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, who with his colleague Valeria Petkova has provided grounding for some of the most interesting aspects of what can happen in virtual environments.¹⁵

Jeremy Bailenson, director of the Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford University, and his colleague Nick Yee call this the Proteus effect, after the Greek god who can embody many different selfrepresentations.¹⁶

In one experiment, the Stanford team found that people agree to contribute more to retirement accounts when they are virtually “age morphed” to look older and that they will exercise more after inhabiting an avatar that works out and loses weight.

Sarah Robbins (aka Intelligal), who teaches at Ball State and is coauthor of Second Life for Dummies, regularly conducts a cultural awareness experiment with her students. She has them put on giant Kool-Aid pitcher avatars and mill around various Second Life spaces to experience diversity, crowd mentality, exclusion, and discrimination. She explained that because most of her students never felt excluded or discriminated against, the “Kool-Aid man experience” is a way to get them to quickly and easily understand a previously foreign concept. So how did the students react to this new (and strangely unique) exercise? Many of them felt safe because they were in a group of people like themselves. Within five minutes, students learned complex, experiential concepts that are only marginally conveyed during a 50-minute, face-to-face class. Robbins believes these tools can help build a bridge from the place where people are interested and engaged to where they need to go, educationally and in society.¹⁷

Margaret Regan, president of The FutureWork Institute, creates unique learning experiences for diversity training in virtual immersive environments. Participants “wear” different skin colors and have the opportunity to walk in the shoes—or skin—of another.¹⁸

There’s even a schizophrenia clinic in Second Life, run by psychiatry professors at the University of San Diego, based on longitudinal data of stories from real patients. You can walk into the clinic in Second Life, pick a badge that identifies you as male or female, and within minutes start having hallucinations and hearing voices that murmur in your avatar’s ears. As you walk down the hallway, the floor beneath you feels like it’s moving a little, like a scene in a Wile E. Coyote cartoon. You pick up a newspaper, and the words get blurry and come to life. Words about psychosis leap out at you.

Play with Possibilities

Often deep learning depends on engaging with materials in realistic environments where you can learn through trial and error. The feel of the experience becomes the basis for understanding how to excel and gain confidence to continue to a higher level.

In a virtual environment you can play any role you like, regardless of who you really are. You can fail in one role, reconnect, and try another one, learning from each.

L’Oréal, the cosmetics company, uses a global recruiting game, Reveal, to bring people up to speed on products and services before they enter the interview process. The skills people learn in virtual environments can be used outside of these spaces too. America’s Army, for example, once just a recruiting tool that offers a glimpse of actual army work in a realistic play environment, is now being used as a training tool because it teaches many skills, some at a high level. The U.S. Navy is doing the same thing with its Navy Training Exercise.

Anne Derryberry, analyst and advisor for serious games, online learning games, simulations, and virtual worlds, points out that many of these examples are pre-designed, structured activities leading to a desired result and are often intended for a specific group of people working together online or in the same space.¹⁹ Virtual environments can also give people an opportunity for more serendipitous, less known outcomes when doing complex work.

Whether designed as an environment that mirrors the real world or as a metaphor for the real world, these spaces can also include or be augmented by opportunities for people to debrief and reflect on what they’ve experienced.

For example, when people at the University of Maryland’s Center for Advanced Transportation Technology Laboratory wanted to improve the way traffic incidents are managed in the I-95 corridor, they knew that training and practice were going to be key to interagency coordination. One of the crucial design elements of the virtual incident management training system that was launched was its ability to run a virtual scenario, record the actions of every team member in the training event, and replay the scenario to the group for debrief and critique. With this kind of system, a virtual tractor-trailer crash and gas spill incident on the Maryland–Virginia state line could occur at 3:30 p.m. on a virtual Friday—with no real-world traffic backups of any kind. Any missteps in the handling of the virtual incident can be evaluated, with the added benefit of running a similar virtual incident to practice the corrected activities.

 

Make Time for Serious Play

Byron Reeves, a professor at Stanford, found that the environment a leader works in and learns from has more influence on leadership success than his or her individual traits as a leader. A rich environment, where people can learn to learn and see leadership modeled, can lead to success. Reeves also found that people who may not be high potentials in the real world end up with significant leadership roles in the game environment, which can lead them to seek out leadership opportunities using the skills they have developed online.²⁰

IBM uses serious play for learning and work across many lines of business. With more than 3,000 employees involved on two dozen public and private islands in Second Life, a dozen more sites in Active Worlds, and several Open Simulator spaces, IBM has a strong public and private presence in virtual spaces. The company uses these spaces for activities such as collaboration among various research and development teams around the world and experiments on the evolution of user-interface design and how people interact virtually.

Sam Palmisano, Chairman and CEO of IBM, has held worldwide workforce meetings in Second Life, reinforcing the organization’s commitment to living its values and creating a strong opportunity for innovation and engagement.

Second Life at IBM is a way to connect across generations and locations. There you’ll see very senior IBMers swimming and flying next to people who have been in the business 10 months and others still who have retired and yet are interested in staying connected.

When polled, 85 percent of the people who participated in IBM’s Second Life activities reported that mentoring events achieved their objectives and that virtual social spaces were suitable for mentoring and better for connecting with people than a telephone call or a web conference.²¹

Respond to Critics

When you begin talking about and planning a new initiative that involves virtual worlds, you will likely face questions and comments from people who want to temper enthusiasm with caution. Here are the most common objections we hear and ways we believe you can address them.

This All Seems Too Sci-Fi, Too Unreal for My Organization

At some point in history, television was viewed as science fiction. Telephones, computers, and the Internet are all innovations that our ancestors probably never even dreamed of. That does not make them less useful or relevant. Companies that stand the test of time are the ones that recognize the importance of change and innovation when there is a business need.

This Is All Too Expensive

Instructive 2D games can be made relatively cheaply, often from templates that can be updated with the simple insertion of a new audio track. Even developers of powerful 3D games assure us that technology advances will improve efficiencies through scalability, lowering the costper-student price. The cost of virtual technologies ranges dramatically from being practically free to requiring significant investments of time, resources, and money.

This Doesn’t Create Lasting Change

Underlying every successful virtual immersive environment are sophisticated analytics engines. America’s Army is a prime example of how this works. The game uses predictive analytics on data about players’ strengths and weaknesses to identify a player’s likely response to any new situation, and it adjusts assignments accordingly. Its adaptive nature has big ramifications for play, learning, and work, giving people a genuine opportunity to learn from their mistakes and improve their performance.

It’s Not Natural

Although some people find working in a virtual environment unsettling at first, most don’t and quickly adapt to the virtual world in the same way we easily integrate into a new city with different smells and sights. Some people choose never to set foot out of their hometown, but most do, and they are likely to enjoy the trip. Virtual immersive environments also offer the opportunity to traverse different planes of reality, something you can’t do anywhere else on earth.

No One Will Be Interested

A recent study by the American Society for Training & Development found that although respondents said that virtual world technology is rarely used to a high or very high extent today (4.7 percent of the 743 high-level human resources professionals polled in 2009), the percentage of respondents who indicated it should be used was 24.6.²² Given how many people don’t know the benefits of virtual environments, we suspect this number would be even higher if they understood. How many people complain about the current structure of training or say it could be improved? How many people say training should be more relevant? These environments provide an opportunity to do that.

Recommendations

Get started with a virtual immersive environment by considering what people in your organization would benefit from doing but can’t in a healthy, safe, or cost-effective way.

Host a Virtual Meeting with a Captivating Topic

Sometimes enticing people to try something new involves giving them something to do that they already want to do and doing it in a way that will require trying something new in the process. Consider hosting a meeting on a topic your constituents want to know more about (or want to argue about, or couldn’t imagine missing) in a virtual environment. Give them plenty of notice and offer mini tutorials on how to get started.

Social interaction improves employee engagement, productivity, and innovation but is often hard to come by in today’s far-flung organizations. Once you show immersive environments as training devices, expand them to facilitate collaboration and communication, allowing employees to interact freely without having to be in the same place. Host a big meeting, a worldwide party, or a networking event, or bring in a guest speaker. Make the business case by measuring cost savings and the success of the project.

Create Onramps

Virtual environments are ideal for training and simulations, allowing companies to replicate almost any environment they choose and have employees interact with it, the trainers, and each other. Karl Kapp, professor at Bloomsburg University and co-author of Learning in 3D, reminds organizations to “provide participants with an onramp to help them become comfortable with the technology. Time must be allocated in advance of the program to provide basic instruction on navigation. Make mentoring available. Separate the learning associated with coming up to speed in a virtual immersive environment from the experience people will have in the environment itself.”²³

Start at the Very Top or at the Bottom

Someone in a middle management position may have even more fear of presenting new technology ideas than those on the front line. People on the front line are more likely to try something for efficiency’s sake and let the results do the selling to the top. Gina Schreck, cofounder and digital immigration officer at Synapse 3Di, often sees the use of immersive technology start in small pockets (sales, project teams, and so forth) of a company; when other groups get wind of the successes, it spreads.²⁴

Make It Easy

Even when the cost and efficiency benefits outweigh the business problem, if immersive environments are hard for people to use, they will not adopt them. Recruit volunteers and evangelists to ensure the first experience is positive for people. Offer lots of coaching and flexible time slots to get newcomers oriented and on board.

Show Real Value, not Gimmicks

Joe Miller, vice president of platform and technology development at Linden Lab (operator of Second Life), suggests companies move past simply re-creating real-world training environments, replete with seats, podiums, and screens. “Once the wow factor wears off,” he says, “this approach may not be interesting or innovative enough to create a powerful virtual experience.”²⁵

Mark Oehlert reminds us that even after 10 years of creating e-learning, people still put the “Next” button in the lower right-hand corner of the screen. Virtual immersive environments can (and should) do better than that. Under-engaging, poorly constructed spaces yield little value.²⁶

Use the technology to create useful, rather than gimmicky, executions. Use the technology in such a way that it augments even the traditional online experience. Ask yourself, how is this better than just putting these assets online with a more basic tool, loading a video into a media-sharing system, creating a basic e-learning course, or hosting a meeting on a conference bridge?

Consider the opportunity to tear down walls, let people learn through action and interaction, see experiences from angles they never could have in real life, and ask questions that would have been unanswerable in real situations. Virtual immersive environments are far too compelling to miss the opportunity to create something great.