Presented by Hayden Morison, CEO, Next World, at ‘Immersive Technologies Driving Industry Transformation: Manufacturing & Construction Showcase’

Imagine sending your employees to an offshore rig in the middle of the Pacific Ocean or giving them the reins to operate expensive machinery – all without ever leaving the classroom. Companies like Next World are making this possible, using virtual reality to deliver immersive learning experiences that are safe, scalable, and highly effective.

Next World specialise in working with enterprise and high-risk companies to implement immersive training solutions. They offer an extensive library of VR courses in safety and soft skills training, combined with a learning management system and analytics platform.

Hayden Morison, CEO of Next World, demonstrates the business case for VR in delivering workforce outcomes and highlights where VR is unlocking unique value.

Dematerialising the Classroom: Lessons from Industry Leaders

Netflix, Audible, Zoom, and Amazon – what do these four companies have in common?

Each of these companies has dematerialised the physical real-world environment, transforming DVDs, books, meeting rooms, and brick-and-mortar stores into the digital realm.

“Innovation is changing the way we think about our reality, and VR is doing the same.”

VR is enabling organisations to dematerialise the classroom, transporting students into immersive virtual learning environments and removing real-world barriers.

The Unique Value Propositions of VR Training

1. Access to digital training environments on demand
Trainees can interact with tools, machinery, and environments virtually, reducing or even eliminating the need for expensive physical assets. Training can occur anytime, anywhere, without the constraints of logistics or equipment availability.

2. Behavioural evaluation
VR enables organisations to measure cognitive understanding and identify knowledge gaps to gain a deeper understanding of each trainee’s competency level.

3. Increased knowledge retention
VR creates a fully immersive learning environment for students, eliminating distractions and increasing engagement. Combined with gamification to reinforce learning, VR significantly improves memory retention.

4. Experiencing consequences & risk in a safe environment
Students can be placed into extremely hazardous or high-risk situations virtually, without being placed in any real-world danger. This allows students to experience and learn from consequences that cannot be safely replicated in the real world.

5. Enhanced learning through emotional engagement
Memorable, impactful VR experiences can evoke emotions that strengthen learning, creating a powerful association to the learning content that results in long-term behavioural change.

For example, imagine being transported to that offshore rig to simulate working at heights:

“You’re up nine stories on a platform looking down. What are you feeling? Vertigo. You feel like you’re going to fall. Every time I do that, my heart starts racing, my palm starts sweating. My mind knows it’s not real, but my body definitely thinks it is. But what’s interesting is we can capture the emotion of vertigo and couple that with the learning content of working at heights. Suddenly you have a very strong care-factor association with that learning content that makes it very memorable, because you have a feeling attached to it.”

Integrating VR into a Comprehensive Training Framework

Traditional and real-world methods are still important components of training delivery, and can be combined with the immersive benefits of VR to create a three-part training framework:

1. Face-to-Face: Face-to-face training offers personal interaction and real time feedback, and is also beneficial for highly theoretical components of training.

2. Practical: Practical training allows for the student to learn by “doing” and provides a better tactile response to the task.

3. Virtual Reality: VR training provides an emotional connection to the learning content via highly impactful experiential moments, and can be “gamified” making it fun to learn. VR also offers a valuable platform for refresher training.

Time and Cost Savings: The ROI of VR Training

One of the most compelling aspects of VR is its ability to drastically reduce training time. Traditional refresher courses can take 4–6 hours, while VR can deliver the same training in 30 minutes. For example, one Next World client trained 1,000 workers in 6 months using only 4 VR headsets, saving 5,000 work hours.

A collaborative study conducted by CSQ, Next World, and QUT comparing the effectiveness of VR training in construction to traditional methods found that:

• VR training was rated to be more enjoyable, empowering, and engaging compared to conventional training.
• VR training can be as effective as conventional training for learning and knowledge retention.
• VR training duration was 20 minutes vs 4-6 hours of conventional training.

“It’s a no-brainer – VR pays for itself. You invest in the technology, you get the time and hours back.”

So what’s time costing you?

For a mid-tier construction company with 100 workers, an estimated 85 would require manual handling training. Based on industry averages in Brisbane for logistics, wages, and course costs, it would cost $26,775 to train that workforce using traditional methods. With VR training, that cost is reduced to $4,160 – an ROI of 644%.

VR Training

And it doesn’t stop there – for the average construction company, there are a range of required courses, including both one-off and ongoing refresher courses. Expanding on this example, VR can deliver up to 770% ROI for training.

“And this is just for training. That doesn’t account for every other value add that VR can provide in your company as well. This technology is incredible. If you haven’t tried it before, I highly encourage you to step in, find your feet with it, prove your use case, build a business case, scale from there.”

As well as training, there are a number of ways the construction industry can leverage VR’s unique value:

• Real-world mock ups, test builds & fit-outs
  • Aligns all parties before construction starts
  • Save material, labor, and time on rework
• Immersive VR experiences for potential buyers & investors
  • Improves win rates for tenders and sales
  • Accelerates decisions & avoids miscommunication
• Learner engagement
  • Improved knowledge retention, no distractions
  • Emotional connection to the material
• Site-specific hazard simulations
  • Improves hazard awareness
  • Take a preventative approach to safety
• VR replaces physical inductions & classroom safety training
  • Reduces training downtime & instructor hours
  • Consistent & repeatable for onboarding
• Reporting & analytics
  • Measure cognitive & behavioural metrics
  • Understand blind spots

The Future of VR is Bright

The potential for VR to revolutionise training across industries is enormous, providing scalable, measurable, and emotionally impactful learning experiences, whilst delivering unparalleled time and cost savings – and it’s a revolution that organisations can’t afford to miss out on.

“The paradigms are breaking. VR is not just for kids. It’s not just for gamers. It’s an enterprise solution that you need to get your hands on.”

 

“Our future is very bright for VR – I’m really looking forward to what we can create.”

ABOUT NEXT WORLD

Trusted by enterprise level organizations, safety managers, and learning & development professionals world-wide, Next World delivers a fully integrated solution for corporate learning through virtual reality. Their platform combines an extensive library of VR courses in safety and soft skills with a powerful LMS and built-in analytics — all packaged with wireless VR hardware, ready to use out of the box.

Her artwork has been presented internationally at venues such as the Barbican in London, Drive in Berlin, the Powerhouse in Sydney and Lusail in Qatar. She was awarded the lead commission for Experimenta’s Now or Never music/Arts Fest in Melbourne and won an honorary mention at the world’s biggest art and technology festival,’ Ars Electronica’ in Austria. Her project ECHO picked up the ‘Best Interactive Experience award” at the prestigious Sheffield documentary festival in the UK and went on to tour in South Africa, Singapore and Melbourne.