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?

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?

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?

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?

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.

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?

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.

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.

Creating an exciting experience in the VR headset is only part of the solution. How do you ensure it's instructionally effective? Even with new technology the basic principles of instructional design must still be applied: challenges, activity, reflection, and feedback, to name a few. In addition, you’ll want to consider the unique features you can leverage in VR experiences related to time, stress, and 3-D movement, as well as the user challenges of wearing a VR headseat. And because virtual reality is a large investment, you’ll need to be especially sure your solution is effective to ensure there's a strong ROI.

Virtual reality (VR) learning experiences are dramatically increasing in popularity. But how do you get started building VR? What if you have a low budget, or no budget at all? The cost of new technology and software, and the development time required, may thwart would-be VR developers. However, there are now several free software and media options that make it simpler and more affordable than ever to build VR.        

How many times have you tried to explain to a new employee, visitor, or client how to find you in your complicated (or not so complicated building), only to have them get lost in an endless sea of corridors on their first visit? Maybe you have an environment you would like someone to see but they are not physically able to experience it for themselves, like a museum or art gallery? You can do all this and more with a series of 360 photos imported into an eLearning authoring tool to create a virtual interactive tour.

You have a vision for how to use virtual reality in your training program, but the idea of working with a team of developers can feel daunting. Unfamiliar terminology and misunderstood objectives can potentially derail your project before it ever gets off the ground. In addition, many VR development teams have limited experience working with the training industry and bring years of assumptions and processes to the table that might seem alien to you at first. You need a process that you can rely on that will streamline your collaboration with your development team, reduce the chances of failure, and lead to a VR project that achieves your vision.

Virtual reality offers instructors a high-impact tool for teaching and learning by engaging learners in a realistic 360-degree environment. While the instructional benefits are extraordinary, there have been two major challenges facing most collegiate classrooms; technology cost and instructional relevance. During this session, attendees will explore innovative VR assignments, utilized over the course of a year, and their evolution in online and in-person courses. Moreover, attendees will discover how to create effective and engaging VR assignments on a public institution budget.

Confused about VR authoring tools? There are many available; some are low-cost or free while others are expensive. How do you compare the features to know which one is going to work for you and your VR projects?

New technology can take time to learn, and can be especially challenging without hands-on experience. At our organization, new slot machine cabinets and components were continuously being introduced, and it was a priority to make sure technicians felt confident in their knowledge when installing them at a casino property. But it was quite pricey to fly field service technicians out to Las Vegas for training each time something new came out.

There is often a divide in many virtual reality products. There are the products that have detailed graphics that are not very interactive, and there are those that have a lot of interactivity with low quality graphics. However, what if there was a way to have both, without having to worry about the frame rate of the VR device dropping?

Virtual reality is becoming more mainstream every day. However, use cases can sometimes be theoretical or hyperbole so that when you peel back the layers, it isn't practical, cost-effective, or the right way to best deliver the learning. This, combined with the fact that most instructional designers are very new to how to design an effective VR experience, poses a costly risk for L&D organizations.

VR and AR can generate a great deal of data, and that includes data in the xAPI format. One promise of this data is that it can be used to create predictive models that can classify learners; helping L&D departments to better serve them with appropriate content.