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A retail employee was on duty when someone tried to rob her company’s store. She said she owed her fast response to the virtual reality (VR) training her company had provided on how to react to a robbery. “I literally remembered the five-step process of what to do from the training,” the woman wrote in an email to VR training provider Strivr.
The robbery scenario is a classic example of a cost-effective use case for VR training. Strivr founder and CEO Derek Belch uses the acronym RIDE to talk about cases where VR training excels; that is, at simulating scenarios that are Rare, Impossible (or close to it), Dangerous or Expensive to recreate in the real world.
Examples of RIDE situations include learning to fly a plane, doing intricate surgeries and setting explosives in a mineshaft. In cases like these, the cost of VR training is almost invariably a good investment, with an ROI that can be easily quantified.
“Especially for so-called ‘hard skills’ like surgery, measuring ROI is relatively straightforward,” said Justin Barad, founder and CEO of Osso VR, provider of VR training for surgeons. “From a business standpoint, we have found that even with rather basic VR training programs, the ROI quickly adds up, whether you are talking about increased quality, efficiency or being more consistent and data-driven.”
If VR training makes perfect business sense for these situations, it has been a bit more difficult to convince companies in other areas to invest in the technology. But the ROI calculus on VR training is quickly evolving, as providers expand the types of VR training they offer, including adding more off-the-shelf options, decreasing headset prices — to $300 for the new Meta Quest 2 — and tapping into advances in AI to apply the technology to a greater number of use cases.
Expanding the Realm of VR Training
Like any other technology, VR training has been evolving and adapting at a fast pace. The technology is increasingly being used for scenarios that are more reliant on 'soft skills,' such as practicing difficult conversations with employees, building courage in public speaking and improving diversity, equity and inclusion.
A 2022 study by PwC found that VR can accelerate training up to four times on tasks related to soft skills. Additionally, VR helps trainees gain self-assurance with uncomfortable tasks, increasing their confidence in the given skills by 275% — 40% more than from classroom training.
VR learners also feel 3.75 times more emotionally connected to and 1.5 times more focused on the training subject matter than classroom-based learners.
“Everyone thought of VR in terms of using it for hard skills, like recreating a bulldozer or a satellite in the desert,” said Scott Likens, innovation hub leader for PwC US and a coauthor of the study. “But the study proves out the efficacy and efficiency for using VR for soft skills — and even more so now that headsets are cheaper and more ubiquitous.”
Not only are headsets now affordable for most companies, with the recently announced Apple Vision Pro being the exception, but advances in AI are making off-the-shelf VR training solutions more useful.
For example, managers using VR to practice having annual review conversations with employees can now speak directly to an avatar whose AI-powered responses are almost as natural — and unpredictable — as a human’s are likely to be. AI can now help public-speaking trainees by assessing eye movement or use of “um” and “ah,” providing real-time feedback or correction to encourage a more effective presentation.
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Lowering the Cost of Entry
There is no doubt that AI is making off-the-shelf VR training options more effective but, by the same token, it is also opening up a new way for companies to find helpful solutions at affordable price points.
Off-the-shelf training tends to come at a very reasonable cost while still allowing some level of customization. For example, users may be able to choose among a selection of environments such as a conference room, office or auditorium. Or a trainee on public speaking might be able to upload their own notes into the simulation.
“Most of the time when people get worried about the cost of VR training, it’s because they’re thinking of highly customized VR environments that require a lot of technical expertise,” said Sophie Thompson, cofounder of VirtualSpeech, a provider of self-paced VR workplace training courses. “But if they find a provider like us that has off-the-shelf courses that can be customized, they just have to pay a license — they don’t have to pay for the build of those courses.”
She said this makes the cost of VR training rather inexpensive. Plus, regardless of the use case, companies can easily measure both the speed and effectiveness of the training to assess ROI.
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“Every company is different, but for the most part it comes down to two things,” said Belch. “One is speed to proficiency. A lot of our customers and others report that they’re cutting onboarding times in half .… And then, because of that, you get significant cost savings because of the time savings. The ROI is very real; corporations are starting to take notice.”
