Earlier this summer, eLearning Inside reported on a virtual reality experience that would go on to top charts on Steam and become a huge success for CuriosityStream, the platform on which it was offered. Nefertari: Journey to Eternity was created in large part by Simon Che de Boer, a Kiwi who describes himself as a jack-of-all-trades. Over the past five years, he, along with his team at Reality Virtual, have been pushing the edge of what is possible in virtual reality and virtual environment creation. They hope to empower photographers around the world to capture and preserve environments of cultural and historical significance. And for Che de Boer, the process started with tragedy.

“About five years ago, I was in a house fire,” he said via teleconference. All of his personal belongings were destroyed. “I got into this space where I needed to find a way to cope with this traumatic experience. And I thought I’d essentially deal with it.”

“I thought, ‘Could I use my old family photographs of my place to recreate my old house so my daughter and I could go home?’ I didn’t know anything about virtual reality, I just knew how to put things together. So I spent many years working on a pipeline of how to do things. Along the way, I discovered photogrammetry. So when I was getting into it, photogrammetry was very new, no one was doing environments.”

Translating Image to Virtual Environment with Photogrammetry

The process would lead to breakthroughs in virtual environment creation, involve machine learning algorithms dealing with vast data sets, and developments that will, with luck, become indispensable for purposes of cultural preservation and education around the world.

An early step was the use of photogrammetry. The process involves taking hundreds to thousands of photographs of objects or environments from set positions, moving incrementally with each new image. Upwards of 4,000 images went in to the virtual rendering of Nefertari’s tomb.

Che de Boer then used software to compile those images into a virtual space. “The first thing we achieved was getting billions of points to work in real time,” he said. We’ve achieved many other new things since then. We can get the computer to help fill in the gaps. It understands what a wall is, what a chair is, all that stuff. We can use that to fill in areas that might be considered incomplete.”

From there, Che de Boer and his team began to manipulate the images en masse in order to create a more stylized version of the virtual environment made up of raw images. That process has recently developed into an application that Che de Boer believes will become instrumental across media.

“Unbaking”

“The problem with photogrammetry currently is what we call baked lighting,” he said. In other words, when a photographer snaps an image, a whole slew of qualities are also encapsulated—or baked—into it. These include the angle of lighting, tones of color, hue and saturation, whether a surface appears shiny or matte, etc.

“We are able to remove that using a custom photograph rig that we have. We’ve actually managed to train a network to look at a normal photograph and remove all the lighting qualities in it. So it can use it as just a base texture. And that’s where base rendering comes in. Under other circumstances, it takes hundreds of graphics artists hours upon days to prepare these textures.”

The implications are groundbreaking. Using Che de Boer’s technique, a film studio need not wait for the weather to comply for an outdoor shot. They could merely capture the environment and then shoot all the action in a studio.

For purposes of education and cultural preservation, it has even greater potential.

“It means that average people with their cameras can go out to historical sites and capture them, but make them such a high quality that they can create a virtual environment,” Che de Boer said.

A Democratized Vision for Virtual Reality Creation

“What I’m personally excited about is encapsulating a place all around the world for education. I can’t be everywhere. We will provide our pipeline and our service and will essentially allow photographers with much less equipment than I use to go out and capture these environments. We’re looking at a way to make sure those photos get back to those photographers, so they make money on them essentially.”

One of these virtual reality projects is already underway in Che de Boer’s home country of New Zealand. In 2010 and 2011, a 7.1 and 6.3 magnitude earthquake (respectively) struck Christchurch, which was at the time the country’s second largest city. The two seismic events killed hundreds of people and devastated the urban center. Numerous historical buildings were destroyed, including two cathedrals.

Che de Boer’s company, Reality Virtual, is currently asking Christchurch citizens (current and former) to send in images they have of these historic sites in order to rebuild them virtually. The company is already collaborating on similar projects elsewhere.

“We’re already talking with parties all around the world who are scanning churches,” Che de Boer said. “Beautiful stuff is happening in Cape Town University [in South Africa]. I’m off to the south of France at some point soon. Many people are beginning to share with us their data sets. So we’re starting to do little passion projects to show how we can use their data to make really immersive virtual reality experiences.”

The vision behind is the work is to empower photographers to do these virtual environment projects, but to also allow them to retain ownership as well.

“We’re leading by example. We’re saying to people ‘give us your data sets, we’ll put them under a trust.’ Eventually we want to have a blockchain repository so anyone who provides a photo, it’s tagged, and have it automated.”

“We want data sets to be under a public trust, but not necessarily distributable. One thing that annoys me with certain jobs is when a company hires me to take a bunch of photos that no one will ever see those again. If the company goes bankrupt, those photos are lost. My biggest thing is archiving and protecting under a public trust those data sets so if, for whatever reason, an entity isn’t able to distribute those in the future, they won’t be lost.”

“If that happened in Egypt, the only other option is for someone to go back into Nefertari’s Tomb and take another 4,000 photographs. As soon as you do that, you have degradation of the environment.”

This effort—an online repository of photogrammetry data sets which preserves certain digital rights—will make up Che de Boer’s upcoming efforts.

“The artists should be getting paid, the people who are going through the trouble to go out and photograph these sites, which is quite a process, should be receiving royalties for the work they’ve done.”

From there, he’s hoping to work with the virtual reality community to fill in some gaps. And one of those gaps involves distribution. It isn’t always easy to access a virtual environment because its such a large data set.

“I can imagine in the future an improved digital platform. Current 3D platforms are kind of limited in approach. They require you to download everything in one go. We see more of a 3D streaming platform where you have a defined space.”

“If you make it scalable and start digitizing and make it feasible and essentially get in to democratizing, you deliver a stronger sense of cultural understanding between parties. You take people out of their bubble. And somewhere down the line, you get to world peace.”

Images and media courtesy of Reality Virtual.

The post Capturing the Past in Virtual Reality: An Interview with Simon Che de Boer appeared first on eLearningInside News.

Yesterday, eLearning Inside published an interview with University of Oklahoma professor Kathleen Johnson. An Emmy award-winning former news producer, Johnson now is a McMahon Centennial Professor at OU’s Gaylord College of Journalism and Mass Communication. Along with veteran war correspondent turned professor Mike Boettcher, she has introduced virtual reality (VR) in one of her classes.

In one sense, VR in journalism is still traditional journalism. Reporters will still be asking the ‘Five Ws and One H.’ But the new medium also brings along new ways in which people consume news, new ethical concerns, and new methods to gain a viewer’s trust.

‘Mobile First’

To begin, VR in journalism demands that viewers watch it on their phones. Still, Johnson doesn’t believe that there will be a day when people make their coffee in the morning and then don their Oculus Rift to watch the news.

“We actually don’t use the headsets, even though we have some pretty nice ones,” Johnson said. “People put headsets on for video games. But they don’t want to bother with them for what I call normal journalism storytelling.”

“And often, they don’t use their computers, they want to use their cell phones. It’s pretty much mobile first I think now in journalism. So we try to produce stories that people can easily view on cell phones. And, in fact, as students are producing them, we ask them to upload them to Youtube and then take their cell phone and look at them. And if it’s not playing well on their cell phone, they need to reshoot it or re edit it or do something differently because that’s how people are going to watch it.”

The Ethical Concerns of VR in Journalism

Using VR to tell stories requires new forms of sensitivities and an awareness of who is on camera.

“In the past if you have a traditional camera, the public pretty much knows what a camera is,” Johnson said. “And they know that if they don’t want to be on camera, they stand behind the camera if they’re in a public place. Well, with 360º cameras, not only do they look very different—most people don’t know it’s a camera—but they don’t realize they’re in the frame.”

Routes TV DollHouse Cut from University of Oklahoma on Vimeo.

“When you’re in public, there is a presumption that you’re not going to be private. But nevertheless, we’re always very concerned with putting people on the air that don’t want to be. Especially when they’re very sensitive stories, like those surrounding immigration. We even shot in a nightclub this past spring. And we had a conversation about the privacy concerns of people in a nightclub. Yes, they’re out there to have fun, but they might not want everyone to know they were out. So there are all these things that come into play that we have to train students on every semester.”

Increasing Transparency

OU students first used the VR cameras last fall while covering the Oklahoma teacher walkouts. In collaboration with a local news station, they began a series called “Unfiltered,” which presented 360º footage of the demonstrations.

“By ‘Unfiltered,’ we mean we’re giving viewers the information raw and unedited so that they can see exactly what the people are saying with no bias at all,” Johnson said. “We try very hard to be fair and balanced, you know, to quote the catch phrase there. But of course, just by choosing what sound byte you’re going to use, you have made a decision that you’re not going to include another one. This [footage from VR cameras] allows viewers to hear exactly what somebody is saying from beginning to end without filtering it at all.”

“When you’re shooting in VR basically you’re seeing everything. And it is definitely raw truth. Now with everything, you can edit it, and you can cover things up with video. We found that out. You can actually take traditional video and then plant it in 360. It almost looks like a picture within a picture. And of course you can cover something up. There’s always a way you can filter something. But the point of VR is to not do that. It’s to allow people to really experience an event truthfully and fully. I think that’s what people really want to see.”

According to Johnson, VR in journalism has the potential to create a bridge of trust between journalists and viewers.

“The whole point behind shooting in VR and the Unfiltered project is to open the door and allow people to see what journalists really do. I think a lot of the fake news claims are really just an example of people not understanding how journalism works. You know, what kind of conversations happen in the news room.”

“When we did the teacher walkout in the fall with both traditional cameras and VR, one of the things we did was actually tell viewers—after seeing one of our projects—to ask questions. And then we went back out and asked those questions to the same people or similar people so that it’s basically as transparent as it can possibly be. And people did. People asked, ‘Why’d you say that the way you did?’ ‘Why are you not covering this part of the walkout?’ And we were able to say, ‘Well, we didn’t ask that because those people weren’t there. That school didn’t show up at the capitol.’ And then people realized, ‘Oh you’re not leaving those people out, they just didn’t show up.’ A lot of where these misunderstandings happen is when people don’t understand how this works. The more transparent we are as journalists, the better off we’re going to be, the more the public’s going to trust us again.”

“It’s frustrating to all of us doing traditional journalism when we hear those fake news claims. Even on my personal Facebook page, I’ve had these conversations just yesterday with friends and family members who are upset about how stories on immigration and how these children are being housed is handled by the media. There’s always this lashing out at the media when they don’t like the overall situation that the media had nothing to do with creating. But they like to go after the messenger. That’s always been the case. I don’t think this is new, I think we’re just more sensitive to it.”

That’s one area where VR in journalism has a lot to offer. When Johnson’s classes shoot traditional broadcast media in a studio, they’ve begun to place the 360º in the mix as well. With VR, viewers can see the entire set with the wires, ladders, and lights scattered around. It breaks down the illusion created in the studio. And in Johnson’s view, that’s the best way to encourage transparency.

“When I take the time to explain why stories are told they way they are, I can see lightbulbs going off. But when journalists get angry at the public and demand that they see it the way we see it, then we’re failing. That’s not the way to handle this. We have to maintain touch with reality. If they think we’re being dishonest, we have to go the extra mile to show them we’re not. And it’s a pain, it takes a lot of work, but we have to do it for the sake of the future of journalism.”

Cover Image: Bernard Hermant, Unsplash.

The post How VR in Journalism Education Keeps Learners Abreast With a Rocky Media Landscape appeared first on eLearningInside News.

University professors are finding uses for virtual reality (VR) in fields from medicine to aviation. A new program at the University of Oklahoma’s (OU) Gaylord College of Journalism and Mass Communication isn’t teaching with VR. Instead, it teaches students how to produce it.

Led by Professors Kathleen Johnson (an Emmy award-winning former network news producer) and Mike Boettcher (an Emmy award-winning veteran war correspondent), the class teaches learners to produce their own long-form investigative documentary in 360º.

VR in Journalism at OU

“They have one semester to do one story,” Johnson said. “It has to be in-depth, researched, with an investigative-type look and we want them to take chances. We want them to push the envelope with production, journalism, data gathering, and now, technically with VR so that they are prepared for the new media that we have now.”

There are five majors OU students may pursue at Gaylord College: advertising, journalism, media production, public relations, and professional writing. And according to Johnson, learners from each concentration have now taken the VR course since it began its first run last fall.

“They all know now that there is a need to have a video experience as well as an in depth experience,” Johnson said. “To my surprise, there’s a huge desire to learn about new technology, such as VR. The class is capped at 14. In the past, we’ve usually had around 8 students, which, for this class is actually a big number. It’s an in-depth project, and very hands on. Since we’ve been doing VR last fall, it’s been full with a waiting list.”

Reaching New Heights v4 from University of Oklahoma on Vimeo.

Telling Stories with New Technology

The digital age has caused a seismic shift in the media landscape. But still, most news production still borrows heavily from the past. The landing pages of news sites are made to look like their newspaper’s front page. Storytelling still takes similar forms. But new media is increasingly used to do it. And Johnson says learners recognize that.

“This generation of young people sees this as something that is necessary for their employment in the future. And I would agree. It’s still in its infancy. We tell students that they’re probably creating the new instructions for how to use this journalistically and entertainment-wise as they go along. They like that idea, they like that they’re on the cutting edge and that they have a part in developing it and designing what it’s going to be like in the future.”

And for several years before last fall, many wanted to incorporate new technology into journalism education. But they still faced the barrier of cost.

Barriers of Cost

“I’ve wanted to explore with it, but the cameras were so expensive up until last summer that it made it hard to do,” Johnson said. “I have a great relationship with a wonderful business here called Trifecta communications. They’ve been exploring AR and VR for about six years now. They were way ahead of most people in the nation. I’ve been paying close attention to what they’re doing. I’ve met with them quite a few times and visited a few of their projects to see how they’re using it. One of their employees, Rob Morris, is an adjunct professor for this class and we brought him on because he’s had so much experience with this technology and how to use it for storytelling.”

The class uses Vuze VR cameras produced by HumanEyes Technologies. Johnson is a McMahon Centennial Professor and receives support from the McMahon Foundation of Lawton. They provided funding to acquire the cameras.

“We wanted something that students could use and we also had to stick to our budget. I find them very easy to use. Basically you hit record and that’s it.”

In addition to their projects, students last fall began to cover the Oklahoma teacher walkouts using the cameras. Spearheaded by fellow professor Mike Boettcher, the initiative was dubbed ‘Unfiltered.’

Teacher Walkout 360 Overview from University of Oklahoma on Vimeo.

“It was highly successful,” Johnson said. “We were even surprised with how successful it was. We partnered with Channel 9 here. And put a special Unfiltered link on their site and mobile app. Students were getting some days 60,000 views of their stories. And by stories, it’s known as a Look Live. In broadcasting, it means you’re taping yourself live on the location with the intent to put it in a story later. So it looks like it’s live but it’s really not. The idea isn’t to deceive people but to give them something quick and raw so you can get it up faster. Our students would go out and interview teachers live or legislators live on their cameras and they’d be uploading it to this website and to a facebook page. It was so successful that we’re going to continue that with other topics going forward.”

This fall, OU students from Gaylord will be reporting on Oklahoma-related issues from Washington, D.C., again using the VR cameras.

Cover Image: Maurizio Pesce, Flickr.

The post OU Journalism Majors Report in VR appeared first on eLearningInside News.

Many instructors in the field of special needs education have likely heard of virtual reality (VR) and its uses for learners with physical or mental disabilities. But how should it be used? When? And for which groups of learners?

For some companies, that answer is everywhere and anywhere. Last week, the U.K.-based Inclusive Technology announced a new product: Inclusive ClassVr. This technology is a creation of the Inclusive Technology and Avantis Education partnership. Educational three-dimensional computer visual environment was created by virtual reality developers with the aim of expanding the possibilities of cognition of the surrounding world through play and research. The product is marketed for ‘special and early education.’ It’s that kind of language—lacking precision and typically treating special needs education as a catch-all category—that might turn an educator off.

But Inclusive Technology believes virtual reality can be used to bring a class together regardless of their learning ability.

Virtual Reality as a Means of Inclusion in Special Needs Education

“With access to hundreds of curriculum aligned,” the company writes in a statement, “ virtual and augmented reality resources, Inclusive ClassVR has been specifically designed to educate, motivate and raise engagement for students of all ages and abilities.”

Virtual reality certainly has the potential to bring entire classes together in an environment in which they might not be able to go otherwise. Numerous schools have begun to use VR to take field trips to places where those with physical disabilities would struggle to access.

And according to Megan Rierdon, a special needs educator at the 53rd St. School in Milwaukee, leaving the classroom is difficult for learners who experience social anxiety in one form or another.

“Going on field trips can be challenging because of the stress and anxiety for kids with autism of being outside the normal routine, and also because of the cost of special transportation,” she said according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. This spring, Rierdon’s students gathered for a field trip to BrightFarms, a company that operates five farms throughout the U.S. In honor of Earth Day, they created a VR experience for schools.

“The kids sat down in a chair, put on a virtual reality headpiece and saw a tour walking around an entire greenhouse. With school budgets being tightened, teachers have to be creative,” Rierdon said. “Virtual reality is a really great opportunity for kids to travel and experience things that they otherwise wouldn’t have.”

“The kids were reaching down to touch the dirt and waving to the people they saw,” Rierdon said. “It was cool that they were cognitively able to connect in the same way they would have had they actually been there.”

Testing Real World Skills in Virtual Environments

For others in special needs education, however, VR has some very specific uses. A team of researchers at the University of Michigan School of Social Work has been exploring the struggle faced by learners with mental disabilities trying to enter the work force for seven years.  The team has developed an AI-powered virtual character named Molly to help learners prepare for the process in a safe environment.

To undergo ‘Molly training,’ learners put on the headset and respond as Molly conducts a 20 minute interview. They then receive scores based on their performance. They believe the training can help applicants who belong to one of five disadvantaged groups. Those include people with severe mental illness, autism, post-traumatic stress disorder, mood disorders, and addiction.

“We really want to make the tool accessible and evaluate if this tool can help other groups, too,” associate professor Matt Smith told the Michigan Daily. “At the end of the day, job interviewing is something everybody has to do. Whether you’re somebody with a certain type of disability or whether you’re somebody that has no disability, it causes anxiety. And it’s a skill set that needs practice.”

Testing is still in its early stages, but many participants have doubled their score so far. In the job search following the Molly training, 30% of participants found employment while 20% landed an internship in the four months following the program. That might not sound great, but it definitely marks an improvement, researchers say.

“The Molly training is designed to help people speak more effectively about their ability to work well on a team — that they’re a hard worker,” Smith said. “If they’d had gaps in their work history, it helps them learn how to frame their responses in a positive way.”

Featured Image: Scott Webb, Unsplash.

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It’s teacher appreciation week and the folks at Google took the opportunity to showcase yet another addition to their education services. For many U.S. students in K-12 classrooms, Google Expeditions was their introduction to virtual reality. Built on the Google Daydream platform, and coupled with the very inexpensive Cardboard headsets, students could explore places such as the International Space Station, Machu Pichu, and Antarctica from their desks. On Wednesday, the search engine giant announced yet another addition to their VR offerings. Tour Creator allows students to, well, create their own VR tours.

Instead of sitting somewhat passively through an expedition, the new application allows students to become the authors of their own expeditions. Tour Creator allows learners to use either the Street View on Google Maps or their own 360º images. It is designed to be intuitive and easy for anyone to use.

“The technology gets out of the way and enables students to focus on crafting fantastic visual stories,” said Charlie Reisinger, a school Technology Director in Pennsylvania, in Google’s blog post.

Creating a Tour

Tours are made up of individual ‘scenes.’ Again, these can be chosen from Street View or uploaded. Users can add description to each scene along with ‘points of interest.’ These points of interest can be placed in fixed positions within the 3D image, allowing for elaboration within a given scene.

The application also allows for image overlay. In other words, you can stick a two-dimensional image into place within a 360º tour stop.

These tours can be published to Poly, Google’s VR image sharing platform. Tours on Poly are publicly available, and the library already has a large body of independently created educational content. Poly also features content from other Google VR services—such as Tiltbrush, a 3D animation app.

While the feature is not currently available, down the road, students will be able to add their tours directly to the Expeditions library as well.

“Being able to work with Tour Creator has been an awesome experience,” said Jennifer Newton, a school media coordinator in Georgia, according to Google. “It has allowed our students from a small town in Georgia to tell our story to the world.”

Tour Creator Joins a Large Body of Google VR Web Apps

To be clear, Tours, Tiltbrush, and Poly—along with Earth VR—form the image side of Google’s VR services. They have also done extensive work with VR video as well. You probably won’t see it in an average K-12 classroom, but Jump serves as a VR video creation suite. Jump cameras go for around the ticket price of a 2018 Kia Forte. Jump Stitcher serves as VR video editing software and YouTube already hosts a great deal of VR video content.

Tour Creator is available now. With the school year soon coming to a close, teachers will have the whole summer to plan its use for the fall semester.

The post Google Releases Tour Creator, An App that Lets Students Design their Own VR Journey appeared first on eLearningInside News.

Online modules and eLearning have begun to change the way in which safety managers deliver occupational safety and health administration (OSHA training) to workers in hazardous environments. Some efforts have brought their lessons online to allow for cheaper and more convenient training. But according to Erica Schaffel, VP of Sales at PIXO, that doesn’t do much to improve efficacy.

“Right now, there are two ways you can get your OSHA training,” Schaffel said over the phone. “You can take an online class or there’s the one-time class were a person comes out and conducts it. We all know what the retention rates are when you read something or you sit through a lecture. People don’t really hang on to that over the long term or internalize its importance.”

In response to this need, PIXO has developed a gamified VR OSHA training module. During the development process, Schaffel and her team have unearthed a few things about OSHA training.

“In talking to safety managers and training managers over the past few years, there were a few things that everyone sort of had in common,” Schaffel said. “The three biggest challenge facing these managers are 1) they’re looking to create a culture of safety, 2) they don’t really know how to change employee behavior, and 3) there’s an aging workforce. The new generation of workers are looking and hoping to learn differently. So we are a really natural fit for that.”

PIXO and Their Big Pivot

The company hasn’t always been in the occupational safety line of work. Just a few years ago, they were developing mobile apps for businesses.

“PIXO has actually been around for 9 years,” Schaffel said. “We started out building mobile apps and then about two and a half years ago our CEO Sean Hurwitz saw virtual reality really starting to come to life. He foresaw it was going to become very useful. So he decided to pivot the entire company. He hired what he saw as a VR dream team that would be able to go out into the world of enterprise VR and see what would happen. Two years ago this was all still really new.”

“We didn’t really know what this was going to be. But since we had a gaming background, he took a different strategy. A lot of the enterprise VR companies in the field today are filled with engineers but Hurwitz hired a lot of AAA gaming professionals and enterprise software architects.”

But at that point, PIXO simply knew they wanted to move into the VR space. They didn’t know exactly where the company would be a few years down the road.

“We landed on a training opportunity for a very large energy company and the team really saw an opportunity there. [We understood that] VR could be used to provide training that there was no other way to give.”

“[After doing that for a while] we learned a couple of things: 1) people don’t want a single lesson in VR, they want a lot, 2) the cost of custom virtual reality is too high for most companies. To give you an idea, it can be anywhere from $50,000 to Walmart, who paid $5 million for theirs.  So if you’re talking about a lot of training, it can get really expensive for most companies.”

“We decided we needed to build a platform. We needed a way to build these modules more efficiently and deliver them to scale.  We also realized that we really needed a content library. We needed to have a lot of VR content that we could offer people for a couple thousand dollars instead of hundreds of thousands.”

“This all happened about a year ago. So the team decided to put their heads down and focus and build the basis of a content library so that’s where we are today. Our platform has a core set of features as well as a delivery system to be able to scale quickly for large enterprises. And we also have a couple of modules (this is really new, the platform was finished a couple of months ago).”

Disrupting OSHA Training

“In interviewing mine workers or people at manufacturing plants or people who work in nuclear reactors, one thing that a lot people said is, ‘I’ve been doing this for 20 years. Sometimes I don’t feel like I need to follow all of these safety practices.’”

“On the other side of that, the people who were the most interesting said ‘I follow these rules every single time and I’ve seen what happens first hand,’ you know, like ‘I fell, I got injured, or my friend got injured.’ VR is a great platform to reinforce these regulations in a way that helps people understand the consequences of not following them and help them internalize how important they are.”

PIXO’s OSHA VR training is gamified, that’s for sure. But still, the tone still needs to be appropriate for training that might save someone’s life.

“Our gaming background means that we bring a very specific set of expertise to the table. It doesn’t mean that we’re making OSHA training as fun as playing soccer. It means that we know how to build really beautiful, expansive, immersive worlds in which the VR training takes place. It also means that we know what really drives engagement other than something being fun. So if you look at the term ‘gamification,’ it means the application of different elements of gameplay including things like point scoring, competition with others, and other rules of play. All of our modules do incorporate those traditional gamification aspects. They are multi-participant so you can collaborate or compete with others. And there are rules to whatever VR training you are engaged in.”

“In terms of engagement there are things we do with every single VR training we build that are relatively unique. Every module we build has an element of randomization. In the OSHA module, for example, there are over 1 million randomized aspects. So it’s engaging not just the first time but over time. Everyone has their own unique experience. Every time you complete that training, it’s going to be completely different.”

PIXO also currently offers VR training for gas meter operations and maintenance. If everything goes according to plan, they will soon have built a library of VR training modules targeting the manufacturing, energy, and first responder sectors.

The post How PIXO Decided to Develop a Gamified VR OSHA Training Module, and Why It’s Better than Your Typical Safety Course appeared first on eLearningInside News.