Interconnected Realities: How the Metaverse Will Transform Our Relationship to Technology Forever by Leslie Shannon

Author:Leslie Shannon [Shannon, Leslie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781394160853
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2023-05-22T00:00:00+00:00

Training: The Low‐Hanging Fruit

Let's start our tour of the enterprise Metaverse with training, the most easily understandable corporate use of Metaverse technologies, and possibly the most widely spread today. Immersive virtual reality, in particular, is excellent for creating safe, relatively low‐cost environments for any training scenario that is dirty, difficult, dangerous, or expensive to replicate in the physical world. It reduces or eliminates travel costs associated with training for both teachers and students, and gives virtual access to even the most complicated of machinery to far more people than may be able to be accommodated on that machinery in the physical world. We've already seen that a number of government entities have begun to invest in VR‐based training to reach people in rural or geographically inaccessible locations. Driven by the same visible benefits, an even larger number of commercial enterprises from across multiple industries have already embraced VR‐based training and made it part of their corporate culture.1 Walmart and McDonald's use VR to train their employees in customer service. Boeing uses VR to train future astronauts. FedEx and UPS use VR to train drivers before they get out on the highway. Bank of America uses VR to train their employees on how to handle difficult discussions.

VR isn't just useful for making training safer, more widely available, and more cost‐effective; it has inherent benefits that make it actually better than in‐person training in a wide variety of scenarios. For example, stopping a production line because some newbie has made a rookie mistake is a massive expense for any company. At Ford Motors, a new F‐150 pickup truck rolls off the line every single minute. At about $40,000 per truck, any assembly line stoppage costs Ford $40k per minute at a minimum, so the benefits of training new workers in VR, safely away from the actual line, are obvious.2 Keep those unpredictable humans away from the machines until we're sure they know what they're doing, please.

A second area in which VR training excels is in an example that we saw earlier, with the assessment of elderly drivers in South Korea: Everything is measurable in VR. I learned this first‐hand in a VR session with Immerse, one of the earliest and most successful VR training specialists. They created a training scenario for Shell several years ago that taught the trainee how to change the flow of oil at a refinery from one tank to a second one. Immerse was kind enough to take me through this scenario, and afterward they showed me how every microtask that I had performed in service of the larger goal was logged, including the amount of time elapsed between each action. Even though I did eventually get the correct pipe hooked up to the correct tank, the record of my actions revealed that for a brief second, I had thrown the wrong switch, which in the physical world would have flooded the platform I stood on with oil. Not a good look. I had also had to stand

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