S1 E15 Virtual Reality

Episode Audio

Sara Johnston shares what she’s been learning about Virtual Reality (VR) in the L&D space.

Connect with Sara on LinkedIn.

Transcript:

The following transcript was auto-generated and may contain typos or spelling errors.

Amy Petricek

Welcome to the share what you learned Podcast. I'm Amy Petricek, a learning enthusiast and the host of the show. The share what you learn podcast is designed for learning professionals to share something they're learning in the field of instructional design. Today, I'm talking to Sarah Johnson about VR. Hi, Sara, welcome to the show.

Sara Johnston

Thank you.

Amy Petricek

Can you tell us a little bit about who is Sarah Johnson? What she all about? Where does she we're all the things.

Sara Johnston

So I'm Sara, I'm COO at Motiv.io. We are a VR platform company. So we built software to help learning designers create VR, I come from kind of an interesting, mixed background, I started my career as an educator. And then I moved into being a UX designer. So every day day in and day out at work, I'm kind of living and breathing, what it means to educate people well in using VR as a medium, but also really deliver top quality VR experiences.

Amy Petricek

I love your background educator background where you really understand how to teach people things, the UX where you understand the best way for someone to absorb content or access content, and then this VR would a perfect marriage of all of your experience into your current role. How exciting.

Sara Johnston

Yeah, it's kind of come together, almost by happenstance, but certainly, you know, loving what I'm doing

Amy Petricek

one of those did a good job. If only I would have planned this from like the first get go. Yeah, exactly. So you mentioned that you work for motive.io, or motive IO, what's what's the preferred name,

Sara Johnston

either either, or we usually say motive IO.

Amy Petricek

Okay, so you work for motive IO. And in Episode Five, we had your pal distri Hildenbrand on and he talked a lot about the differences between AR and VR, which if you haven't listened to that episode, listeners, I highly recommend because Desarae is just a wonderful wealth of knowledge and offered some great insight into that. But today, Sarah, you're going to get in the weeds with VR. So tell us a little bit about VR and what makes good VR versus bad VR. You know, we've

Sara Johnston

really, really spent a ton of time especially me as a UX professional kind of digging in and looking at what makes for a wonderful VR experience. And it's always interesting to encounter people who have very negative feelings about VR, generally, they will have encountered an experience that was what I would say, like, quote, unquote, bad VR, and only labeling things, but and so I'm just gonna sort of give you an example, I was at a trade show a few years back, and somebody had a VR demo. And I tried it out, I think it was on an Oculus go. So it's a little bit of a lower end, headset, and I I put it on. And instantly, I was sort of surrounded by what I think was maybe a store but I was kind of wedged in the middle of a clothing rack. And there was sort of a way oversized t shirt to my left, and I had no idea what I was going to be doing. So I felt a little lost. And the entire time I was I was very conscious of wanting to get out of that experience. That to me was not a great VR experience. I felt lost, I wasn't sure what what was meant to be happening. And it didn't feel immersive a real at all, because all I could focus on was how strange everything was. So to counter that I'll sort of give an example of an experience I had one of the very first VR simulations I ever created. And I can't take credit for the art. So I don't want to sound like I'm bragging. But we created a hospital simulation. And when we ran the doctors through it for the first time, we hadn't actually gotten around to sort of animating our nurse very well. So she was quite still she kind of was standing there with her arms crossed, and the doctor put the headset on. And he instantly forgot about the outside world and started to interact and completely, you know, got immersed in trying to help the patient. She was in distress trying to deliver a baby. And he kept you know, sort of barking orders at the nurse and she wasn't responding because we hadn't programmed her to and he got really frustrated. He kept saying if you're not going to help you have to get out. Anyway, it was so immersive for him. I mean, I he didn't enjoy because he was mad at the nurse. But it's a good example of how if VR is sort of done really well. The point is that now you are in an alternate reality and you are comfortable interacting because you feel familiar in your environment. So that's kind of an anecdotal, you know, example of good versus bad. One other thing I would say about VR that's less than effective is sometimes people forget to use the medium. So they'll take the time to render a really great scene and put people in it and then just put a bunch of information up on the screen like a slideshow or a video. And I could do that without my headset on. So you really want to make sure that you're using the medium, you know, for what it's good for.

Amy Petricek

I think you've highlighted some really insightful things here. In regards to the first example, where you were kind of highlighting the extremities or the differences of VR, I, what I kept thinking was, oh, the t shirt, and like the clothes rack analogy was, there's so much distraction, there's so much lack of clarity, I think you said something like, why am I here? Like, what am I doing some something along those lines, instead of even though the doctor was upset in the other example, there was some clarity around this, I'm here to help deliver this baby. And this nurse should be helping me. And that really clarified a lot of things in my brain. So thank you for I can tell you're the expert, right? You're like there's two ends of the spectrum. Here you go. Yeah, I also want to talk about your UX background, because in my mind, I could see a lot of overlap between UX and VR. Yeah, so the

Sara Johnston

really interesting thing, and definitely, sort of one of the things I needed to grapple with as I was changing from designing UX for 2d screen to sort of a whole 3d environment. And I sort of full disclosure, I wouldn't say I'm a 3d UX expert, but I have learned a lot. And I think the biggest takeaway is that it's really important to remember that you can't control where your user is looking. So on a 2d screen, I've got, you know, nice shiny buttons and text and things. But I know that that's where the focus is going to be. Whereas in 3d, somebody might be looking 180 degrees from where you expect. So you want to make sure that when you're delivering especially feedback, it comes in several forms. So you might put up a text message, but you would probably also include a voiceover that says, Good job, as well as potentially sort of a time to say, yes, you

Amy Petricek

completed it, because maybe someone's looking a different direction.

Sara Johnston

Exactly. So they might if you just put a text up to say, yes, that was right. Or this is the answer from the person that you're speaking to, or whatever, you hope they don't miss it, because they're engaged in the way that they should be. But you really can't plan for that. So you want to plan for the fact that feedback is delivered, almost always in three or more ways.

Amy Petricek

You named audio, you named potentially text, what would be my brains trying to imagine what would be like a third way.

Sara Johnston

So a third way could be some sort of symbolism in the scene, you know, arrows or, you know, some iconography or you know, things like that. There's really like, it would be nice if I could inject a smell in there, something like that, but I can. So really, you're you're working hard to engage the eyes and ears, you know, and so potentially something that's animated, I mean, the other thing that's that's wonderful about VR is that you can actually pick this stuff up and it reacts the way it wouldn't in real life. So, you know, if if you are meant to be opening a container, when you're successful, the container will be open. So that in itself is sort of self reporting feedback.

Amy Petricek

That makes a whole lot of sense. So when you're building VR, is there anything different that you have to do in preparation, specifically, anything tips or tricks, I think you bring a lot of insight to the table. And maybe for people who are newer to VR development, I'm sure there's some approaches or ways of thinking that are really helpful.

Sara Johnston

Yeah, so the good news is, I think one of our sort of core principles that we come back to when we're designing experiences in VR is something that a lot of the learning community will already be familiar with. And that is the action mapping process that Kathy Moore has made famous. So she's done a ton of amazing work on kind of digging in and figuring out first of all, leading with the learning goals, and setting those up front and determining why we're training, what we're training, and then with those goals in mind, laying out the procedure to teach to those goals, as opposed to kind of getting distracted. So we always start from that place. Even though when she designed action mapping. It wasn't meant for VR, it really, really maps well to designing VR scenarios. From there, we do us a specific storyboard sort of outline, where we don't just, you know, sort of describe what the steps are. But we also make sure to note what is the user seeing, what are they doing, potentially, and what are they hearing so that we remember, you know, how are we engaging all of their senses and then what is the feedback at each step? So we sort of plan for engaging you know, more than just the eyes

Amy Petricek

so it sounds when I think of Some of the other types of learning experiences I've built as an instructional designer, I would say largely, I'm probably just focusing on visual display, and maybe some feedback in some way. Like it's not as complex. But it sounds like I'm thinking back to that your thought earlier of having multiple forms of feedback, but you're also when you're designing, you have to think about those and take those into account and plan those as well.

Sara Johnston

Exactly. And when we're working with SMEs at different companies, who will eventually sort of take on their own VR development, that's always our our goal at motive, we put them through that exercise, you know, we'll often will get sort of a Word doc that says, Okay, here's the scenario. And then we go back, and we say, okay, if I'm doing step a, what does it look like, when I wipe the floor? Is it still a little bit wet? You know, do I need to take another step? Is there any job aids that I need to sort of consult? And where should those be, and you know, so, so really kind of digging in at that early stage and thinking through every thing at every step that that the user is going to encounter?

Amy Petricek

Definitely sounds more complex to me, like thinking five steps ahead, not just like one or two, but five steps ahead. It's true.

Sara Johnston

And and I mean, you know, it's an iterative process for sure. So you're never going to get it right the very first time none of us do. But you can see pretty quickly, it's, it's quite cool to sort of create a little bit and then put the headset on and try it. And you know, instantly, okay, this feels right, and this does not. And so, you know, the other sort of aspect of designing learning for VR is that you can't just like sort of do it all at once. And then hope for the best to put the headset on at the end, you really do have to be testing and iterating, pretty much with every step that you create, to make sure that it it feels like it would in real life.

Amy Petricek

I remember in my conversation with destiny that he said sometimes he uses his children that Here, put this headset on and then they're like, Why won't this thing pick up? noted, go back and fix that.

Sara Johnston

No, exactly. I mean, it's perfect. Because the other the other thing is you can you can easily get caught up in like moving quickly past things that don't work, because you've gotten used to them. And then you know, put a family member for me, it's usually my husband, poor man. Why can't you pick up that wrench? But it is very, you know, that's the other thing you've got to run? Sort of, yeah, 10 plus people through it to make sure that it works the way that it should.

Amy Petricek

So if someone's wanting to learn more about VR, where are some places they might go to learn more? I'm thinking like, maybe classes, maybe books, maybe webinars, what would you recommend for someone early on in their VR process,

Sara Johnston

you know, it's a field that is still evolving, as we all know, and so people are still kind of finding their way. So I wouldn't say that there are a ton of sort of like I can go to, I was going to use a Canadian bookstore, that won't work. I think Amazon and find a book on on creating VR, it's not far enough along yet for that. But what I would say is the people who have been creating VR for a lot longer than people in the learning industry, or those in the gaming industry. And so I would say that the very best thing to do is to go and pick up an Oculus quest, it's a couple 100 bucks if you can afford it, and just play and I would specifically call out the games that are made by ALC Owlchemy labs it spelled with an O WL l like the bird and they create vacation simulator and Job Simulator. And I it's, it's our opinion, we actually go back to those two games incessantly. Because in our minds, they have really, really mastered user experience in VR, you there's almost not a moment that you're in there. And you know what to do immediately without a lot of instruction. They also have some really good talks on YouTube about creating really good VR so while they have a gaming focus their work in our mind sort of a mode of they're like our heroes, so they they do they do really amazing work. So that's that's one place to to sort of start. The other would be to reach out to those of us who are building VR, grab a coffee, let's have a chat. We also have a you know, shameless plug, we have done a lot of writing about creating learning for VR and sort of posted it in several places on our website, I put together a learning design best practices guide last year, we have a copy of the storyboard that we use. We're all for sort of sharing what we've learned so far. And I would definitely tap DUSTRY or me for sort of more details and information. Yeah, and we've got a blog that takes up lots of topics on on designing VR as well. So

Amy Petricek

I should have guessed that you all would have content out in the world and be a willing participant of sharing that learning but I also love that you said we should play more VR games that feels important. Everyone, did you hear that? Go get your Oculus? Play some games?

Sara Johnston

No, absolutely. I mean, you've got to, you know, you've got to be a convert, I think before you're kind of willing to really dig in and create it. But I can promise you, if you try Job Simulator, you will have a very good VR experience. And even if you're a skeptic, now, you'll see that it can be very transformative in in sort of the way that you can experience not the world, the virtual world. Yeah. Which is

Amy Petricek

kind of weird. That's kind of the path we're living in an Oculus, or is this real life? I don't know. Thank you. I love all of those resources. And we'll certainly, I will try and ping my partner to get an Oculus. And but in the meantime, I will check out your website. And we'll be sure to include that in the show notes as well, for people who are interested in exploring that further.

Sara Johnston

Perfect. Yeah, you just go to the resources section on our website, and we've got everything there. So

Amy Petricek

well, I'm ready for the Rapid Round. Sarah, the questions I get to ask all of my guests. So I'm going to start out today with learning is and you get to fill in the rest.

Sara Johnston

My answer is essential for growth.

Amy Petricek

When you're mustering up the courage to learn something new, What song do you put on? So

Sara Johnston

I have teenagers, so it changes from week to week because I am exposed to new music all the time. But right now, it's actually a bit of an obscure one worked out by Jurassic five and Dave Matthews. Yeah, I'm a Dave Matthews Fan. And so when I heard this actually, embarrassingly on my peloton. I was like, I like that song, added it to our family playlist and now it's a fav

Amy Petricek

thanks for sharing I love checking out new songs so noted we'll check that one out. Didn't have to pay for the peloton to get that advice you're asked to do a brand new task with a skill set you do not yet have Where do you turn

Sara Johnston

so I am very traditional in the sense I actually sort of wish you know I could still go to the library and take out the card catalog but definitely Google you know I feel like that's a given but I also if there's a book about it, I will buy the book and read it i i really like text on a page that's the way that I sort of consume information best

Amy Petricek

or you a highlighter and a post it note or to

Sara Johnston

post it but I can't bring myself to write in a book

Amy Petricek

that's why yes, there's all different kinds of book readers out there some are like mark it up and others are like can't Yeah, no posts galore for sure. I feel like I know deep into your soul now. Sarah with without learning, there is no growing what would be the best way for people to be in contact with you after the show? And or is there anything you or your company motivi Oh is up to that you'd love to give a shout out for

Sara Johnston

I mean, we would just love for you to come by the website, book a meeting or a demo to sort of take a look at what we're up to with our platform because we really do feel like we've finally created a tool that allows true l&d professionals to control the training content, which has been sort of elusive in the past with VR. And so you know, we're trying to get the right tools in the hands have the right professionals to create really fantastic training. So always happy to show you what we're up to to contact me directly. You can hit me up on LinkedIn or you can email me sarah@motive.io

Amy Petricek

Thanks so much, Sarah for sharing all about virtual reality with us today. Be sure to check out her company@motive.io I also want to give a shout out to you my listeners for learning with us today. Until next time, stay open, receptive and kind.