VR — Complex toys or powerful educational tools?

When most of our team (and well, whole Fortum) started their holidays in July, as a summer trainee I was keeping some of our projects up and running. What I didn’t expect then, was that I’d literally start putting down fires while the others were gone.

I worked with Fortum’s internal startup eSite, and especially with their VR, AR & XR trainings. The goal of the project was to improve the usability of the VR trainings and make the whole experience of participating in training smooth and easy.

VR: Virtual reality
AR: Augmented reality
XR: Extended reality

Photo by Lux Interaction on Unsplash

Using VR technology for organizing training can sometimes be quite challenging. People have very different levels of experience with VR equipment. For that reason, it might take quite a lot of time to learn the tricks of VR and start using the equipment fluently. In addition to this, the technology can surprise the user with unexpected bugs. After all, VR is still a developing technology that changes and evolves constantly.

Due to these challenges, until now it has been necessary to have a trainer hold the trainee’s hand throughout the training experience, ready to support with any difficulties they face. One sub-goal of our project was to minimize the need for this constant support and make the training experience so smooth that the trainee could finish the training independently. This would be valuable, since removing the constant need for a support person would make it possible to scale the trainings for a bigger audience without the need of recruiting a great number of trainers.

eSite has already come far with their work on VR trainings, and they have managed to get some really good results out of the first training sessions with VR technology. With design thinking methods, we hoped that we could take the trainings even further and help them achieve their highest potential.

So why are we then building trainings with VR?

Many of us have probably first heard about VR in the context of games and entertainment. However, VR technology has also been found to be a powerful tool for educating people. Especially valuable it has been in teaching people to operate in situations where failure would be dangerous or expensive if happening in real work environments. VR provides a possibility for achieving a realistic learning setting and immersion without any danger to the trainee or potential failure-related costs to the organization. At Fortum, VR training has been used for example for training people working in power plants to operate in radiation environments or to learn to extinguish small fires.

Here I am extinguishing a fire in the Realistic Fire VR training, using VR equipment by HTC Vive.

So, what did we do?

• Ran a simulation about a typical training situation, and participated in a fire extinguishing training
• Defined a customer journey for VR training and its pain points
• Organized a test round with a low-fidelity training prototype with instructions for 6 people and observed them complete the training
• Benchmarking
• Created development suggestions for the VR training at hand and developed a set of heuristics to support developing user-friendly VR trainings in the future

Image from the Realistic Fire VR training

Key insights

Read about 3 of our insights, picked from among the whole set of 10 key findings here.

1. Simple commands

The biggest obstacle for a user in doing VR training is usually the adoption of a new set of controls and technology. Especially for older users, the use of VR controls is not self-evident, and it might take a while to learn the very basic logic of operating in the VR environment. Having to learn complex controls takes the users’ focus out of the main point of the whole training situation — the content of the training itself.

The more simple the controls of the training are, the more capacity the user can fix to accomplishing the learning goals of the training. For this reason, controls of VR trainings should be simplified to using only 1 of the buttons appearing in the controls, instead of utilizing multiple different commands for different actions in the training.

(In the cases where the idea is to simulate a very specific, motoric set of actions, complex controls might be inevitable. However, when teaching the user a process or an operations model, for example, simplicity is the way to go.)

2. Feedback & guidance

VR environments simulate real-life environments as accurately as they can. However, what it sometimes fails to replicate, is the natural feedback we receive in the real world from our actions (for example, the feeling of touching an item). For this reason, VR training should also focus on giving the user constant feedback on their actions.

Forms of feedback:

· Indicator of succeeding in a task. “You put down the fire, good job!”

· Indicator of failing a task. Preferably also telling why, especially since it might be difficult to understand in the VR world, for example, if failure happens due to misuse of controls. “You didn’t succeed in extinguishing the fire, since you didn’t use enough movement. Try again by moving the spray nozzle horizontally.”

· Support when the user is stuck. “You are too far from the extinguisher to grab it, move closer.”

3. Don’t assume anything when it comes to instructions

Even those tasks that feel self-evident for the developer might not be that for the user. Be prepared to explain everything, from the logic of the VR world to the content of the training. In our tests, to our surprise, we noticed that for many of the users, the first piece of instructions they needed was that in the VR world you can see more by turning your head to the left and right. All these features must be somehow introduced to the user.

A critical piece of instructions for VR training is of course the guidance that helps the user to go through the training. Instructions can be implemented for example with text and sound, or with elements in the VR environment guiding the users’ eye. Finding guidance should not require work from the trainee. Instructions can be either attached to the trainees’ sight or their eye can be guided with arrows, for example, to help them find the instructions from their environment. The instructions should also guide the user in real-time, not for example by providing all the instructions in the beginning and expecting the user to remember it all.

With the help of our design insights, eSite is now building new trainings that are smooth to use and soon achieving their highest potential as educational tools. I, on the other hand, see now the potential of trainings organized with VR, AR, and XR technologies, and believe that they will play an important role in the way we train professionals in the near future.

*Fortum is a leading clean-energy company developing and offering solutions for our global customers in electricity, heating, cooling, as well as solutions to improve resource efficiency. Digitalization is enabling us to create new customer offerings and improve the productivity of our businesses. See more on www.fortum.com