Episode 124-Curating Content and Empathy with SkillsVR

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Hello, everyone. Welcome to another exciting episode of VR in Education, where we dive deep into virtual reality for teaching and learning. Today, we have the pleasure of talking to Shani Bowman, who's the Content Development Manager for SkillsVR. Shani attended Stanford University, where she studied communication and media studies with a focus on virtual reality technologies. She completed an honours thesis on using VR to encourage pro-social behaviour.

After earning her master's degree in 2014, she became the manager of the prestigious Stanford's Virtual Human Interaction Lab, developing VR applications that promote empathy, learning, communication and environmental behaviour. behavior. Amazing. Welcome to the show, Shawnee. Hi, thank you, Craig. Thanks for having me. Of course, everyone is so excited to hear that background because everyone thinks of the lab and Jeremy Baylinson.

So we're excited to have someone of your pedigree here to talk about VR. Thank you. Oh, yes, absolutely. Very happy to be here. So why don't we start with an origin story, and that was what got you interested in virtual reality in the first place? Well, I was fortunate enough to happen upon it at Stanford, really. The Virtual Human Interaction Lab is a research lab in the communication department at Stanford, where Jeremy Baylinson is a professor.

And I was taking some classes with him, and that's kind of how I first was was introduced to virtual reality. Also in that department, as a student, most people really get into it because certain courses require that you participate in research for the course. And so before I started working in the lab, I was a participant in some of the research studies and got introduced to it that way. I just thought it was really cool, the technology.

This was before Before Oculus and before the most recent... Decade of consumer VR became a thing. So it was still very new and just really intriguing in general. Did you have a favorite research study that you were part of that really resonated with you? Let's see. I think, yeah, I remember I was a participant in one of the studies focusing on environmental behavior or environmentally conscious behavior.

And I thought it was really interesting because many of the research studies at the lab use sort of deception or a seemingly real type of behavioral tracking right after the study. And the researcher, Researcher, of course, lets you know immediately afterwards what has gone on and what the whole point of the study was. But in this case, you were participating in an experience in VR in which you are in the shower and you can see outside through a window someone, an avatar.

That's meant to represent you. And in fact they would kind of put a little texture of your face on the on the face of the avatar and you would eat you would watch yourself eating coal as the shower continued so to represent the amount of energy that you're using up by using that hot water in the shower and it's a very strange experience to watch an avatar of yourself crunching on pieces of coal.

But also while that's happening, you're learning facts about the environment and energy consumption and how using a little bit less hot water actually makes a pretty significant difference if you add that up over time. And so following this study, there was an intervention where the participants have to wash their hands as they leave the lab. And it was set up in a way such that you might think it's just part of the lab

procedures and not necessarily a part of the study. And, The metric was comparing participants who saw the coal-eating interaction to those who didn't see it, and who used more hot water. And there was a statistical significant result in those who saw the coal-eating using less hot water to wash their hands immediately after the study. So that was cool there was another study similar to that in which the researcher.

Pretended to spill a cup of water and see how many paper towels people use to clean up the spill after an experience where you embodying a lumberjack cutting down a tree with similar results so those are some of my favorites and and still some widely cited studies on how vr can actually make you behave differently in real life. Oh, wow. And some of that, you know, we talk about how making, as Jeremy Baylinson said in his book, making the impossible possible.

And the coal eating is so, it is so interesting. I want to shift, I want to shift to your job at SkillsVR. And one of the reasons why we connected through Joe was to get, you know, more insight into what SkillsVR does.

And so I browsed the website and one of the first things that I thought was really cool that I'd love for you to unpack is on your website for SkillsVR, you have this immersive learning journey and you list with icons, you know, step one sitting, step two crawling, then walking, then running, and then flying. And I love this evolution. So talk to me more about this and why you guys use this sort of evolution to describe how you deploy VR. Yeah, it's a good way to...

Make an analogy for the lengthy journey that takes place when an organization chooses to adopt VR and implement it at scale. We want to be transparent with our customers and our partners about what it really takes to support scalable VR implementation across these very large companies. We typically work with some of the largest companies in the world, and they have many hundreds or many thousands of locations and even more employees.

So anytime they adopt a new technology, and VR is relatively extremely new compared to some of the other technology that these companies use, you need to have a very careful and intentional plan of trialing the technology within your, not only the organizational parameters people-wise, but also your technology infrastructure. How are we going to maintain updates to these devices?

What do we have to go through together to ensure that everything is secure in the way that your organization optimization requires. We get kind of through those types of challenges or not necessarily challenges. We've set up the infrastructure in the first few phases, the sitting to crawling phases. We provide a lot of support so that these orgs can understand what they need to do in order to continue to use the technology and also to run pilots so that we can show the value of the VR training.

And then getting into the later stages of the journey is typically, you know, past the first year of engagement, we're getting into years two, three, four. That's when we start to. Pass along some of the responsibility to the customer in regards to, you know, now that you've worked with us for a little while, you can start to own a little bit more of the design.

Now you've started to understand more about how designing learning content in VR is different from designing it for other mediums, which is typically a big, you know, not a big, but it is a learning gap in many organizations because no one has used this technology before.

So you should have some time to learn and understand what is good for VR, what doesn't need to be in VR, how do you make use of the affordances of VR specifically, and then, you know, what does that mean in the context of designing the experiences.

And then eventually we hope that over time the customers become ready to really fully own their entire VR training infrastructure, the designs, even through to the building of the experiences, which is a technical skill that, again, most organizations don't have or they have very few parties who are capable of that. So you might imagine how long that would take to kind of get to that point organizationally.

Yeah, and I looked again, doing my homework and doing due diligence on your company, and you're starting to build out content libraries.

But that's a tricky journey. And you alluded to this already. You know, you've got various industries that you've listed on your site, like the airlines industry, the healthcare industry, financial sector, and then you've got content libraries. But the challenge, as you already talked about, is that, you know, VR isn't meant to be for every single part of a curriculum, especially hard skills.

So how do you guys decide then when you're starting to build out these content libraries for these various industries, you know, pick one if you want, like healthcare, how do you decide where to start and what to put into a content library? Yeah, it's a good question. And you're totally right. There's not always a need for VR in every type of training scenario. And certainly there's not a situation in which there's also not going to be

other types of training. VR is meant to augment existing training programs. Sometimes it can replace a piece of the curriculum for specific reasons and how we decide what topics to take on and what will be appropriate. Is a discovery process with the customer, of course. And we have to be very honest, too, when people bring us ideas that just don't need to be in VR or shouldn't be in VR.

You know, Jeremy Balanson is very clear and transparent about the fact that certain topics not only do not need to be in VR, but sometimes could actually be training the wrong things, Right. So in in hard skills, like you said, if if it's a very, very fine motor skill that someone needs to practice and we can't precisely replicate it using the VR controllers or even using, you know, now we have the ability to do XR and pass through.

Even in those cases, are you running the risk of training something slightly wrong because it's not exactly the real-world haptics or the real-world full multisensory experience? So we have to be cognizant of that. We can't always put everything in VR. That's why a lot of use cases are on the soft skills side or the adaptive skills side of things. But there are certain hard skills for which I think VR can augment the training. It certainly can't take over the entirety of the training.

However, for hard skills that don't require that very minute motor, multisensory experience of real life, there have been many trainings we've done in that area. Especially when part of the training goal is to just enhance the procedural aspects around hard skills training. I know that kind of slants away from the actual hard skill, but a lot of those cases we have encountered as well.

And I love how you, if we go back to your original evolution, which was sitting, crawling, walking, running, flying, as you're, I assume, working with a client in the sitting and maybe even the crawling phase, you may find out that it's more a leadership problem and not a training problem. So some organizations, you know, need to know that, you know, they want you to fix, you know, through training and, you know, professional development, fix some of the problems of their organization.

And they assume it's because they didn't learn it, but it could be a different reason altogether. So that's so good. Absolutely. And that does happen. I mean, we, in part of that discovery process, when we're really at any stage of the journey, if we're helping customers to design new pieces of content, we want to find out what the, what are the metrics that define success and, you know, what are the trends right now in the business?

Because if, for example, if a customer says, well, we really want employees to make less mistakes during this process right here, and then we ask them questions, we ask the employees themselves questions, and we find out they just don't have enough time. They feel like they don't have enough time to go through the process, and that's why they're making mistakes. I can't fix that with a VR training. I can't give you more time by, you know, just training you more.

And so now there could be, maybe we find out that there are instances where they're taking too long on something and we could train them to do it more quickly and then they have time. But really, if the consensus is that they just need a little bit more time to go more slowly through the process and then they make less mistakes, that's probably an easier fix than us building a VR training anyway, or a more effective, certainly a more effective one.

The other thing that I really liked that you said earlier was that you eventually want to give more agency to your customer.

And because of that, I saw that you guys have built out a content creation kit or CCK is what you call it. Tell us a little bit more about this where where the client can actually start to slowly learn to build their own content and not necessarily rely heavily on you guys to build it? Oh, yes. I mean, we certainly want to be the platform to support VR training at scale. And for the beginning stages of the customer journey, they certainly need help creating content.

And whether that's help from us or help from other third-party vendors, we still want to be able to be the platform for it. But these organizations are many, many times larger than SkillsVR. And so we couldn't possibly support all of their content needs forever. So part of the success of the journey is in giving them that agency and getting to a point where they can handle their own VR content creation.

They really are the experts in their business and their training needs so they should have the most agency over the content anyway the barrier of course has just been the newness of vr the you know, The amount of technical skills that are needed to develop not only the code behind the content, but also the 3D art or the animations or the spherical video productions, those are all very complicated and highly skilled areas of content creation.

Now, of course, as we go on with Gen AI and everything that's progressing in the tech space right now. Things will get easier. Things will get more efficient and faster. And we want to be part of that too. That's why we have our content creation kit.

And that's why we have the goal of handing that off to not only customers, but other partners that want to use it to speed up their content development and to have a consistent tool to work from, it's necessary for everyone to be able to make as much content as they like as quickly as possible, as efficiently as possible. Otherwise, you just have this device sitting around with very few pieces of content on it, which is not ideal.

Is the CCK, the content creation kit that you guys provide for customers, a low code, no code option, which means they don't have to rely on the minutiae of Unreal Engine or Unity to learn programming skills? Yes, it is a node-based interface that we've created. It is directly in Unity. And part of the reason we chose that pathway, I've worked at other companies who have created authoring tools for VR. A lot of our competitors create them.

What I've noticed is that many of the no-code options out there are very limited in functionality. And so I find that customers typically after, you know, after a little while of using the tool, they start asking, okay, but now I want to do this. Or why can't I do this? Why can't I do more? And so they become a bit frustrated with the limited functionality.

And so when we decided to build an authoring tool, We wanted to make sure that we're not limiting any of the functionality of Unity so that if you do have developers or even if a non-developer user upskills over time and wants to branch out of the kind of what we've provided in the node-based interface, then they can and they can do anything that Unity can do. And so for people who do not have development experience, which I am one of those people, I don't write code in Unity.

However, I do build experiences with CZK using the nodes, and it does take that upskilling in general. No matter what interface you're using, one of the challenges people have to overcome in their mindset is that translation from 2D media now to 3D media and making sure that you're kind of imagining the entire scene, developing the scene in a way that makes sense for the user.

And so conceptually, that can be some place where people need to learn, but typically come up to speed pretty quickly and get used to kind of navigating the 3D scene and building out the flow in that tooling. Do you get more requests in your crawl, walk, run, fly situation where they want to get to the fly, which I assume in the case of content creation is a fully interactive scene, as opposed to I might think of a walk as a 360 video.

Where do you get more requests? Do you get more requests where they're able to either with your help, with SkillsVR's help, or maybe holding hands where you're both helping each other, where the scene is fully interactive with physics and you can grab things, and when you grab them and place them somewhere else, something else happens, like the operation of pushing buttons on a machine, or do most customers start out at the 360 video stage, which is more a crawl?

Yeah, I would say it, the answer is it depends. And there's many factors on which it depends. I, the journey, the customer journey that we have is more about scaling and operationally to all locations and making sure that you are, you know, able to operate in a way that's efficient in regards to software updates, pushing content to all the headsets, managing the sessions, managing the data. And so when it comes to content, there's all varieties of requests that we get at any of the stages.

So some customers, in fact, are already in the later stages of their journey when they They come to work with us because they have been doing VR, possibly with help from other vendors in the past or even internally for many years now. Walmart, for example, had rolled out VR to all of their locations around 2017, 2018.

So they've got quite a few years under their belt and there are, you know, a handful or maybe a dozen of those type of companies out there that have already spent many years in the space. For those who are just starting out, you know, with the help of us or other content houses, yeah. They really have all the requests in the book. So it's just a matter of how much they want to do themselves or how much they'd like someone else to help them with.

A lot of people do rely on spherical video to get started on their own content creation journey. However, there's pros and cons there, of course, because once you've shot a video, it's very difficult to edit it.

So the maintenance of that over time is a little bit more difficult than if you're able to create cgi 3d scenes but certainly it's a great tool to get started i would say it has a lot of value in especially in certain use cases i want to pivot to a ted x talk that you did and i was able lucky enough to find it on youtube and it was a talk about of course vr and more importantly empathy And in your talk, you were advocating that the use of VR, of course, is great to cultivate compassion.

And you spoke a bit about that with your work at Stanford. But give us sort of a high level of what someone might take away from that great TEDx talk that you did. Oh, thank you. That's very kind. I think part of the talk was on the potential value of virtual reality for uniquely having a unique impact on behavior, pro-social behavior, based on the research that I conducted at the lab as well as many other researchers. I think another part of it was also about choices.

So where there is potential for good, there's also potential for not so good. And so how do you... You know, manage your own choices in this media-saturated world. I think, I still believe in the value and the potential of VR for encouraging empathy and pro-social behavior. I think designers and content creators need to be cognizant and careful such that their intentions are making it into the final design.

And what I mean by that is you can have the best of intentions and actually produce the opposite effect. And we've seen that in some of the research studies around embodying others in VR.

And the hope has always been that by giving someone a first-person experience, letting them be in the body of someone else and experience something from their perspective, that people will come away more empathetic and will come away with different answers to these values metrics that are widely used in the research space to evaluate your empathy for others. However, there have been studies in which that was the expectation, but the findings were opposite of what was expected.

So embodying someone and experiencing something from their perspective can actually push you further into sort of a cognitive dissonance that really impacts your, you know, the empathy metrics in a what would seem a negative way. And so that's where we learn that the specific design, the way that you approach the content, It matters very, very, very much for the results you're trying to achieve.

And so, yeah, I think my talk definitely mentioned some of the experiences that produced some really positive and uplifting results. And I think there have been even more of those produced over the past several years to support that argument. But there's really no regulation on VR content right now, not in a major way. And so who should be regulating that content, making sure that it's not having an unintended negative effect or even an intended negative effect?

And how do we make sure that we're not creating that type of content? That's still a question. Yeah, I can see like standards on anything, whether it's music, or in our case, VR should be prevalent, especially if it's affecting us in a way that.

You know, changes behavior, as you've talked about. I feel slightly disheartened, though, because most organizations, especially when they're trying to see whether learning has occurred over a period of time, they're always trying to hang their hat on metrics that aren't necessarily feelings or empathy related, because they tend to see this as mushy or subjective.

And they always They want metrics that are more quantitative, like it saved us X number of dollars in our organization, or it sped up the time it took our employees to do a procedure. Yet, as soon as we start to talk about, well, what about the feelings? And shouldn't that be also taken into account? They tend to devalue that.

Is that what you're finding with the work that you do? Yeah, I will say that it was disheartening for me to learn as well over the years that what bubbles up to the top of the conversation is always the ROI, the return on investment monetarily. So, you know, how much time did we save? How much money did we save? You know, how did this make money for us or save money for us? And so, but as a business, I understand that's an important factor.

Another thing I was disheartened by initially was, you know, the metrics around learning not necessarily being relevant to whether people actually learned. Right. More importance being placed on things like butts in seats type metrics, right? Did they do it or did they not do it? Whereas I care very deeply and I'm very much a nerd about the analytics coming out of these experiences.

How can we prove that people really learned this skill by the way they behaved, by the way they answered questions? How can we show progress over time and not just a one and done experience. That's also an area that needs some work in the industry. However, I will say there's some positive aspects as well. So even though some of the folks that we talk to, it's their job to ask those questions.

What's the monetary value? What's the, you know, are people, the most important thing is if people are doing the training or not. And that doesn't mean they don't care about the other aspects. And so as a vendor, what we can do is prioritize those things ourselves so that we're ensuring that when we're helping you design VR training for your organization, we know that these metrics are the ones that will lead us to being able to show learning has occurred.

And every time I develop a program for these organizations, I always include sentiment and engagement metrics in addition to the other types of metrics that they might want to track because they've been extremely valuable additions to the conversation whether people asked for them or not. So when I can show that 96% of people agree that they really enjoyed this training experience. You know, organizations really like to see that.

Even if they didn't ask me to ask that question, it has led to a lot of conversations around, well, if your employees are really enjoying this training experience and they're really feeling engaged by it, it's likely that they're going to be happier with their overall, let's say it's an onboarding training, with their overall onboarding training, perhaps that makes them more likely to stay longer.

Now, we would have to track a lot more data over time to prove that, but it's certainly something you could see could be true and that I would love to track the data for over time in order to prove it. But we do know that it's net good for people to enjoy and connect to their training. And so we as a company, SkillsVR, can have that as a tenant of ours no matter what, even if it's not part of the initial conversations with the customer.

And they are persuaded by it as well. They care about it as well, even if that's not the first thing that we talk about in terms of value.

Not only that, but there's a great book by a UK gentleman, Nick Shackleton-Jones, and his book is How People Learn. And he argues and makes a case for the fact that it's all about how we feel. And the reason that we have things in our long-term memory is because of our approach to how that felt and that feelings are, you know, in his argument, 90-some percent of why we learn and remember things.

And so it's so hard in a world that gets stuck on quantitative that, you know, we can't just deny that ability.

That is so, it's such a good point, and it reminds me a little bit of, tangentially, of... A famous phrase from a communication and media scholar, Marshall McLuhan, I think is his name, who said, the medium is the message, which by that he really meant the way something is delivered, the way a message is delivered to us really makes a difference in how we perceive it and how we take on that information and how it impacts us. And the same is true of training.

And I think it's another way you could think about why certain training formats are not very effective, the feeling aspect, the connection aspect. Because many statements are often made about, you know, let's say e-learning or even just a PowerPoint presentation that someone's delivering. Lots of people will make blanket statements about how it's because it's not experiential enough. It's because it's not multi-sensory. It's because it's not using multimedia.

It would be more impactful if you add this or that. And that's why maybe VR or some other type of format would be better. However, earlier in my career, I got to go actually participate in a lot of the original trainings for which we were augmenting the program with VR. And so I've sat through many, many hours of different formats of training. And while a PowerPoint presentation...

May not be that engaging. I've sat through orientations with a PowerPoint in which the, facilitator is so good and so engaging as a person and as a teacher and a deliverer of information that everyone loves that training course. And it wasn't about whether it was a PowerPoint or not. They loved the person delivering it. So that specific instance of that PowerPoint may have been pretty effective because the teacher made it that way.

However, we know that most people are not very good at delivering PowerPoint presentations in an effective learning manner. And so it's not necessarily the media itself, but it does make a big difference. And it makes a big difference whether people connect with the presentation, connect with the messaging, and really feel like they, not necessarily, you don't have to enjoy it, but you do have to feel like, I feel good about having learned that. I feel like that was a good use of my time.

Oftentimes, I think the downfall of e-learning is that it's just become this required thing that I have to do, and I don't really think it's going to be valuable to me, and so I'm just going to click through it. And I'm just going to, you know, play Candy Crush on my phone while I click the buttons forward and not really pay attention. And so if that's the way people are approaching it, it doesn't matter how good you make the e-learning, it's just going to not be very effective.

Yeah. I love, again, I love that the medium is the message. That's beautiful. Beautiful. I'm mindful of time and always leave sort of the last question as something that's very open-ended. And it's, you know, is there anything else maybe that we haven't talked about that you feel like educators or people that are excited to try and dive into VR might want to know? Oh, sure.

I think anyone who is interested in trying out VR for educational purposes, I think the really important part of getting into that is choosing a use case and choosing a topic that makes sense for VR. are. And that can be challenging, but there are certain use cases that I recommend in general around. In the soft skills realm, of course, as we know in real life, role play and other types of soft skills methodology for training are not always effective.

Because of the format and because people don't feel comfortable or they don't like to do it. And so VR presents this psychologically safe space where you can participate in those activities and not have to feel kind of awkward or strange about it, at least less so when you're participating in VR. And so within that realm, there are so many things that can be trialed as a first start into your educational VR journey. And then it's also about who is this applicable for?

I always encourage folks, even if you have a very good idea for VR, if you can only educate or train a subset of the population that you work with, then maybe go for something that's a little more widely applicable. Because some of the mistakes I've seen in organizations that have trialed VR and then give up after the pilot, that they chose a use case that was not impactful enough for their wider population.

And even though it might have been a good training, it just it needs to be adopted it needs to be seen by anyone who can see it and so make sure that you're being inclusive about your your topic choice certainly those are two great tips shawnee thanks so much for coming on the show and i wish you and skills vr all the best as the year progresses and things get busier and busier in the in the realm of learning learning. Thank you so much, Craig. Thanks for having me. Awesome. Bye for now. Music.