The end of June signifies the end of the 2nd quarter, and half, of 2022, so it’s time to look back at what we’ve been up to at the studio these past three months.
After many new starters in the first quarter of the year, we’ve been busy onboarding them and bedding in with production and processes. However as we prepare to wave a temporary goodbye to Ellie, our Production Assistant who is shortly headed off on maternity leave, we welcomed Michael into the fold as our new Production Quality Assistant. With a solid background in QA and running VR cafes, we’re looking forward to what he’ll bring to our production environment moving forwards.
As part of our ongoing desire to educate and inform those of you interested in the immersive learning and technology industry, we published more of our monthly “Reality Check” newsletters, for April, May and June. If you haven’t signed up to receive the best curated monthly news in your inbox, you can do so here.
Learning Technologies 2022 – oh boy! What a show. May saw the return of the in-person event to ExCeL London after a two year hiatus due to COVID and it did not disappoint! We made the decision this year to have a booth built for us (thanks Creative8!) and it was a joy to be able to rock up, setup, do the show for two days and leave without the additional stress and effort of having to lug all the gear up in a van, pack it down again at the end etc. Plus, it looked (in our honest opinion) a-m-a-z-i-n-g!
It was great to reconnect in person with many existing clients and associates within the learning industry and of course, meet many new people and talk about our approach to creating meaningful immersive learning experiences. This effort was bolstered by our Director of Learning, Sophie, and independent academic researcher, Lynda Joy Gerry, having a talk at theatre 11 behind our booth about the outcomes of the study we had carried out into one of our projects for Lloyds Banking Group, ‘Hear to Listen”. You can find out about the research, read the paper and watch the talk on our blog post ‘Turning your learners into activists‘.
Elsewhere, due to travel troubles and our inability to bend time and space, our Immersive Partnerships Director, Sam, gave a number of virtual talks, workshops and inclusion in panel discussions for Ithra Creative Solutions, Into Games, Eschede University and AIXR.
Our programme of special guests being invited to come speak to the team each month continues. This past quarter we have been joined by Dr Sylvia Pan (Associate Professor of VR @ Goldsmiths Uni) in April, Lynda Joy Gerry (independent academic researcher) in May and Aki Jarvinen (Lead Technologist of Immersive @ Digital Catapult) in June. These continue to be popular with the team, generating a lot of discussion during and after, helping us keep our minds fresh on a Wednesday morning. If you are reading this and are interested in speaking to the studio team about your work, research or thinkings about a relevant aspect of immersive technologies and learning, please do get in touch.
Leading up to the end of the first half of the year continues to see the studio busy with a range of projects across a selection of clients in development.
■■■■■■■ – ■■■■■■ : team-based leadership training for Quest and PICO Neo 3 Pro VR devices
■■■■■■■ – ■■■■■■■■■ : team-based leadership training for Quest VR devices
Lloyds Banking Group – Frameworks : a content development tool for the L&D team to quickly and easily create web-based immersive learning materials without the need for a developer.
Lloyds Banking Group – Leadership Diagnostic Tool : a web-based application that helps LBG leaders determine their learning needs with guided direction to appropriate follow-up content.
Southern Water – Pollution Response : immersive training experience for Quest VR around field team time-critical activities required to resolve pollution events
St. James’s Place – Immersive Roleplay : additional Quest VR-based interpersonal soft-skills immersive learning experience scenarios to support the SJP academy programme suite for training agents in customer care and rapport building.
Vodafone – DriVe Safe : additional minigames and localisation translations for the widely adopted mobile serious learning game available on iOS and Android.
Frameworks : We’ve continued to work on our Unity development tool for rapid creation of immersive learning content for browser-based experiences. With realtime updates displayed from a suite of screen and interactions types, it provides the power to enable clients to design, develop and deliver their own innovative training content at reduced costs.
Loco Dojo Unleashed : Our multiplayer social VR game for Quest and Quest 2, continues to do well, with the first big update going out in May, the “VIP Party Update”. This added Quest Party support at an OS-level, making it easier to get into games with your friends, as well as adding gold VIP animal masks to unlock to show you really have the skills when meeting foes online for multiplayer.
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That wraps up the second quarterly review of 2022. As we continue into the rest of the year, many of our clients have matured beyond the pilot, proof-of-concept stage to test innovation in L&D with immersive technologies. Many are now working with us to enable innovation to become business-as-usual operations for them to control with our frameworks tool. Get in touch to find out more about this and how you can bring innovation to your L&D teams without the need for vendors.
Elsewhere we are busy working on our next update for Loco Dojo Unleashed, which will see a pass-and-play local multiplayer mode added. For Q3’22 review, we’ll have news of a host of other projects to share and perhaps even some award nominations for finalist shortlists…
We’re always happy to talk to you about how immersive technologies can engage your employees and customers. If you have a learning objective in mind, or simply want to know more about emerging technologies like VR, AR, or AI, send us a message and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.