Ben Breitenstein, Founder at Composit, sat down with Workforce Training Specialist Michael Harris to get some feedback on the Virtual Reality training simulations they recently deployed for Stanwell Corporation Limited, and this is what he had to say.

TRANSCRIPT

Michael: Everyone from our new graduates to our board members have undertaken our simulations and everyone’s got something out of it. Everyone’s talking about how great they are, but they’re also remembering the key messaging behind everything that we’re trying to get across.

Ben: Stanwell had contacted us originally to try a pilot program to see if VR could work for them. It was pretty broad in its scope of the sorts of things that they wanted to cover off, because hazards can be physical, but they can also be psychological. And so to be able to take quite a long list of scenarios and synthesize that into something that was coherent, engaging, and that made sense to staff as they worked through it, was quite a challenge.

Michael: The virtual reality project enabled us to take high risk and dangerous environments that were able to use repetitively, take people on a journey. And I think one of the greatest things we achieved with it was the telling of really good stories. We were able to deliver training in a different way and engage with an audience in a way they weren’t expecting.

Ben: In the past, anything that was in a textbook or on a screen, there are many layers of abstraction between what the user is learning and what they will actually do when they get to site. With virtual reality, you can get as granular as you want, whether it’s teaching somebody which order to remove the bolts in or confronting them with an abusive coworker, and load that learning into their muscle memory so that when they do get to site, it’s like they’ve done it before.

Michael: So the simulations, the VR experience is a way of taking that theory, putting it into a practical, and then discussing the outcome of that process afterwards. What we’re finding with that is the engagement has lifted, especially with our junior team members, and they’re understanding the process because they’re putting them into practice. One thing that’s been amazing with Composit is their understanding of storytelling and it’s given great value to the VR far beyond just doing an assessment or currency-based kind of simulation.

Ben: So one of the biggest advantages for us as VR designers, by using something like hand tracking for the users to be able to interact with the world, is that we can set up scenarios where they have to really think on their feet and make decisions in the moment that can produce a set of branching outcomes.

Michael: One thing that I personally enjoy is the puzzles, and the way we’re looking at the processes that we’re teaching about. Having that depth to the process, making the challenges the right difficulty level, so they’re not a simple, here’s a hazard, you know, I’ve identified it. It’s about controlling that hazard and making the person feel in control of the simulation, that their actions have an effect. And also building in some of those, we call them Easter eggs, those pieces of information that can go a few different ways, that we often stop the simulation and talk to people about. Everyone from our new graduates to our board members have undertaken our simulations and everyone’s got something out of it. Everyone’s talking about how great they are, but they’re also remembering the key messaging behind everything that we’re trying to get across.

Ben: Probably the biggest factor for success for any sort of virtual reality training is the people who are there to deploy it. And that’s somewhere that we’ve been really lucky in that Michael and his team at Stanwell, they’ve been extremely thorough, not only in tracking what their users are learning, but also in gathering feedback from their staff in a really structured way that helps us tremendously.

Michael: Some of the things that surprised us with the virtual reality is how well the workforce received the VR. They were able to adapt to the technology, and how much of our workforce actually understood and had used that technology previously. So it’s much more commonplace than we thought it was going to be, and it was far more accepted all the way through from our new starters to our, you know, 30-year team members who’ve been here forever.

From that, the things that really came out of it that were hugely beneficial to our organisation, it starts the conversation about our hazard identification and our systems and processes that we then build off as trainers as part of our workshops.

Overall, the process was amazing, working with Ben and the Composit team. We were really surprised at how well they took on our objective, our mission and who we are as an organisation, and were able to translate that into the simulations so that we didn’t have to go through multiple review processes. It was just, it felt like it was always meant to be. We also got a lot more out of the simulations. The right questions were asked so that the simulations really represented who we are and what we needed them to achieve. The storytelling is absolutely critical, and it’s really made it a fantastic and engaging and promising experience for us.

Ben: One of the things I’ve come to appreciate the most about Michael and Amy and the team at Stanwell is that they’ve been doing this for a long time. They can smell a furphy when they hear one, and they don’t like to be talked into something that they know they don’t want.

Michael: They listen, we understand each other and we’re able to work towards a common goal. And it’s been an absolute pleasure, so I hope to work with them far and into the future.

Read the original article published by Ben Breitenstein on Composit’s website.

ABOUT COMPOSIT

Composit transforms businesses using extended reality technology. For 10 years, they’ve been transforming traditional approaches to training, marketing and entertainment into engaging, immersive experiences that leave users speechless.

Composit create immersive, interactive experiences using the full spectrum of spatial computing technologies: VR (virtual reality), AR (augmented reality), MR (mixed reality), and XR (extended reality). These experiences are used in education, training, sales, engagement, and entertainment.

ABOUT BEN BREITENSTEIN

Having grown up with an unhealthy obsession for both Lego and MacGyver, Ben was destined for a career rooted in both problem solving and making things.

Drawing on his experience designing real-world products for people, his approach to building immersive experience mixes learnings from the psychology of user-centred design and behavioural economics.

Ben is a diligent devotee to the evolving practice of building compelling virtual reality experiences that make looking at a 2D screen feel like reading latin off a stone tablet.