Artificial intelligence-backed, AR-based solutions are being sought by enterprise to close gaps in performance. These efforts require careful strategic planning, adept understanding of the business problems at hand, and expert level technical execution. It's not enough to say, "AR is great and we need to do something with it." We must use sound technology assessment and keen business acumen to determine when, where, and how to create groundbreaking, process-changing tools for the workforce.

Augmented reality continues to advance and emerge in both consumer and enterprise markets. There’s also  rising interest in how to use AR for learning and performance. With AR now one of the hottest buzzwords, how much is hype and how much is substance?

Immersive technology can be alluring. It is a fresh canvas waiting for you to explore. However, just because it is exciting and new doesn't mean it is the right modality for your learners, the right fit for your team, or the best outcome for your organization. Are you considering AR/VR technology because it is novel and might grab some attention? Or is this a necessary tool with which you can finally fully explore subject matter in greater depth?

Imagine if your GPS took you to the wrong location once out of every 10 uses. Now imagine paying tens of thousands of dollars for this mistake. What started as a learning solution for waiters seating guests and delivering meals to wrong tables in an ultra-luxury, fine dining venue became a quest for a learning experience superior to real-world training. Could we do it?

Immersive reality is cool and mysterious, but faculty often have difficulty seeing how to tie the use of it into learning objectives. Additionally, the vast technology associated with it seems out of range for the classroom.  So how do you incorporate what is often a singular experience into a classroom opportunity? More importantly, how do you engage students as content creators? This session will address the pilot experiments and result of a multidisciplinary classroom approach using virtual reality, 360-video, and Google Expedition into coursework. The results speak volumes to where this is going.

Augmented reality is a widely-used technology in games, marketing, and everyday apps, but what about learning and development? Where do you get started? How should you use it? Finding answers to these questions can be difficult and cause developers to overlook the potential this technology holds. We will answer these questions and more through discussion, development, and interaction.

How do you go from a concept to a VR platform with global distribution and analytics that proves efficacy? Producing VR content is challenging without a long-term plan for software monitoring and iteration. Where do you start?

We've talked theory and design for years regarding machine learning-powered AR products. It's time to share business-focused case studies that will illustrate the process, warts and all, of bringing advanced AR to the front lines of businesses.

How does the largest employer on the planet, Walmart, attract and develop a new generation of managers who have spent more time playing games than they have in the classroom? How does Fortune 200 healthcare leader DaVita train a global organization to see the world through the customers’ eyes? How do some of the world's largest companies create realistic rehearsal environments to teach technical skills? How do you deploy VR solutions at scale in a large enterprise, safely integrated with legacy LMSs and LRSs? 

Virtual reality hardware, and the computers that are needed to run higher quality headsets, are changing all the time. What difference does it make, and how will that impact learning?

We've all heard about the power of VR for learning and the benefits it's providing some early adopters. But many companies are still scratching the surface with how VR can be used to boost learning outcomes and transform  business operations. Pilots and PoCs have been deployed and then the question arises: "OK, this was great. But now what?" How does an organization move from a successful VR pilot to a wider-scale deployment?

While virtual reality has been rapidly growing as an innovative method to deliver immersive and engaging training, current implementations are commonly isolated and singular experiences. As VR evolves to be more cost-friendly and the release of tetherless headsets (e.g., Oculus Quest) makes it more mobile, there is real potential now for VR training to also be leveraged for multi-user, shared experiences while still keeping engagement levels high.

Virtual reality is the next frontier for scenario-based training, but producing branching scenarios for VR is time consuming, expensive, and requires extensive technical expertise. Each scenario must be programmed by developers using a tool like Unity 3D, leaving instructional designers with little or no direct control over the content. For VR training to meet its full potential, instructional designers must be able to construct complex branching training scenarios themselves. The training content must be easy to author, maintain, and share with your team.

The soft skills gap is real, according to Bersin, LinkedIn, and McKinsey. Employers reported leadership, communication, and collaboration as the most crucial skills to learn from L&D programs. However, when it comes to developing these complex skills, many current offerings teach what to do but don’t provide opportunities to practice and apply them. Learners may try games, role-plays or pre-recorded simulations, but are you truly moving the needle on performance? In light of shrinking budgets, limited time, and lack of effectiveness, how can you demonstrate impactful gains at scale?

Employees need relevant, just-in-time product and service information on the sales floor. Many sales fail because employees don't know the correct information, they cannot access relevant information, or cannot position it in a way that makes sense to the customer. But what if there was a way to deliver just-in-time, relevant, media-rich product/service information directly to the device in your hand?

Enterprise adoption of virtual reality is gaining traction. This is particularly true for L&D organizations tasked to provide training for complex, large-scale operations, often in remote locations. However, the cost, timeline, and deployment challenges may hinder implementation, and the speed of development in the immersive technology sector can overwhelm those looking to take the first steps. Where do you begin?

Virtual reality is gaining traction in learning settings, but implementing it is resource intensive. Convincing your leadership to invest in virtual reality can be challenging unless you can speak to its impact on organizational outcomes. How do you know you're getting your learning bang for the buck?  And how do you know if you really need it?

VR and AR have been around for a while, and the good news is they’re getting easier to do. The bad news is that it’s easier to do the wrong things! Remember PowerPoint presentations in Second Life? Don’t be that person. While there are some compelling examples now showing us the way, we want to make sure we’re doing what makes sense and not missing any opportunities. 

A VR experience can be exciting and rewarding if designed well. It can also be nauseating and short-lived if it's designed poorly. VR introduces a new realm of possibilities and an equal barrage of obstacles. Traditional elearning is designed in a flat, 2-D space. The 3-D space of VR is entirely different. We'll walk through the top 10 techniques to design an effective VR environment (and the common mistakes designers make). You'll learn about uncanny valley, detective mode, toddler mode, the fourth plane, and other popular terms used around VR/UX design. We'll introduce some recent tools on the market, and techniques that can help produce early prototypes and UX testing. We'll also show some of our favorite VR experiences and share secrets to their UX success.

Getting started with augmented reality can be hard and require complex code. What if you are not a coder and still want to build some level of augmented reality for your learners? Luckily, Wikitude Studio makes it easy to build augmented reality experiences.

More companies are realizing the effectiveness of virtual reality for training. Getting excited about virtual reality doesn't mean you have to reinvent your entire training program. Chances are, you've already developed great learning content, eLearning courses, and even ILT sessions. But how do you incorporate virtual reality into your existing learning program?

Pop the hood on any car or truck and you see the engine. What you can't see is how the engine works. You can't look at it while it's running, you can't easily teach this in a lecture or by telling students to read their textbooks, and there aren't many diesel resources available for instructors. Many industries face similar problems how to teach what the learner can't see. Additionally, the diesel technician industry faces a shortage of workers and those who are entering the profession have less mechanical know-how than previous students. We were faced with the challenge: How can you give students a realistic view of how an engine works and help them rapidly build skills?

Imagine designing a VR experience that enables the learner to explore a 3-D world; practicing, succeeding, failing, and learning along the way. Imagine also that this passes your IT department’s security requirements and produces tons of data that is all nicely organized and presented in analytical charts that actually provide meaningful results. Designing an engaging VR experience in the headset is the "easiest" part of the solution. How do you implement and deploy in your corporate environment? How do you safely deploy content behind the firewall? Moreover, how do you connect the data from a learner's experience in the headset to the LMS? How do you implement xAPI and a LRS to gain the full spectrum of data? We'll outline how to do so.

HP has been successful in teaching the concepts of an inclusive workplace to its employees. However, after sessions were over much of the feedback centered around how best to put those concepts in action. HP needed a learning solution that reinforced key concepts covered during traditional classroom sessions, and also illustrated practical application of those skills. Because this topic relies heavily on soft skills, HP wanted to prepare employees with practical conversational skills that promote inclusion. HP required a self-contained solution that learners could engage with on their own time. They turned to virtual reality as way to model and simulate office discussions in a way that integrated the classroom lessons into scalable, interactive, and highly-engaging modules.

The frequency with which virtual reality is being deployed continues to grow in both enterprise and academic environments. However, there are still barriers that need to be overcome in implementing and expanding the use of these technologies in the context of learning and development.

Corporations invested $87.6 billion on training in 2018, according to Training magazine. Current technology and design in the industry makes learning dull, costly, and restricts the ability to learn in an effective way. Investing in AR/VR/MR can help solve all of these problems, while helping learners increase knowledge retention and speed up their time to competency.

Organizations are currently experimenting with virtual reality that creates presence and provides an immersive, firsthand experience for multi-generational employees to improve their hands-on skills at work. Instructional designers can now use Adobe Captivate 2019 to create virtual reality projects.

When facilitating a simulation-based activity, do you sometimes hear participants say, "Yeah, but in the real world, I would do this…"? How real do you need to get with AR, VR, and screen-based simulation activities? In our world of emergency nursing students, realism is critical to meeting the learning outcomes of the program. In order to increase competence and confidence, our emergency nursing students need to be exposed to a multitude of patient cases in simulation form. So which simulation modality (AR/VR/screen-based) provided the most realism and was the most practical—in terms of design, development, and delivery— for on-campus and distance students?