Make Real – A Primer

It’s often confusing when shopping around for learning & development content creators, especially if you’re looking to break moulds and increase the perception of your company leading in innovation, whilst also keeping a firm hand on logic and reasoned design, towing the line of what’s known to work (because you’ve always done it that way, right?) safe and accepted by the higher ups.

Immersive learning experiences and the development of is a rapidly growing area and many companies are offering services to create content, but how to choose between them, what differentiates their capabilities and why do we feel we offer a balanced approach to help you achieve your lofty goals whilst keeping your, and our feet on the ground?

Therefore we thought we should create a single go to piece to reference, covering our heritage, approach and external perceptions to help you feel confident that we’ll provide you with the most cost / time effective outcomes whilst hitting those all important learning and business objectives.

The sectors we typically work within include AEC, utilities services, transportation (all in a group we call Built Environment), automotive, healthcare and finance, within the enterprise side and consumer gaming and out-of-home location-based experiences for the other 30% of focus. However our approach allows us to work with you to determine best fit and use cases for your learning & development needs and where, how and why you should apply a particular immersive technology.

The Team

Our studio team background is from key pillars of industry that we feel combines to create a capability map that’s fairly unique in the immersive space. From full flight simulators to games and immersive content studios to traditional learning companies, we provide experience and knowledge in areas such scale, enterprise solutions, emerging technologies, learning design and the engrossing fun factor. It is likely, via the big names in elearning, simulation and interactive content, you have experienced content that our team has been involved with prior to joining our studio.

As we grow, from operations, client services and business development, to UX, learning and interaction design, to frontend, backend and multi-user development, whether it be desktop, mobile, web, 2D, 3D, VR, AR, 360º video or somewhere in-between, across a range of look and feels, from the hyper-realistic realtime simulation environments to the abstract, our experience and knowledge caters to a range of outcomes and objectives.

Our Approach

Having worked on content previously elsewhere is all very well, but why come to us then? All of our team believe in our integrity-based approach to design, development and deployment, and our desire to push the boundaries of what is possible with emerging immersive technologies, whilst ensuring that we are asking ourselves why every day, to ensure we are leading with validated use cases, not just the technologies.

They all believe that when applied correctly, immersive technologies can bring about impactful, positive change and make learning better than what is currently available elsewhere; they also understand that sometimes a solution requires something more traditional but that doesn’t mean our unique experience and capabilities cannot enhance it further, through incorporating levels of immersion beyond the atypical.

Now the hype is fading and people can take off their shades to look seriously at immersive technologies, we understand the importance of measuring impact and outcomes, ensuring that metrics and data show the ROI to hit those KPIs critical to business success and continued involvement. Having deployed over 75+ projects over the last decade, we have certainly learned some lessons along the way, taking that knowledge into future work efficiencies.

However all that is achieved without burning out the team or expecting them to work long hours, forgoing their own quality time with family, friends, pets and their own interests. We won’t ask the design and creative team to create concept pitches, requested at the last minute meaning a weekend has to be sacrificed, when we won’t be able to present their ideas. We won’t ask the development team to work endlessly into the night to make sure the deployment is ready for a Friday. We believe in a positive work//life balance and that our best work is created when the team is refreshed, stress-free and happy to be in the studio. Our consistently happy clients can only vouch for that we’re doing it right.

Our Clients

Since the rise of the 4th wave of Virtual Reality in 2012 and beyond, we have worked with enterprise partners and clients of all sizes nationwide and globally. We are prepared to and have taken the time to work with department leads and engage key stakeholders to ensure we educate and create internal champions for the possibilities of what immersive technologies can offer.

We are acutely aware of the risks of taking on unknown vendors and providers and work diligently with teams to ensure our processes, practises and documentation meets the highest standards and needs of all departments involved in onboarding and deployment, no matter the scale; proof of concept, pilot, phased rollout, we can work with and guide you through each and every stage confidently.

This is why many of our clients become partners and continue to work with us beyond the initial project, to develop further phases of deployment and scale, increasing complexity and objectives or requesting repeat work to tackle new problems and learning challenges.

The Challenge

We absolutely love a challenge, whether it be reducing cost or time or complexity or integration of one seemingly unconnected technology or platform with another. From power station control rooms to operating high-end PCs in the middle of a field, ensuring robustness means 5 years of operations without fallover or deploying to unknown devices on the other side of the world, nothing so far has been too much to handle.

External Perceptions

Through our external partnerships and reach within the immersive technology communities, we have become trusted developers for all the major hardware platforms, from Microsoft to Google, Oculus to HTC Vive and many more development environments and tools alike. Via education and evangelising the benefits and realistic pitfalls of the technologies, we are regularly asked to speak at and present our findings, lessons learned and best practices at conferences worldwide, often enabling our clients and partners to have stage time to share their experiences directly with audiences.

Through our approach to design and development, we have become accredited by industry standards bodies and gained memberships with relevant groups, often sitting on steering committees or advisory boards, to help the industry and others grow as a whole, benefitting all parties involved.

Not only that but we have been recognised and included on many industry sector reports and landscape, from Digi-Capital to The VR Fund amongst others, based upon level of investment combined with immersive industry companies showing positive growth in 2019/2020.

Get In Touch To Discuss

Whether you are looking to start your journey down the immersive road, or have deployed a project with another vendor and want to explore other options, or are completely unsure of the benefits of immersive learning experiences and the associated technologies, we are all about engagement, education and evangelising without the hard sell.

We can work with you and your learning team to run a workshop to upskill everyone and raise understandings, or come run a discovery session to help eek out those critical business objectives and challenges that can be tackled effectively. In the meantime, whilst you’re evaluating your options, here’s our project mapping and data gathering templates to use, to help you get the right answers to the right questions about immersive learning and technology deployments.

Get in touch

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.