Improve Your Business with Mixed Reality

Businesses everywhere are using data to lead their decisioning, spending increasing time and capital on analysing their asset performance. However, in all this effort and increasing focus on AI, human performance management and improvement has been largely ignored.

Training, Learning and Development (L&D) still relies mostly on outdated and inefficient 19^th century training methods and 20^th century tools. You’ve probably seen memes that call this out – that while everything about our culture and technology has changed, the classroom and our methods haven’t changed in over 100 years. I talk about the neuroscience of learning and how we are still focused on cramming information rather than learning experiences in a previous blog post.

However, a Harvard Business Review Analytic Services’ survey – Mixed Reality: A New Dimension of Work suggests this is changing.

The majority (69%) of businesses surveyed say that mixed reality (MR) and virtual reality (VR) training is crucial to achieving their organisation’s strategic goals. 54% have identified “Training and Education” as their most important use-case and 57% say it’s the area where VR/AR has the most potential for their business.

In contrast to virtual reality (VR), which immerses users in a completely digital world, or augmented reality (AR), which overlays digital content on top of physical setting, mixed reality blends digital and physical experiences. A majority of respondents (68%) believe mixed reality will be critical to achieving their companies’ strategic goals within the next 18 months.

Nearly 90% of the businesses surveyed said they were exploring, piloting or deploying mixed reality. Overall, 7/10 respondents agreed that “mixed reality offers a measurably better way of doing things than we currently have.” At least a third of respondents are currently in production or have deployed a Mixed Reality solution in training and development.

Picture Perfect Productions Can Help Your Business with Mixed Reality Training Coursework

We are currently seeing the most interest in industries that have to train their employees how to effectively deal with hazardous environments, and the HBR report reflects this. The oil and gas industry is exploiting the benefits of mixed reality to train technicians who maintain remote offshore facilities. MR is implemented to familiarise them with the complex operations before they set foot on the rig for the first time.

There is a catch-22 situation in a lot of hazardous environments such as oil-rigs, warehouses, container terminals and power stations. The new employee is not allowed on-site until they have attained an accreditation in site safety, but the new employee cannot acquire real-world experience until they get on site.

They currently have to translate the information from traditional courseware and manuals into simulated experiences – all with varying degrees of success. Mixed reality offers ways to immerse workers in familiar, real-world situations that are too costly, illegal or dangerous to replicate live.

This is especially true of Singapore and APAC in general. We are working with forward thinking leaders across the region to create L&D pilots on their innovation or training budgets. Most interest is currently from the Military, Civil Defence, Supply Chain, Aerospace and Automotive.

As the report points out; ‘mixed reality offers ways to train workers for situations that are too dangerous or costly to replicate live.’ Mixed reality is not just for hazard training. We have created Sales and Marketing experiences and ‘Soft Skills’ empathy training for customer relations management teams.

Mixed Reality Content Development, Not Your Traditional Developer Skill

HBR respondents reported that developing mixed reality applications is more difficult than any other type of enterprise application.

Using Mixed Reality training in your organisation will bring challenges in how to create the immersive experience. You will need a team of people who have skills in Script Writing, Storyboarding, Video Production, Instructional Design, User Experience Design, Interactive and 3D Graphics as well as Data Integration.

Picture Perfect Productions is a highly experienced collective of Video Producers, Directors, Editors, Digital Consultants, and Instructional Designers who have been creating video content for business, Film and TV for over 30 years. A natural evolution of that skill set led us to become one of the pioneers of interactive 360 content, MR and VR creators.

Our Virtual Reality courseware combines learning science and performance data to increase engagement, enhance behaviour and increase retention. We use proven research in cognitive science and human behaviour to deliver on-the-job experiences that create immediate ROI through Lower training costs, higher productivity and better job performance.