Meet the leaders who are changing the face of virtual and augmented reality
XR for Business
Claim This Podcastby Alan Smithson from MetaVRse
4.5(12 reviews)
112 episodes
Updated Daily
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Podcast Overview
Meet the leaders who are changing the face of virtual and augmented reality
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🇺🇲
Publishing Since
5/8/2019
1 verified contact email on file for XR for Business
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Recent Episodes
December 10, 2021
XR for Business - 2021 in Review
Alan is back in the podcasting saddle — alongside his partner in life and business Julie Smithson, plus colleague and marketing expert Alex Colgan — to take a look back at the last year of happenings in the XR metaverse. 2021 was quite a strange year, but there were several promising updates in the XR industry to make 2022 something to look forward to, and our panel discusses just a few; NFTs, Facebook, the Metaverse, and much more. (more…)
June 16, 2020
From the Classroom Lab to the Factory Floor in XR, with Labster’s Michael Jensen
Labster CEO Michael Jensen was on XR for Learning not-too-long ago, talking about how XR can teach kids science in the classroom. Now he explains to Alan how that same technology is making professional training safer and more cost-effective. Alan: Hey, everyone. Alan Smithson here. Today we're speaking with Michael Jensen, CEO of Labster, a venture backed, award winning company that focuses on revolutionizing the way science and safety is taught at companies, universities, colleges, and high schools all over the world. They started with creating multimillion dollar science labs in a VR headset. And now they're ready to take on the enterprise training world. All that and more, coming up next on the XR for Business podcast. Michael, welcome to the show. Michael: Hey, Alan, thanks so much, honored to be here. Alan: It's my absolute pleasure to have you. I know you were on my partner and wife Julie's podcast, XR for Learning. And I learned all about how Labster is revolutionizing how we teach science, and making it more exciting, gamified, but also bringing the opportunity to create multi-million dollar science labs for the cost of a cup of coffee. So let's unpack that. Michael, how did you get into this? Michael: Yeah, so that actually started about nine years ago, when my co-founder and I saw an opportunity to create much more engaging online learning content for students and learners around the world. Basically, most people were learning in very boring, non-engaging formats as we saw it. And at the same time, we saw these billions of dollars being invested into the gaming industry to create really engaging games. And we thought, why not find a way to combine and merge the learning world and the gaming world in a more engaging way, so that we can engage learners in the content, make them more excited about the topics, but also use these mechanisms to help them understand some of these more complex concepts in a much better way. Alan: Walk people through what a typical Labster lab looks like, and why this is exciting. Michael: There's two main components that we really looked at. One is engagement -- as I just talked about -- and the other one is timesaving, cost savings. And so what we looked at was, how can we best address some of the biggest challenges in the industry by presently creating virtual training -- similar to a flight simulator that was revolutionizing pilot training -- and then create, for instance, virtual laboratories to simulate dangerous experiments or dangerous scenarios -- like safety training -- and then that way help the universities, in our case as well as high schools -- but now also corporates -- dramatically reduce their cost and saving, as well as the time spent on this training. And we did a huge research project now -- about two years ago -- a $6-million research project involving hundreds and hundreds of employees around the world in large pharma companies, to really analyze and understand, does this really help? Is there a way for us to create better, more engaging content? And if so, does that really help students or learners understand it better? And does it also help save costs? And the results were quite overwhelmingly positive, was published and peer reviewed -- among others -- in Nature magazine, where we saw more than a doubling of the learning outcomes, as well as engagement for learners, compared to -- for instance -- standard online e-learning training, or even personal one-on-one training. So even compared to a personal one-on-one trainer, we found that this virtual immersive training format can be far superior, both in costs, as...
March 24, 2020
Turning a Game Engine into a Training Experience, with PIXO VR’s Sean Hurwitz
Today’s guest Sean Hurwitz started his journey to the XR field in the realm of game development. But as the years went on, more and more he saw the value of putting game engines to work training professionals instead of hunting zombies. He talks about how PIXO VR achieves this. Alan: Hey, everyone, it’s Alan Smithson here with the XR for Business podcast. Today we’re speaking with Sean Hurwitz, founder and CEO of PIXO VR, a Detroit based company focused on VR software for training on processes, safety, and emergency response. Much like myself, Sean believes that extended reality — or XR — technologies can unlock human potential, and realize limitless possibilities. He’s assembled an all-star team of game changing VR and AR engineers, and we’re going to talk about how this translates directly into safety and training across all different industries. All that and more on the XR for Business podcast. Sean, welcome to the show, my friend. Sean: Hi, Alan. Thanks for having me. Alan: It’s my absolute pleasure. I’m really, really excited. I’ve been kind of using your VR training video that you did. It was in a basement, and you’re training gas meter people on how to how to — I guess –use a gas meter. But I’ve been using that video to show the diverse range of things that can be done within VR. Tell us about that. Tell us about PIXO VR. Sean: Yes, I am definitely onboard with the way that XR and training will definitely change the ecosystem, make people’s lives safer and more effective, and hopefully make more money too, at the end. So yeah, the example that you give is a replication of a basement, where technicians were in the traditional way of training, driving around, mirroring or shadowing older technicians as the evolving workforce and the younger generation coming in. And they were training the new employees, the new trainees, and they were looking for a way to do this training that would be close to real life, rather than drive around for weeks or months on end. And they couldn’t show– the problem was they couldn’t really identify or show all the variances in the gas meters in these basements. So we did a multi-user randomized scenario of millions of different setups and scenarios of what these gas meters would look like, and really expedited the training timeline. So PIXO, that’s sort of the– using your video as an example. But we started as a traditional console video game company, moving quickly into mobile and enterprise, and then even quicker in 2016 into getting the first Oculus DK and starting to build enterprise VR training, from that point forward. Going from making games, because I just interviewed Arash Keshmirian from Extality, and he was doing the same thing. They were making virtual or augmented reality games for phones. And now they’re making enterprise solutions. How did you make that shift from going to making games to enterprise? And was it simply a way of making money or just– what is the precipitating factor of going from making games to basements full of gas fitting technology? Sean: Well, money certainly plays a role, but really the mission to make people’s lives better, to help improve the planet that we live on, being able to utilize the skill set that we’ve spent combined dozens of years, used the same skill set, even the same game engine as to develop interactive games — which is really what this training is — to be able to replicate things that you either were too expensive to do otherwise or just too risky to do. So, once we figured out that we were able to create the scenarios in the field — or in a basement, like you said earlier — and then actually make money doing it served the purpose and the mission, and also getting paid for solving problems rather than developing games and hoping someone...
112 total episodes available
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