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Issue 7: 9.2024
In This issue:
Dive in and explore how VR technology is transforming productivity in both workplaces and educational environments. With immersive experiences that enhance focus, collaboration, and learning. In September's issue, you'll read stories about how VR is breaking traditional barriers, offering new ways to engage with tasks and materials, and is reshaping efficiency, improving skills, and creating a more dynamic, interactive approach to achieving success in the office or classroom.
Happy reading!
- The VRD HealthTech team
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Special Announcement:
VRD HealthTech presents the "Immersive Tech Talk" Podcast series hosted by Dr. Skip Rizzo!
Episode 1: Our guests to launch the podcast series will be Amir Bozorgzadeh and Hossein Jalali, Co-Founders of Virtuleap.
Episode 2: Skip Rizzo walks down memory lane with Sarah Hill, CEO of Healium.
Register here to attend episode 3, featuring Taylor Freeman from Axon Park. This episode airs Tuesday, Sept. 24th, 2024 at 11am (PT).
Drexel Study: Virtual Reality May Enhance Learning Efficiency Over Real-World Environments
“The combined analysis of task-related brain activity and behavioral performance provide a more nuanced assessment, and here, results suggest that for this cognitive task, VR reduced the mental load needed to complete tasks,” said senior author Hasan Ayaz, PhD.
In the first study to consider brain activity during visuospatial problem-solving across immersive virtual reality (VR), 2-D computer screens and physical environments, researchers from Drexel’s School of Biomedical Engineering uncovered a surprising revelation – VR-based learning exhibited optimal neural efficiency, a measure that gauges the brain activity required to complete a unit task.
This finding, published in the journal Sensors, reveals using virtual reality may foster more efficient learning than real-world environments. During the study, 30 young adults engaged in approximately 60-minute visuospatial (looking at participants’ visual perception of the spatial relationships between the objects in front of them) tasks, tackling 3D geometric puzzles as their prefrontal cortex activity was monitored with a wearable neuro-imaging sensor called functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS).
This optical brain imaging tool tracks cortical oxygenation changes in specific brain regions corresponding to neuronal activation alterations. Researchers continuously monitored participants’ brain activity via fNIRS sensor throughout the session through a carefully designed protocol of tasks across three presentation mediums. Dr. Ayaz, an associate professor in the School of Biomedical Engineering, Science and Health Systems, said “this implies that VR furnishes more intelligible 3D visual cues, facilitating better problem inspection and solution evaluation.”
Cornell University: Female AI 'teammate' generates more participation from women
According to new research, an artificial intelligence-powered virtual teammate with a female voice boosts participation and productivity among women on teams dominated by men.
The findings suggest that the gender of an AI's voice can positively tweak the dynamics of gender-imbalanced teams and could help inform the design of bots used for human-AI teamwork, researchers said.
The findings mirror previous research that shows minority teammates are more likely to participate if the team adds members similar to them, said Angel Hsing-Chi Hwang, postdoctoral associate in information science and lead author of the paper.
To better understand how AI can help gender-imbalanced teams, Hwang and Andrea Stevenson Won, associate professor of communication and the paper's co-author, carried out an experiment with around 180 men and women who were assigned to groups of three and asked to collaborate virtually on a set of tasks (the study only included participants who identified as either male or female).
Each group had either one woman or one man and a fourth agent in the form of an abstract shape with either a male or female voice, which would appear on screen and read instructions, contribute an idea and handle timekeeping. "One interesting thing about this study is that most participants didn't express a preference for a male- or female-sounding voice," Won said. "This implies that people's social inferences about AI can be influential even when people don't believe they are important."
When women were in the minority, they participated more when the AI's voice was female, while men in the minority were more talkative but were less focused on tasks when working with a male-sounding bot, researchers found.
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Did You Know?
VR can boost morale and productivity and make training way more fun.
3 Ways VR Can Improve Your Workplace
- Boost employee productivity.
- Improve team morale and bonding.
- Make training and development more fun and more effective.
Boost Employee Productivity
According to a recent McKinsey study, more than 50 per cent of workers say that their productivity is down. VR has quickly emerged as a new and novel way to address this and improve employee performance and productivity. It’s something that HR leaders are turning to for fun and new ways to ensure that their teams are set up for success and are able meet expectations from day one.
VR is a way for employees to collaborate, be creative and have more meaningful interactions with each other versus dialing into the usual boring video call, which ultimately takes away from employee connection and satisfaction. Imagine being able to visualize and interact with a product in a virtual environment before it even exists in the physical world. This is exactly what VR enables.
By eliminating the need for physical prototypes, VR saves time and reduces material wastage. This technology has evolved into a sophisticated tool with far-reaching implications that has allowed for more efficient and effective brainstorming sessions.
With so many distractions and interruptions happening constantly, VR can reduce those issues and help employees refocus.
Improve Morale and Team Bonding
Employees are unhappier now than they were at the height of the pandemic, according to a recent study by BambooHR. They are experiencing a sense of resignation and even apathy from the work they do. If this doesn’t concern you as an employer, it should. I believe one of the key reasons for this unhappiness is the lack of personal contact in fully remote working environments.
We’re in the middle of a loneliness epidemic and workplaces are unable to navigate these challenges on their own. It’s resulting in a lack of staff retention across businesses.
Level Up Training and Development
Job hopping among employees is higher than it’s ever been before. UPS, Ford and Walmart have successfully incorporated VR into processes and workflows for areas such as product development and employee upskilling. PWC’s Metaverse report found that those who were trained using VR learned four times faster compared to those taught in a traditional classroom. Furthermore, the report found they were 257 percent more confident applying skills after learning.
What’s exciting is VR’s impact on developing soft and interpersonal skills, too. The PWC data suggests that employees are more emotionally connected after VR training, compared with training in a classroom. VR training providers who specialize in creating customized training programs tailored to specific industry needs, and these programs can offer hands-on training experiences that simulate real-life scenarios, allowing employees to practice and refine their skills in a safe and controlled virtual environment.
While there will always be the need for real face time with colleagues, we’re seeing exciting developments in the corporate AR and VR space. Whether it’s to learn, connect or play, these technologies have proven their role in the ever-evolving future of work.
Read more on the Built In website →
ASU pilots virtual coffee shop experience to teach about business decision-making in real time.
VR helps students learn about supply chain management with a partnership between ASU and Dreamscape Immersive.
Students in Arizona State University's Planning and Control Systems for Supply Chain Management class had the opportunity to explore real life scenarios and business challenges while piloting W. P. Coffee, a Dreamscape Learn virtual reality immersive classroom experience last fall.
Set in a virtual coffee shop, the program teaches students about operational capacity management. It allows them to purchase and discard coffee machinery, invest in additional staff to improve efficiency and change the shop's appearance. At the same time, the simulation provides live updates on how the decisions impact the shop’s finances and net profit.
Dreamscape Learn merges education and storytelling in a virtual reality format to redefine immersive education and improve outcomes for students across all demographics. They began testing VR experiences for ASU courses two years ago to determine if students not only learned through VR curriculum but enjoyed the learning experience.
“Generally speaking, we found that students loved it,” said Lisa Flesher, chief of Realm 4 Initiatives at Dreamscape Learn and EdPlus.
During this testing period, Dreamscape’s research determined that students enrolled in ASU biology courses with VR curriculum excelled compared with peers enrolled in biology courses without VR experiences, or “business as usual” classes.
“Students were 1.7 times as likely to earn an ‘A’ in the Dreamscape version compared to the business-as-usual version and saw about a full letter grade improvement,” Flesher said. “I think VR has a lot of exciting applications, especially when you can instantly transfer students to places that otherwise may be impractical or impossible to visit,” says Printezis, who taught the pilot class. “It offers opportunities for engagement and motivation by breaking away from traditional in-class learning and placing students in a more immersive and interactive environment.”
Students said the experience helped them better understand and apply concepts learned in class, and the real-world scenario made the experience more relevant.
GITEX Global - October 14 – 18, 2024
GITEX Global, one of the largest technology events in the Middle East, is a must-attend event on the AIXR list for companies looking to expand in the region. Hosted in Dubai.
Live Viewing of Meta Connect 2024 with the XR Creators Community - September 25, 2024
Online event. Mark Zuckerberg presents the latest innovations from Meta.
2024 Augmented Enterprise Summit, October 15th-17th
Where enterprises go to innovate with XR. Hosted in Dallas, Texas.
