Exploring the Transformative Potential of Extended Reality
All right, let's go ahead and get started. Welcome everyone to the Tippie Webinar Series. Thank you for joining us for today's webinar.
My name is Ashley Durham and I'm the Director of Alumni Engagement at the Tippie College of Business. The Tippie Webinar Series is an initiative of the Alumni Engagement Department. Our goal is to bring the knowledge of our faculty and staff to you wherever you may be in the world. I'm excited to have Jim Chaffee with us today.
He'll be teaching us more about extended reality through his presentation, exploring the transformative potential of extended reality. I got a sneak peek yesterday, and it is very good. Just some information before we get started. We have a lot of content to share today, so we will do our best to get to your questions at the end of today's presentation. Um, if we are unable to get to your present or to your question,
you are always welcome to email Jim. Um, following today's webinar. As a reminder, all of our virtual presentations are uploaded to the college's YouTube page with closed captions a few days following our live webinar event. Finally, you are encouraged to stay until the end of our webinar so that we can gather your thoughts on today's presentation. Your feedback helps make our virtual programming even better, so we appreciate you taking time to answer our survey at the end of the Q & A.
Now, I would like to quickly introduce Jim Chaffee. Jim joined the Tippie College of Business in 2007 and currently serves as the executive director learning innovation. Prior to Tippie, he acted as the Assistant Vice President of Information Technology and Chief Information Officer at Illinois College in Jacksonville, Illinois. Jim has over 30 years of higher ed experience, specifically in implementation, innovation, and management of information technology. He has taught computer science, business analytics and information systems at higher education institutions for over 20 years. His primary focus is using innovative technologies to improve learning, including extended reality and the use of AI as a learning tool.
Thank you for being here today, Jim and I will hand it over to you. Alright, let me share my screen and we will get going. So thank you everybody. I really appreciate you taking the time and, uh, thank you Ashley for that nice introduction. Uh,
what I'd like to do is take you on a journey, uh, today, and that journey will be, sorry, my video keeps freezing, but I'm causing that that journey will be about exploring the transformative potential of extended reality. And as this story unfolds, we're going to have some statistics about how extended reality is already being used. We're going to have a, some, some panel information from different groups. We're going to have some videos.
We're going to have, uh, some polls for you to interact with this presentation as part of a way to keep things going in the videos themselves. When I talk about videos, they're gonna be short snippets, but really, instead of listening to me talk about a specific topic, it would be good for you to actually visualize it. So bear with me as we wander through this exciting, in my mind, at least exciting area of, uh, extended reality. So as we, excuse me, as we enter into this, really, we have to think about what is extended reality. We hear this term all over the place, and really what we're talking about is a combination of different types of reality, virtual reality where you're completely and fully immersed into the environment.
Augmented reality where you look through a device and the images that you see are augmented by that device. Uh, so you can see that up in the upper area. And then mixed reality, which is kind of a combination of these, but really giving you an introduction into a enhanced world where virtual augmented realities kind of mesh together. And I would be remiss if I didn't mention ai. Uh, obviously as Ashley mentioned, that's another area that I'm passionate about. And there is a significant amount of AI usage in extended reality. Now,
we will not go heavily into what AI is used and how it is used, but rest assured as we go through each piece, that if there is a piece of ai, uh, that is there, I will mention that it's being used. So what's the point of this webinar? Why, why are we even talking about this? Where is this all coming from? Well, the reality is, uh, pardon the pun, that, uh, we are in a transformative state. Virtual and extended reality have been around for a very long time. Uh, in actuality, if you start looking at this from a, from a, uh, very focused definition, virtual reality has been around since the 18 hundreds, uh, with the stereoscope and some other environments that were similar to that. And so it's nothing new. It's been around a long time, but we are in a state right now with hardware and software that have converged in a way that we can transform the way we're doing business and the way we're learning.
So that has really brought us to this point in time when we can truly talk about the transformative possibilities of extended reality. Just to give you an idea of how extended reality is in the market. So if you look at the market size by precedent's research and the numbers are off on different, uh, research firms, but they all say pretty much the same thing. Over the next seven to eight years,
we are looking at a growth of somewhere around a 340 to $350 billion market share in extended reality. Now, this runs the gampa gamut of things like games and educational experiences and businesses using it, but the story is truly there. The this is not going away and it's something that's going to continue to grow how it's being used. We're gonna talk about that in many different ways,
but one of the areas that it's heavily used in is in simulation and training. So if we look at this, we see that we've got augmented reality training yields at 75% learning retention rate. We've got VR training, reducing the occurrence of workplace injuries by 43%. So you can imagine, uh, someone who has to deal with reporting to OSHA every single time something happens on a, on a floor of a manufacturing plant. If we can implement VR training and reduce the occurrence of injuries by 43%, that is massive.
Enterprise virtual reality programs so far show that they improve productivity by an average of 32%. And we're gonna take a look at a couple of those. And 39% of large organizations are already leveraging VR and AR technologies to facilitate training. And to give you an idea, here is just a very small subset of those companies that are out there using it. But you can see these are big companies, Lenovo, Viacom, Forbes, Hershey's, Deere, Microsoft, all of these companies are already invested in augmented reality and more coming and there's more investment happening within these companies themselves. So the first question, the first poll question,
uh, the retention rate of VR training in schools. So if you do virtual reality training in schools versus other types of training, what is the retention rate? And this is where Ashley can start the poll, I hope. Yes, Ashley is starting the poll. Excellent, thank. You. We might have a small editing error on my part,
so the the poll questions are all together. We'll just launch it again. All right. That's, so that's, that's okay. Question one, the retention rate of VR training in schools. So are we looking at 35% retention rate, a 45 retention rate, a 75% retention rate, or an 85% retention rate? And I will let Ashley run the poll and 'cause I can't anyways, and we'll see what our answers get. Go ahead and answer what you think. We've got about 45, we're gonna hit about 50% participation.
I'm gonna close the poll in the next 10 seconds. Get your answers in. All right, we're looking good. So just, we're just looking for poll number one here. Poll number one. All right, Jim, do you see those results? Yep. I see that we've got, uh, most everyone said about 75% and then, uh, 45 was our second 85 and then 35. So let's take a quick look.
And most of you were right, 75% is the retention rate of virtual reality training in schools beating out lectures, which is at 5%. Now this is a study done by the NEA, National Education Association. And just as a side note, all of my resources are, are cited at the bottom of this presentation, uh, reading at 10% audio visual learning at 20%.
So you can see the retention rate is so much better than anything else we've seen. And the reason for that is the immersiveness of virtual reality. You're not distracted. So you can think about when we are in a classroom and it's nice outside and we wanna look out the window, or you know, Joey is, is, uh, playing with his pencil and so you're watching Joey playing with his pencil or your phone rings and you're not supposed to have your phone out in class, but you do. Anyways, all of these things that are taking our attention away,
when you are in virtual reality, you are completely immersed and therefore the retention rate, because you have nothing to take you away from that is significantly higher. So our next poll question is the average increase in memory recall using virtual reality in a study comparing virtual reality and desktop learning. So what is the average increase in memory recall? So is that 8.8%, 7.4%, 10%,
or 15%? Right. Hi Jim, I'm trying to get it to launch. That's alright. Alright, no worries. Let's try again. So it looks like a lot of people answered this, which is fine. Uh, we've got 8.8, 7.4 10, and there we go. Now we'll let people re-answer. So please re-answer if you can.
Is it, is it working, Jim? No, I don't think so. I think it's, but that's okay. No worries. Perfect. See, the beauty of live webinars. Exactly. If, uh, if this was the only thing that went wrong technology-wise, we are doing great. Uh, it's, you know, things happen.
So I'm gonna just continue without the poll for now. Um, so what we see here is 8.8%. So a lot of people in the original poll had said about 15, I wish it had been 15, but, um, the average increase in memory recall using VR and desktop versus desktop learning by the University of Maryland is an eight point eight average increase.
It's not a significant increase compared to 15, but it's still something better than just desktop learning. And then the last one, and we won't worry about the poll with this, uh, but just think to yourself, this is a question about higher accuracy. So what's the level of accuracy percentage higher after doing virtual reality training? 12%, 22%, 32 or 42%. And some of you had already answered this before, but to give you an idea, it is 12%. So 12% higher accuracy and 17% faster. Time to completion was the result of a skilled labor study using VR versus instructional videos. And that was a study done by Accenture.
And you'll notice Accenture and, uh, EY and PwC, uh, are very heavily involved in studying and using extended reality. As we go through this, you'll see them crop up more and more. So what are the true uses for extended reality? Now I'm gonna share some uses and some use cases, and then I'm gonna share some, uh, case studies and give you some quick insight as to some different areas. And then I'm gonna talk about how we use this in the Tippie College of Business and specifically in my class that I do. But you can see as you're going through this, there's a huge number of of uses for extended reality, and we're gonna take a look at a few of these as we traverse along this trail. So before we get too far,
I want to show you some crazy uses. So we have five crazy uses of virtual or extended reality or add-ons to virtual and extended reality and crazy use. Number one is scent. Now, some of us on this call are old enough to remember smellovision and the concept of smellovision, where, you know, if you were seeing a Turkey dinner being cooked on the tv, you could smell the Turkey dinner. Well, we're not there yet, but the idea is you would have your headset on and then you would wrap this around your head and the little blue area there would be under your nose.
And although it wouldn't replicate sense exactly, it would give you the sense of eh, punt not intended. It would give you the sense of what it is you're looking at. So if you're watching a Turkey dinner, something would be coming through that would actually give you the idea that you're smelling a Turkey dinner. I don't know if that's there yet.
I don't know if there's a need for it yet, but it's a crazy use. So how are meetings being used in, uh, or VR being used in meetings? And there's a lot of different applications out there. I'm gonna share this one with you, um, in hopes that it works out well. Imagine a new reality where you don't have to travel to work because you could just teleport there where you could shake your teammate's hand and feel together even if you are continents apart, where the rules of physics don't exist. And everything is designed to make your meetings more productive than ever, where the whole space around you is your blank canvas.
And you can use your superpowers to create three dimensional mind maps. A reality created for agile meetings, presentations, and brainstorming sessions where every interaction is designed to be more effective than in real life. A reality for optimal teamwork and collaboration. Inspiration.
Meet in VR better than real. So before I go too far, Ashley, were we able to hear the video? Yes, sir. Okay. I just wanna make sure. 'cause you know, it's technology, you never know what's gonna happen. Sounded. Great on my end. If anyone else heard differently, let us know in the chat. All right, so yo, whoops, moving on. So then we talked about,
so that was meetings. Now let's talk about training. And what I hear a lot of times from people is, oh yes, that's, that's fine for, you know, techie people like you, Jim, and you know, you'll put on a headset, you'll figure things out and this, this isn't for the mainstream or this isn't for people working in let in quote unquote reality. This is just, uh, kind of pie in the sky things. But I wanna share how Hilton, Hilton, is using virtual reality for training. Now this video's a little bit longer than the last one, but I think it's important to, to listen to what they're talking about. Every day at the corporate office, we make decisions that impact the team members at the hotel. So we really needed to make sure that our corporate team members understand the complexity of working in a hotel.
Oculus for Business has really shifted the way we were. We can truly upskill team members faster and really focus on empathy building, which was a game changer for us. We then said, we can use this tool to be able to really help our team members practice different scenarios of building empathy with our guests and make sure that we are delivering best in class service. Hi. I am here to check in. If we were to try to do this in a traditional setting, when you have 400,000 team members, that is not something that comes in an inexpensive way for us.
And nor do I think it's realistic. Every time there's been a significant advancement in the way you interact with computers, something great happens. So when the Quest came out, it was groundbreaking for us because just like that you have 60 o f possibilities for your experiences. Having all this available to you allows you to concentrate in what's most important, that getting what the client sees when they close their eyes and making it happen.
To me, virtual reality is absolutely the future of learning. It just genuinely immerses the team member in the experience. Once you see this and can experience how much it can build empathy and change behavior, it's really the best tool by which we can simulate a real experience. When clients ask, how can we develop this? How can we create this for the masses? Now we have an answer for them, the quest. So for me, the, the few things to bring out of that particular video, uh, immersive, which we've been talking about, empathy, which is something that, uh, we try and make sure in my class specifically, that we get the point across of empathy from the virtual reality.
I'll talk more about that later. Uh, best in class, which I thought was very interesting. You know, think about Hilton and, and how Hilton really does try to be a best in class in their environment. And using something like virtual reality to train their 400,000 people. Let that soak in 400,000, how would you train them? You can't go up to W401 in Papajohn and do 400,000 people. You can't just throw up a video, it doesn't work. As you watch that video, you saw people were actually doing the job, whether they were doing it in, in a completely stimulated environment or a semi simulated environment, they were doing the job, not just hearing about it. So that is part of the,
the benefit of doing something like extended reality. Now, another area that we wanna talk about just very briefly is things that revolve around human resources. Now this is a broad topic, and I'm not trying to step in any particular area of, of hr, but, and, but think about the opportunity of soft skills that you can learn. Communication skills and public speaking such as active listening, uh, public speaking, uh, essentials, managing anxiety, presenting your best self, interview skills, career-minded development. I, I don't think I need to read all of these, but, uh, resolving conflict, managing difficult situations, these are all things that we're trying to make sure our employees understand and do well in as well as our students.
These students are going off into the workforce and they need to be able to have access to this so they can be better prepared when they go to do that interview or when they're a first time manager and they need to resolve a conflict. We have excellent students. We need to make sure they're prepared the best they can. And so we are already partnering with a couple of different companies, meta being one of them, on how to provide these soft skills to students and hopefully we can help work with companies on how to provide them as well. Now,
marketing, marketing is one that people say all the time, oh, no problem marketing is, is great for virtual reality. You can throw some things in there and I agree completely, but I had to share this particular experience. This is probably one of my favorite when it comes to marketing. Now, you'll watch, I'll move the screen around because this is literally a 360 degree world that inspired the filled cupcake flavored Oreo cookies. Uh, but it really draws you into a fantasy Oreo world. And if you like Oreos, um, it's a great place to be.
Now I want an Oreo or 10 or a hundred, uh, but you could see the idea of this, even though it's a flat 2D screen that you're looking at, you can envision a 360 degree view of this marketing scheme. Now put that into a virtual reality where you're immersed in coming back to that term. Crazy use Number two, hey, simulated kissing. So this is a use of haptics. And so some of you who have been working with virtual or augmented reality recently, you know that there's a big push in haptics again. And the idea here is you would have your headset on and you would have this funky device which actually uses haptics and it will blow air onto your lips, teeth and tongue to simulate kissing because I guess somebody needed to simulate kissing.
I don't have a clue why these crazy things are created, but they're created. So I thought this was really neat to share. Crazy use number two. Um, and no, I'm not gonna have a simulated kissing device in my office, just so anyone is curious. Now,
one of the other things that we really need to make sure we bring to forefront here is the idea of analytics and visualization. I'm gonna talk a little bit more about visualization in a few minutes, but it's so much better in a extended reality environment. If you can visualize the data versus just see the data, I can see the numbers, I can manipulate spreadsheets, but boy, if I could actually see what's happening and I can walk into that visualization, there's no comparison. It's just that much more powerful. Now, this is probably one of my favorite videos. My, I,
I mentioned I'd be telling stories. So my grandfather was a master bricklayer, some of you know that 'cause I've talked about him a lot. And, uh, he would train, uh, apprentice and journeymen. And this was in the, in the, I'd say mid-seventies. And, you know, you spend a lot of time learning how to lay bricks. Now we can use augmented reality, and I'm gonna jump around in this video a little bit.
But you can use augmented reality to help people see the layout of bricks to help them learn faster and better. So I'm gonna play just a little bit of this. Not gonna get exactly like this would.
So you can see he's wearing his augmented reality headset that is a, uh, uh, Microsoft HoloLens. And then if we jump forward just a little bit. Let's call and see the outline and precise placement of every single brick in the wall. Aside from using hologram as an instruction set, Colin was also able to use it to train his apprentices. So. You'll see here. So.
That's all the bricks. Right? It shows the outline. Brick. So see you are here. Brick. That one's good. Yep. This one here shows it's gotta come around. So just treat that like, like you do your string line all the way around. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. So hit that back.
It took us two brick layers and it took us, um. So I just wanted to share that really quickly. But the idea that you can train someone faster and better based on those stats we saw earlier in things like brick laying.
Sorry, brick. Wires, it's amazing. And now we can see, and a lot of people have used this, uh, but I did wanna make sure that everybody still understood that augmented reality from companies like Target and Ikea and Wayfair, where you can place things in where you want 'em to go and see how it looks. Or Sherwin Williams, where you can change the, uh, color of, of a wall. These have been around a while, but this is the use of augmented reality.
This is a use of extended reality. So it's important that people are aware of this. Now, if you've searched for a house recently, you've probably run across this. If you haven't, it's pretty powerful.
So this is a Matterport 3D virtual tour. These tours are done on a 2D platform, but with a 3D camera. But the idea is you could literally walk through the space through virtual reality and experience it. So you know, that's a house I want to visit or that's not a house I want to visit. So I'll play a little bit of this.
And you can see as it zips through it, it's zipping fairly quickly. You can zoom in and zoom out and you can go in and you can look around and this is actually the house that you'd be in and it's actually the layout of the time they took the images. And you can see those little green and white dots.
Those would be hotspots you could get information about. And so the overarching idea here is using virtual reality or augmented reality to, uh, let people experience things in a way that they have never experienced before and get a better buy-in for different things. So I will move on from there. And I wanted to share this one because, you know, tourism and travel, and I'll talk a little bit in just a second about that in a different way.
But I just think it's amazing what you can do with extended reality and virtual reality. And in this case, where else could you have a private tour by David Attenborough through a museum. Hold the World is an interactive virtual reality experience. Welcome to London's Natural History. Hello Louisiana <laugh>. In these drawers today, there is a special selection of objects ready for you to explore. Thank you very much. Ah, there we are.
Wow. Whoa, that is amazing. <Laugh>. Heavens above. Sorry. Whoops. Look, it was gonna hit me in the face.
I'm bound to put my hands out to defend myself. It is breathtakingly beautiful. So Sir David Attenborough thinks it's breathtakingly, breathtakingly beautiful. What more could, should I say, uh, but crazy use number three. Now this one's not as crazy, uh, as some of the others, but I still think it's, it's pretty amazing.
So in a lot of instances, especially with the, with the younger people and children, uh, we use virtual reality to help with pain relief and also to help when we're doing testing. So, uh, the patients who have had significant pain and we can't give them any more, uh, morphine or any other type of painkiller, they're at their limit. How else do we get them to have pain relief? Well, there's a lot of clinical work going on right now by putting on the headset and taking them somewhere else other than the room they're in. It does help alleviate pain in some ways also with young children who are not really comfortable with getting shots or going through any kind of procedure. Taking them into virtual reality, uh, really does seem to help. There's also one study, which I'm still trying to wrap my head around, where for outpatient surgeries, they're not doing anesthesia at all.
They're putting them into virtual reality and letting them experience the virtual reality and then just doing maybe some minor local anesthesia versus putting them under. And it seems to be working fairly well. So some quick other uses. So those are kind of the main areas, but I did wanna share some other uses. Uh, so here's one that's patient care simulation. And I'm not gonna play the whole video even though it's just seconds. So extended reality in virtual reality being heavily used in the medical field now and allowing people to do training in different ways than they ever have before.
And we're gonna look at another one in just a couple of minutes. I wanna share this particular item because it is close to home for me. So travel for home bound. Many of us have, uh,
or have had elderly parents or relatives who are home bound for one reason or another, or circumstances have set it in such a place that you can no longer travel yourself. Whether your health is fine or not, you're just not able to get out there. And what virtual reality does is it gives us an opportunity to take ourselves or other people somewhere other than where they are currently. Now, it's not the same as going to the Louvre or going to the Great Pyramids or going to Petra in Jordan. It's not the same. But if you can't make that trip or you can't have that experience, it's something more than just sitting in front of a television and watching Sir David Attenborough do a tour for us. I have been to Petra in virtual reality.
I have experienced it probably better than most people because I can fly over it. I can look at the enormity of Petra because it's not just one area. I have been to the Louvre, I've never been to the Louvre, but I have been to the Louvre in virtual reality. And I guarantee you, for those of you who have been the majority of you, I have had a better seat at the Mona Lisa than you ever will because I'm the only one there when I'm looking at it. And it's the Monali, it's not a facsimile, I'm looking at it and there is no one else around. So the idea that this travel for home bound is available to us is a significant opportunity that we should be thinking about.
You know, military training and military have been using VR and XR for many, many years and uh, a lot of the things that come into the consumer areas are from military. But I do wanna share this one particular example. So if you look, you can see all these soldiers have on HTC 5 headsets and they are on this platform of some sort. And you can look down in the bottom right corner and you can see it's called infinadeck. Infinadeck is a multi-directional, uh, treadmill that allows you to move in any direction without having to change anything other than where you're placed your feet. So if you're walking forward and you turn to the left, the multi-directional treadmill will move with you.
It is not a consumer model. There are consumer models that simulate this, but it's not a consumer model. This is used for military training and heavy duty, uh, equipment training, but it allows people to walk through environments without ever having to leave a specific space. And you notice there's some security safety bars around so they don't fall down, hopefully. Crazy use number four, stepping inside your memories. So we all take pictures,
we all take pictures with these phones that we have in our pockets, and that's great. And, we take videos and we can watch the videos on a flat screen. But this company called Wist is actually taking those flat videos using some AI as well as the items outside of the view of the camera that you normally don't see. And it's creating 3D environments where you could then put on your headset and you could step into your memory. It's an interesting concept. I'm not sure where it'll go, but we'll keep our eye on it. We also see virtual reality entering into things like welding training.
So another story, when I learned to weld, I was 23 years old and I learned from a high school classmate of mine who had just gotten out of prison and he learned in prison how to weld. And he was very, very good. An amazing welder. He tried to teach me. It was terrible. I wasted a lot of equipment. Um, I learned enough to make it so you can't break the weld and that's about it. But fast forward all these years, and I'm not gonna say how many. And now my nephew is an engineering student at St.
Ambrose and he learned to weld as part of his engineering program, but in virtual reality. So we had a headset like this and a device like this, and he was welding in virtual reality versus in real reality two case studies. I wanna share real quick. Accenture did a case study on PPE training in virtual reality.
So instead of wasting a lot of PPE in parts of training, they actually were able to do that in virtual reality. So you can get the idea training in virtual reality saves equipment, it saves supplies and it also allows you to try things over and over again. Now this particular item, uh, that was put together between Accenture and a national theater, I think is really important because one of the things we have not talked a lot about here, and it is a big issue with virtual reality, is accessibility.
It is not as accessible as we would like it to be in a lot of different environments, but it also brings accessibility to the forefront in certain ways. And this is a great example. What we asked Accenture to do is to come up with simple user device that provided a more personal experience and that ultimately gave people the freedom and the choice to come to any performance.
What we tried to achieve here is put the text with the performance. This is a game changer. What you would see is captions only appearing on the screen so only you can see them. The people next to you can't see them.
The captions come up in perfect sync with the actors, which gives a much better experience for everybody. You can have a text scrolling. That can be different sizes. You can choose car of the subtitles. But then he said, is your husband or partner on his or her. Way? You said no because he's in Geneva watching protons collide.
So you can get the idea of having a pair of glasses that you're wearing that have the subtitles on them. Now I have a pair in my office. It's similar to that. Uh, it's a music, uh, um, headset. It actually looks like a pair of glasses. I can bring it out here and put it on and I can actually, it only shows up in the one eye. I know I look very nerdy. Um, not surprised, um, but geeky, that's it. Uh,
but I can have subtitles running across the right hand side of that. And so the concept here is really to open up worlds to other people that haven't had that opportunity before. Now, crazy use number five. There was a study done by, uh, man named Kolkman and he created what's called a near-death experience. We always hear about being outside of your body. And so what was done here was you put on the headset, but the camera that you're viewing is actually in that kind of white head that's behind you. So you look like you have an out of body experience.
It was done more for an art, uh, exhibition, but still kind of a crazy use. And so the question always comes up, how are we using extended reality in Tippie? And we are using it heavily in certain areas and other areas. We're just starting, we're just kind of edging in. So recruiting and admissions, we're really starting to, to open that world and see what that can do for us. Data visualization, we've been doing a little bit of this and we're gonna be doing more.
I'll share a couple of images. Uh, marketing. We've got some really good research in marketing. A few of our researchers are working on that.
We are looking at things like real estate tours, uh, museum access. We talked about soft skills. We're gonna be doing more with that. And then teaching the benefits, benefits of extended reality to business students. So research we've been doing, marketing research management and analytics research and how, uh, extended reality or virtual reality will help in different ways. Visualizations actually walking into the data.
So the different types of data that we have, having the students walk into it and actually work with it. Uh, my class that I'm got this semester, we're actually doing that, uh, next Monday. The digital twin.
Now many people have seen this so I won't spend too much time on this, but the digital twin will allow us to open up the campus for recruiting and admissions potentials. So you can envision we'd actually be able to virtually bring somebody, let's say from India or China or even from Nebraska. If they didn't wanna make the drive, they could be coming in virtually and seeing what campus life is like a little bit and talking to our counselors in this environment. Soft skills, we talked a little bit about that, but we're looking at things like interviewing conflict management and handling difficult questions and getting our students both at the graduate and undergraduate level to be able to do that.
And then the course I have that I teach with our MBAs and will potentially teach with a larger audience really encompasses a much larger, uh, environment when it comes to virtual reality. And we look at things like exploring the nomad experience where you're actually in, um, Mongolia and wandering around in Mongolia with with nomads. And you are in Adam Savage's lab and working with him and learning what it's like to be homeless and going to Anne Frank's house and experience that learning what it's like to be an airport ground handler, looking at, uh, things from an architectural perspective or from doing simulators like transformer oil sampling and occupational safety. And you can read all these others that we do. And this is over an eight week course that we cover this entire realm of virtual reality experiences. My resources,
just so you have them available. And I'm pretty sure we'll be sharing this out there somewhere. Uh, but anything that's underlined as a web resource, the last ones on the bottom are books that that I use for resources, really good books, especially the Bernard Marr, uh, book. That's a great one to look at. And with that, I wonder if anyone has any questions? And we do have some questions. So the first one is,
how can virtual reality experiences be assessed and evaluated to measure their impact on student performance and comprehension? That is a great question. Uh, assessment is one that we are still working out all of the details, uh, because it can be pretty subjective. It's what are you looking for? And I would suggest if anyone in the college or anyone in any college is looking for assessment opportunities from virtual reality. So reach out to your instructional designer. So in our college, Shelby has been doing a lot of ex uh, experience, uh, looking into this type of thing. So how do you assess it? So for example, in my class, the way I assess the students' reactions as well as their understanding is using video feedback.
Because my course is online a hundred percent. And so I get a lot of video feedback to get not, not only did they understand what the topic was, but what they got out of it, what was their reflection. I do a lot of reflection videos beyond that. It really depends on what kinds of of assessment you're looking for.
And so I can't give you details, but if it's something you're interested in, I'd reach out to Shelby and talk to her. Or if you're not from this college, reach out to your instructional designer in another college. Uh. Melissa Villamil asks, kind similar along the lines of what you're just talking about.
What products or platforms are you building your original VR and AR projects on? What products or programs are you subscribing to use them with students? So we don't build our own. Um, so we utilize everything that we utilize is a canned piece of software that has been developed. Uh, it depends on the product. A lot of them are developed in Unity. Uh, some are developed in, in other products that are out there. There's like three main ones, of course, I can't remember them right now. Uh,
but Unity tends to be one that's that's used heavily. So we use, like for our soft skills stuff, we're using body swaps and we're using some stuff from Victory XR for our, um, digital twin Victory XR out of Davenport developed that. All the rest of them are ones that we can get off of the, uh, the app store for Oculus or for Meta, excuse me. And those are usually free or at a small price. And, and so we don't develop our own, but we do look heavily at how they are developed, who's working with them. Is it something that just some techie guy like me put together or is it something that has an instructional designer and a psychologist and whatever else necessary behind it? There was a second part to that question and I forget.
What was that? Hold on, sorry. That's all right. Um. What products are you using with, uh, with students? Like what are we, oh yeah. Are we utilizing for our students here at Tippie? So.
So, um, the digital twin we're using, uh, from VictoryXR. We're using body swaps, um, for a lot of the soft skills. And then the list that I showed, those are actually the names of the applications. Uh, so we're using a, a huge number of their, those. We use a, a product called Engage, which allows us to have meetings. We have not yet chosen a meeting product. There's a number of different ones out there. Uh,
we're using a ready room in some of the areas for research, uh, as well as there's been some custom development in those areas. Uh, so that kind of runs the gambit, but our large numbers are the ones from my class. And that was that big list at the end. Greg McClenaghan, sorry if I butchered the last name there. How does a smaller employer or business access VR measures for things like training, orientation or marketing? Wonderful thought. Uh, so what's really neat is we're,
like I said earlier, we're kind of on the cusp of all of this. And the headsets, we're only talking about $300, maybe $400 a piece. So even if, even if you're buying one or two, yes, $300 can be a lot of money, but at the same time, it's not a lot of money when you talk about bringing somebody in for training or going away for training. So if you take that, and then a lot of these applications, because we're still at the very early stages, the companies are that create them, are willing to talk and willing to work out a lot of details as far as pricing. So obviously as an educational institution, we have things that come at us from a different perspective, but from a business perspective, you were to say, want to use the Body Swaps application as an example.
And I'm not trying to push that by any means, just one on the top of my head. You could reach out to the company and say, Hey, I see that you've got this for sale and you're charging X amount, but I'm a small company and I only have four employees and I'd really like to try this. Could we work something out? And most of these companies are willing to do that. And if you are interested in reaching out to any of these, please feel free to to reach out to me and I'll do my best to connect you with them. So Stephanie Sims has a couple of questions. So her first is,
when using virtual reality, can you feel the handshake? What would the financial investment be for a company to transition to a tool like that? So I think you sort of answered that a little bit on the finance side, but more about can you feel the handshake? So yes and no. So without a haptics device, and haptics really gives you that physical feedback. And there's different types of haptics. There's electrical haptics, there's, um, audio haptics, and there's, um, in this case, air haptics like we saw with the, with the kissing device, uh, you would need, in order to really feel something, you would need some kind of haptic device. Now we have haptic gloves as an example, uh, here in the college that we're using for some research.
And they were $300 for a pair of gloves. And they actually use electrical sensors in the tips. So if you were to reach out and, and shake hands with a, uh, with a avatar or an invisible being, if you will, you would feel that there was some sensation there. It's not perfect. We've still got a long ways to go. They do make haptic suits and a lot of other haptic devices, those are out of reach for most people just yet. Now the financial investment, I mentioned some of that, but it really comes back to what you're trying to do.
The more you want to do, obviously the more expensive it could be. But there are a lot of possibilities and I am absolutely over the moon excited about talking to any company who wants to learn more about this and connect you up with companies that do this because it's really is a passion of mine. But it could be as simple as a few headsets and some free software, or it could be in a significant investment just depending on what you're looking to do. So Stephanie, as follow-up question is for the virtual office spaces that you were showing.
So it's possible that you see people in their cubicles and you can walk over to those people and ask them a question in real life. Yes, yes. I know it seems mind-boggling. I think <laugh>. Yep. Actually it is that simple. Yes, you can. Yep.
It's, I I hold a lot of meetings in virtual reality with people from all over the world. And what we'll do, a lot of times we'll be breaking out into our own little offices. And if I wanna walk over, I don't believe in my chair, but if I wanna walk over and talk to, say an architect that I'm working with, I get out of my virtual chair and I walk over to his space and I ask him his question and we might talk, and then we might move to a room and we have, uh, uh, kind of a brainstorming session where we draw on the board and we capture all that, and then we go back to our spaces or we take our headsets off and we're back in our offices. So.
David Scurlock is asking what specific hardware I think he means, what specific virtual reality tools or extended reality tools are we using here at Tippie College? Tippie College of Business. I know you mentioned like Oculus. Mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. So we are mainly a, an Oculus or if you will, a Meta Quest is the, is the new name. We're a Meta Quest shop. We have quite a few of them, uh, that I think we're at 150 devices that we have that, uh, we can loan out for a class or classes depending. Uh, we also ex explore the different environments that are out there.
So we have probably one of all the mainstream devices. So like I said, I have the music device, I have, uh, the hollow lens, we have, uh, the Magic Leap, we have the HTC 5, uh, portable version. We have an old version of Google Glass that we've had for a while. So, but the, the Meta Quest too is the one that we use mostly. Well, or sorry, are there any VR projects in the agricultural field to help overcome and study the current effects of climate change? Yes, and I don't have specifics off the top of my head, but John Deere is heavily involved in working with this as well as some of the other companies whose names are escaping me. I apologize.
But there's a significant amount of agricultural work going on in this. Obviously we don't do a whole lot here because, you know, we're, we're not heavily into agri business, uh, in this college, maybe someday. Uh, but, uh, there is a lot going on and if you wanna reach out to me, I can connect you with people that, that are doing that. Excuse me, let me unmute myself. <laugh>, another question is, how is this connected to manufacturing 4.0? Industry still is looking for ways to minimize waste across the process and rise value added activities.
Yeah, it's, it's hard because this is such a new concept for so many people to wrap their heads around. You know, if you think about the manufacturing floors that we've had for years and you do, whether it's training, uh, whether it's safety training or it's, uh, just regular training on what's going on on the manufacturing floor or on, uh, on the assembly line or whatever it is. We've had different examples of virtual reality, um, training, but it's never been very good, quite frankly. And so most businesses and most managers all the way up to the top shy away from it because it's takes time. And there's very little ROI to start with. Uh,
you've got to think long, long term with this. You know, we saw some, some things with the PPE where you could actually save on devices and, and not have to waste the the items. But frankly, if Covid hadn't hit, I don't know if that would've taken off as well as it did because when there's not a shortage of PPE, why would you change the way you do things? So as you think about the new way in manufacturing and you think about changes in auditing, changes in osha, uh, visits, changes in all these things that are going on, it's going to take innovative and, um, forward thinking managers to really, and I hate the term, but think outside the box on utilizing things like this for like we saw with Hilton for our line people, because we can talk about it in the boardrooms, we can talk about it how it could benefit, but we need the floor managers really looking at these and really saying, yes, I can see how 75% increase in learning and only, and I didn't share this statistic, but 15, 15 minutes versus two hours in the time of training. So you can do that training in 15 minutes, that would take you two hours in a room in that desktop environment.
And getting people to say it's worth the initial investment, even though we're not gonna see a, an ROI to start with and maybe never a direct ROI, it's just going to be kind of getting people comfortable with it and unfortunately it's gonna take the right people. Um, I hope that makes sense. So. This is going back to those poll questions quickly, Jim, but this should be an easy one for you.
What is the difference between the retention rate and memory recall in the study's reference? Is retention rate in terms of retaining information or just in terms of students staying engaged during that learning process? Uh, so the big difference is time. Uh, it really comes down to time. It's if, if you want to think of it in, in simple terms, it's pretty much the same thing. Uh, but the retention rate is, the studies showed retention after X amount of time where the memory recall was where shorter timeframe it was. We're going to show you some things. We're gonna take a break. We're gonna see, if you recall those where with the retention it was, I can't remember the exact dates, you can look up the studies, uh, off the slides. It was, uh, certain amounts of time between, uh, each testing of the study and the retention lasted longer with the VR versus, uh, non vr and the memory recall was much more quick response return.
That is all the questions we have for today, plus we are getting to be at time. So just thank you Jim, and thank you everyone for attending the exploring the Transformative Potential of Extended Reality Webinar today. When the event ends in just a moment, you'll see our quick survey. We'd be grateful if you could share your thoughts and again, help us make our future virtual programming even better. On behalf of the Tippie College of Business, thank you again for joining us this afternoon. Thank you so much, Jim. This has been such an exciting topic and maybe we'll need to do a 2.0 on this
down the line. Um, but thank you everybody and on behalf of the Tippie College of Business, as always, go Hawks.
2023-09-20 06:13
