VR: Coming To A Workplace Near You

Embracing VR technology for remote work collaboration and employee training

Highlights:

• VR can help companies train employees on hard and soft skills critical for growth and development.
• VR enhances collaboration among distributed teams, making them feel like they are in the same space.
• Companies need a step-by-step implementation approach to overcome cost, hardware, software, and perception challenges.

Few technologies garner our attention, enthusiasm, and speculation quite like virtual reality (VR), a trend that rapidly accelerated during the Covid-19 pandemic as people sought ways to create connections and accelerate collaboration from disparate locations.

According to the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, “In 2021, more than 171 million users worldwide had adopted VR, 58.9 million Americans used it more than once per month in 2021, and the number of active users will reach 65.9 million in 2023.”

However, its long-term efficacy is still being decided as companies wrestle with cost and implementation challenges, leaving many to wonder if it is a ground-breaking innovation or a technology in search of a problem to solve.

VR at Work

VR is helping companies teach various hard and soft skills critical to their continued development and growth.

For example, businesses are leveraging VR to host meetings and build better connections and facilitate collaboration when teams are distributed. This is especially true for companies with international employees, who otherwise would not interact with their coworkers similar to how co-workers in the same location would.

For distributed technology hubs, like Ireland, which is home to countless employees from U.S. technology companies, these connections can be vital to maintaining seamless connection regardless of location.

As June Bolneo, a Learning Experience Design Lead at Grow Remote, explains, “VR has a lot to do with collaboration, making people feel like they are in the same space – If you are a designer or an architect, if you are designing physical products and you can make them into 3D, and you can inspect them in the same place, you can move them around instead of just viewing them on a video.”

Ireland has a strong tradition of collaboration between universities, research institutions, and industry, making the technology particularly intriguing for empowering its expansive remote workforce in new and innovative ways.

The Walton Institute, a center of R&D for ICT research and innovation in South East Technological University, SETU, which works actively with overseas companies, is helping VR become more accessible to more companies. This includes use cases for various industries, from architecture and engineering projects to virtual tourism.

In one such project, the Walton Institute used a VR product that allowed people to see the model of a house on a green site. When implemented effectively, VR can help people augment their workflows to produce better outcomes. Stephen Barnes, Senior Project Manager and Mixed Reality Lab Lead, The Walton Institute, sees the technology as central to actually having a more collaborative experience and nurturing an at-work presence even when in different locations.  

In many cases, Barnes sees that VR is helping companies to train their employees on critical hard and soft skills, enhance collaboration among distributed teams, and foster a sense of presence and connection. In the future, he sees AR/VR becoming the norm once the teething challenges of new technology are ironed out.

The Challenges of Implementation

VR technology has the potential to revolutionize the way we work, but integrating VR into the workplace presents its own set of challenges.

“There are significant logistical and hardware challenges for businesses,” June Bolneo of Grow Remote notes. “The software also presents challenges, as limitations to the size of allowed groups and the need for employee training creates hurdles to adoption.”

For businesses, “going all-in on VR is not always financially viable or practically feasible, it requires a more nuanced approach,” says Bolneo. She suggests a step-by-step implementation to make VR as impactful as possible.

“It is not that companies need to buy into this massive, monolithic experience. It can be scalable. They can start with AR, allowing teams to learn how a piece of equipment works and how new processes can improve their performance,” Barnes said. “Then work up to a virtual model and start to build up to a VR experience.”

Currently, the most pressing limitations include:

• Software: Existing VR platforms are limited in terms of the number of people who can participate, making it more difficult for large institutions to implement VR at scale.
• Open access: To realize the full potential of VR, software needs to be interoperable and open. VR applications are mostly incompatible with each other, which makes the collaboration of different tools impossible right now.
• Hardware: Cost considerations, battery life, and physical comfort can stall implementation.
• Onboarding: Lack of proper onboarding limits its usefulness and effectiveness.
• Perception: VR is popular with gamers, leaving many professionals with the perception that the technology is not for serious work.

To overcome these obstacles, organizations must carefully plan and execute their VR integration strategies while taking into account the unique needs of their employees and the nature of their work.

Looking Forward

Despite these obstacles, organizations must carefully plan and execute their VR integration strategies to take advantage of its benefits and stay ahead of the curve in a rapidly changing workplace landscape. As a hub for distributed technology, Ireland has a unique opportunity to lead the way in embracing VR technology and its potential to shape the future of work.

Companies are working through the long-term implications of remote and hybrid workers, but with the emergence of new artificial intelligence (AI) solutions, it is clear that the only limitations are our imaginations.

Original article can be viewed on HR.com. Article written by Ciara Mullarky, IDA Ireland with contributions from Stephen Barnes, Walton Institute, SETU.