VR Creates the Trainer That Never Retires, with Immerses James Watson & Justin Parry

Published: Dec. 2, 2019, 9:47 a.m.

b'Imagine being able to learn, hands-on, exactly how to operate a deep-sea submarine \\u2014 without needing the submarine! That\\u2019s the kind of training opportunities VR training platforms like Immerse are able to offer with the technology at their disposal. James Watson and Justin Parry drop in to talk about all the other opportunities the tech presents businesses.\\n\\n\\n\\n\\n\\n\\n\\nAlan: You\\u2019re listening to the XR for Business Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. Today, we have two amazing guests, James Watson and Justin Parry from Immerse. Justin is the co-founder and chief operating officer and leads product strategy for Immerse. As a founder, he designed and led product development of the Immerse platform from scratch. He now oversees the delivery of all technology and VR content across the organization. Justin has 20 years experience creating and growing B2C and B2B products from startups to global organizations. He\\u2019s developed and launched online platforms, websites, mobile products across the world, and joined Immerse from his role as global director of the Internet Yellow Pages for Yell Group. Immerse Virtual Enterprise Platform enables enterprises to create scale and measure virtual reality training content and programs. The platform enables enterprises to look at training and assessment in a completely different way, providing the tools to help maximize human performance, resulting in a more engaged, better equipped and safer workforce. If you want to learn more, you can visit immerse.io. \\n\\n\\n\\nGuys, welcome to the show.\\n\\n\\n\\nJustin: Hello.\\n\\n\\n\\nJames: Thanks, Alan.\\n\\n\\n\\nAlan: [laughs] Hey. So you guys\\nare in beautiful, sunny, warm UK. How\\u2019s it going over there?\\n\\n\\n\\nJustin: Well, it was very sunny\\nuntil last week, actually, with the sort of slightly freakish weather\\nthat we\\u2019ve been having, but today is cold.\\n\\n\\n\\nJames: It\\u2019s British grey.\\n\\n\\n\\nJustin: Yeah.\\n\\n\\n\\nAlan: British grey. Oh, well,\\nwe\\u2019ll just assume it\\u2019s beautiful and sunny. So let\\u2019s get digging in\\nhere. I\\u2019ve had a chance to try out the Immerse platform. It\\u2019s really\\namazing. You\\u2019re completely immersed, and the demo that you guys did\\nfor us: We were inside of a submarine. We not only go into it, but\\ninteract with all the bits of the submarine and start to learn parts\\nof, \\u201chow do I make some things work?\\u201d And the great thing about\\nit is you guys were there every step of the way. But one of you was\\nin VR, and the other one was on a tablet or a computer. Talk to us,\\njust to how did Immerse come to be?\\n\\n\\n\\nJustin: Well, we\\u2019ve been in the\\ntraining space quite a long time. We weren\\u2019t initially in VR. We\\nactually delivered our training applications via desktop, but they\\nwere always multi-user. So we would be tying together people from\\nsomewhere \\u2014 maybe even Kazakhstan, some oil and gas training that we\\ndid \\u2014 with trainers that may be in Iraq, or in the UK, or wherever\\nthat might be. And that was all done in a sort of virtual world. So\\nit\\u2019s a little bit like the old Second Life, if people remember that.\\nSo it\\u2019s a powerful proposition, but it\\u2019s still a little bit difficult\\nto sell. So with the advent of the headsets \\u2014 or the latest\\ngeneration of headsets, at least \\u2014 we made the move into VR and a\\nlot of services that we built there just kind of immediately made\\nsense, and we got traction very quickly. We effectively then pivoted\\nthe whole company to be a full-on VR training platform. We rebuilt a\\nlot of those services, especially for VR, because there was obviously\\nsome small itemization that we need to make. And so we find ourselves\\nwhere we are today. \\n\\n\\n\\n\\nAnd just in terms what you said there,'