Are Shared Virtual Experiences The Future Of Meetings And Work? – Forbes

Toyota is a global corporation with over 350,000 employees, almost $300 billion in revenue, and manufacturing or sales outposts in over 140 countries globally. How do you connect, develop, and train a company of this geographical diversity and size when even the Olympics will be held without foreign visitors this year?

Perhaps in virtual reality.

According to The Leadership Network, results of training in VR include 15 times more knowledge retained at 72% less cost and 98% less time wasted in travel. TLN recently signed a deal with the automobile manufacturing giant to teach its executive masterclass Leading the Toyota Way in virtual reality.

So I recently took a tour to experience it myself.

First impressions: its nothing like the vision that Microsoft has unleashed on the world in Microsoft Mesh, which is a seamless blending of the real and the virtual. Microsofts gorgeous cinematic video introduction of Mesh makes digital connection in mixed reality seem rich with detail and context and metadata: capable of much more than purely physical engagement today. Its sensual in a very baseline understanding of that word: it engages the senses.

Are Oculus Quest, VR, and Microsoft Hololens the future of remote meetings and work?

Its important to note, however that the Mesh highlight reel video is mostly that: a vision.

TLNs Gemba VR technology, developed for Toyota and other global brands, is very different. For starters, its shipped and currently in use right now. Its available via a $250 VR headset, the Oculus Quest, not a $3,500 HoloLens 2. Also, its less about rich details of a human-like avatar and more about the simpler act of telepresence and engagement with others.

That is a kind way to say it.

The hard way of saying it is that in the Gemba technology, people look like animated boxes, one step up from stick figures, with floating heads and somewhat expressive hands.

Thats kind of the point, says Nathan Robinson, CEO of TLN.

Seeing more photo-realistic avatars can be distracting, Robinson told me during a demo for the TechFirst podcast. Also, weve heard that some feel they get treated more equally this way.

Thats completely understandable in the era of heightened awareness of sexual and racial bias and harassment. Just as some female computer gamers find they get treated very differently when they use a typically male avatar and name, its not surprising even if it is disappointing that the same can be true in corporate and business environments. Also, lets be honest: if youre bringing 35 executives together for a business meeting in VR ... do you want to have them spending 20 minutes first customizing an avatar with colors, hairstyles, and shapes? I cant even build a Facebook avatar I like, and executives trend older than the general workforce population, with likely less experience in VR, and less ability to use technology. I could see a meeting starting off as a disaster as half the attendees struggle to finish customization, and others remain unhappy with rushed choices of clothing or eye color or nose type.

A scene inside a breakout room in TLN's Gemba technology. You can use tables, whiteboards, sticky ... [+] notes, and more in a persistent environment.

You arrive in Gemba at a gathering point. TLN calls it the lounge.

This is where they join, says Robinson. We can interact with spaces and we can ... have a quick chat in here, but this is just designed to open up and and introduce the world of Gemba to everybody.

You get used to the controls and environment in the lounge, including how to move around the virtual space.

Anyone who owns and uses an Oculus Quest will find it incredibly easy, and thats probably the headset that more people are familiar with than just about any other. Its also the VR headset that Walmart chose for its virtual reality training program, buying 17,000 units to distribute.

From the lounge you teleport to an island. Different groups and different companies can have their own islands, and you literally walk up to a teleport station and transfer over, or a group leader can magic you away. Theres a lecture hall, there are breakout rooms, and there are virtual analogs for paper, notes, whiteboards, and pretty much everything else you need for collaboration.

Speakers in the lecture hall can bring up slides on an apparently ginormous screen up front with basically any digital content you can image: videos, decks, websites, notes, and so on. Listeners can sit in various seats to be farther or closer, and your proximity to others impacts what you can hear and what you cant, just like real life.

Web banner of young african man wearing virtual reality headset. VR concept.

It's all designed to be as intuitive as possible, says Robinson. It might feel complicated at the beginning, but there are essentially two buttons. One that you click with your index finger on your left hand, and one that you click on with your middle finger on your right hand. And that's it.

You can also bring in 3D models and examine them together, so you could use this technology for more than a group chat or big meeting: you could use it for interactive design sessions. Engineers, for example, could share engine designs, explode them visually, and essentially walk inside them. Dont get too excited, however: this is Oculus VR, and what it gives in cheap and accessible hardware, it takes away in fine resolution. While the Quest 2 has a resolution of 1,832 1,920 pixels per eye, in practice its as not as clear on small details as that might imply.

For most meetings, however, its more than enough.

And, if you lean into the technology, it provides a much richer experience of being there than watching on a two-dimensional screen. It also enables much better workplace collaboration because youre in a VR space: its not your typical computer or smartphone where a notification is always buzzing away, demanding your attention, interrupting your flow, and distracting you from the meeting.

Would it result in learning 15X the knowledge compared to a traditional remote training or collaboration experience?

I dont know about that. Thats a tall order.

What I do think is that it would retain my attention, at least in bursts of 90 to 120 minutes, much better than a typical remote conference would. And that might indeed make for a much higher level of learning, simply thanks to better, deeper, and longer engagement.

Ultimately, I think we want something like Mesh. Here can be anywhere, Microsoft says and Covid taught us over the past year. Mesh will enable high-fidelity interactions and collaboration, at a cost of high-quality equipment and a learning curve. But Mesh isnt a hardware platform: its a platform specification. It runs on HoloLens, but it isnt limited to HoloLens.

And that means that other hardware, including Oculus, phones, tablets, PCs, and interfaces we havent yet thought of can participate in Mesh. Or, they can participate in whatever technology or sets of technologies win.

That might be Mesh. That might be Gemba. And that might be some combination or synthesis of the two, like different worlds in Ready Player One.

One thing we know: the future of work and meetings isnt what it used to be.

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Are Shared Virtual Experiences The Future Of Meetings And Work? - Forbes