PwC's Tech While You Trek: Extended Reality

Tune into another episode of Tech While You Trek to hear PwC Emerging Technology Managing Director Daniel Eckert and PwC Emerging Technology Manager Andrea Mower discuss Extended Reality (XR), which often uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) in its applications and is experienced through Internet of Things (IoT) headsets or mobile devices, enabling workers to practice even risky tasks in a safe, realistic way. They also share the results of PwC's enterprise study on the effectiveness of using Virtual Reality to train leadership development skills compared to traditional learning delivery modalities. 

Transcript

PwC's Tech While You Trek:  Extended Reality 
Guests:  Daniel Eckert, Andrea Mower

Adam (00:08):
Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of PwC's Tech While You Trek. I'm your host, Adam, and today I have with me PWC's emerging technology managing director, Daniel Eckert, and emerging technology manager, Andrea Mower, to talk about extended reality, the convergence of technologies that simulate different environments for the user, and also the results of PWC's most recently published study on the effectiveness of virtual reality for soft skills training. Daniel, Andrea, welcome.

Dan Eckert (00:35):
Hello. Hello.

Andrea Mower (00:36):
Hi.

Adam (00:37):
Listen, let’s dive right in. Can we give our listeners an overview of what extended reality is and specifically, how would you define augmented reality, virtual reality and mixed reality?

Andrea Mower (00:47):
Extended reality is a nice umbrella term that we can use for all three. If you're ever in a situation where you don't actually know what the right technology is to refer to, you're always safe just calling it extended reality. Virtual reality is a technology that, essentially, your line of sight to the physical environment around you is completely covered and everything that you're seeing is digitally created. Usually to view virtual reality, you're going to put on some sort of head-mounted display, and then you can engage in that experience. Augmented reality is a little bit different. You are able to see your physical environment and it is, as the name would suggest, augmented with digital content that's overlayed.

Dan Eckert (01:31):
Augmented reality, think of it as a heads-up display. It's anchored in your field of view; and wherever your head turns, it moves with you. Where in mixed reality, the synthetics are anchored around a real world object. As you move your head, whatever's over that object stays with the object no matter where you're looking, and then it's a significant difference in the types of technology.

Adam (01:56):
In a previous Tech While You Trek episode we had your colleagues Scott Likens and Tony Anderson talk about the six emerging technology convergence themes.   Extended reality is one of these convergence themes.  Can you explain further why it is on the list?  

Dan Eckert (02:09):
I think the key thing that we have to remember is that convergence themes are really about things that we're seeing emerge into the market. It isn't a single technology. It's when these technologies are combined with other technologies that we see the disruption occur. And specifically around extended reality, we're seeing the combination of obviously virtual reality and augmented reality, but also the introduction of artificial intelligence or the Internet of things being able to lift a real data off a real world objects and display them in augmented reality. Or the fact that in virtual reality, we're using synthetic avatars to engage with users to train them. It's a convergence theme because it's using so many different types of technology to create an experience and solve a business problem.

Adam (03:00):
PwC executed the largest study to date regarding the efficacy of using VR to train soft skills. What does this study have to do with the technology stepping out into the spotlight and what did you learn from this step?

Andrea Mower (03:13):
The study itself was not an academic study that PwC did. This was a chance for us to share our findings from an experiment that we held inside the firm. We were trying to compare something that had not been compared before, how does virtual reality fare against other types of training? 

Traditionally, we'll train either in a classroom with an instructor or you might take an eLearning course. And we wanted to know is virtual reality as effective of a way to train, and that was the key question behind our study. We were able to take existing classroom training and create a version of it for virtual reality and a version of it as an eLearn. And then we were able to put a large group of our own people here at PwC through one of the three different methods. We divided that population up into three groups, and we gave everyone in the population a pre-assessment and a post-assessment to evaluate their understanding of the content. And we saw some really phenomenal results on the virtual reality learning side.

Dan Eckert (04:22):
What was really interesting about the study is that it was really two studies in one. First of all, we looked at the efficacy of using this new modality as a way to help people understand the very challenging subject. The second part was, what was the cost efficacy of delivering virtual reality training and comparing it to the other two modalities of eLearn and classroom learning. It's not only looking at, "Hey, does this stuff work," but "Hey, can I do it cost effectively?"  

And at PwC for this specific study, we used a course that we'd been using in the firm to train our new managers on diversity and inclusion. You would interact with a digital avatar in this training, in virtual reality anyway, and you'd be put in a situation where you have to respond and act using the things that you've learned about diversity and inclusion. It was about really studying the efficacy of virtual reality in soft skill training. 

Andrea Mower (05:12):
Yeah, so some of the big findings that we saw, one was distraction was greatly reduced among the vLearning group, which was kind of to be expected because when your eyes are covered and everything else is blocked out, it's really hard to get distracted by email or pings or anything else. 

Adam: (05:30):
Well, that makes a lot of sense.  How can companies use VR to support their employees’ digital learning?  

Andrea Mower (05:35)
Some of the findings that surprised us a little bit more were the emotional connection that learner's reported having with the content inside of VR. We thought that that might really be blown out of the water by a classroom experience, but we were surprised to see such high numbers coming out of the vLearn experience.

Learners in VR also were more confident in their ability to hold the kind of conversations that Dan was talking about. And then one of my favorite findings from the study was that 75% of people who went through it said that they experienced the wake-up call moment where they realized that their performance, which in most cases was based on what people felt like they would do in real life, they realized that in the past they had not been as inclusive as they previously believed. Something in this experience was giving them this wake-up call moment to realize, "Hey, I actually need to do better."

Adam (06:33):
How does VR make leadership skills training more impactful? 

Dan Eckert (06:37):
One of the best things that we saw was the fact that people that trained in virtual reality were able to train four times faster than in classroom settings. Those soft metrics are really good because it really improves the experience. People are getting a lot more out of it, but it's kind of hard to measure. But we could measure the fact that it was taking less time. Because it took less time and we're an hour-based organization, we could actually see real cost savings in comparison to the other modalities.

Adam (07:06): 
Is classroom or e-learning still more cost-effective than VR training?  

Dan Eckert (7:10):
The reality is, is that VR training is more expensive to build than classroom training or eLearn, and that's to be expected because you still have to develop the course. And then once you develop the course, then you need to program the course for it to work in virtual reality. It's always going to be a little bit more expensive, at least today. But when you start looking at the time savings that you have and when you start looking at scale, there's a real positive ROI. In the study itself at 3000 learners, VR was actually 52% more cost effective than classroom training. And we all know with the whole situation that's going on with lockdown and COVID-19, training budgets for classroom trainings have been significantly attenuated.

Andrea Mower (07:52):
And I want to say one thing about the scale, because that might sound counterintuitive. Everybody's got to have a headset. How could it be more scalable than just throwing a bunch of people in a classroom and talking to them? But one thing that's core to learning is actually the ability to practice what you're learning and to have a chance to make sure you know how to do the skill that's being discussed.

And what we're doing in virtual reality is providing a chance for everyone to practice and to get feedback on their practice. You can really feel like you're having these conversations when we're talking about soft skills training. For doing jobs skills training, you can practice in specific specialized environments with specialized equipment, and you can have feedback that is usually not available at scale. You would have to have subject matter experts standing next to you, watching your performance, giving you feedback on how well you did in that specialized situation. And that's where we can program that all into the VR experience and you get that at-scale advantage.

Adam (08:58):
Can we get specific? Are there specific examples you can think of, of places where you're seeing the extended reality being used in the enterprise today?

Dan Eckert (09:07):
There's actually four different use cases that we're seeing extended reality. The first one is around job skill simulation. VR and extended reality technologies have been used in job skill simulation for literally decades. Think of a flight simulator, for example, that's just happens to be in virtual reality. That is an example of a job skill simulator.

The second one is about what the study was, which was around soft skill training. We're seeing this being emerged and as a really great way to give individual coaching one-on-one at a scalable level around leadership, maybe identifying anti-bribery and anti-corruption, dealing with difficult people, leading through adversity like the COVID-19 situation.

The third one is around collaborative VR, being able to replicate a workshop setting or when several people of up to 20 or 30 people need to get together to collaborate in a workshop type of experience, but they can't physically be together in the same space. We call this collaborative VR.

And then finally the fourth one is around job aids, and this is more specifically to the AR and mixed reality. Specifically for technicians that require both uses of their hands, to have a head mounted display on their head while they're working and being able to use both hands. And in their augmented reality view, they're getting everything from this ability to get what the next step in the process is, they might be reading information off the equipment in real time and it's displaying in their headset. It could be a remote assist where a subject matter expert is coming in and overseeing what the technician is doing and they can work together to solve a specific problem that they might be working on.

Adam (10:38):
Where can people go to learn more about extended reality and the VR study?

Andrea Mower (10:43):
It's pwc.com/us/vlearning.

Dan Eckert (10:49):
Yep, and if you go out to that website, not only does it give you access to the study, but there's a whole bunch of additional information out there that's really useful. It also talks in depth about how we did it, what are some of the things that we had to think about, some of the challenges that we needed to overcome to be able to deploy this at scale in such a large organization such as PwC.

Adam (11:16):
Here are some final questions for the both of you, just for fun, before I let you go. What do you say?

Andrea Mower (11:20):
Sounds great.

Dan Eckert (11:21):
Excellent.

Adam (11:22):
What would the you of 20 years ago be most surprised that you use technology-wise today?

Andrea Mower (11:28):
Yeah, I think 12 year old Andrea would be shocked to hear that I'm having meetings with my coworkers almost every day in virtual reality.

Dan Eckert (11:37):
The thing they'd be most surprised is the fact that I'm hyper-connected, that I can connect to so many different people in so many different ways than I could ever do before. In the past, it was literally you would meet or you would talk to them on the phone. And now, there's texting, there's video conferencing, there's virtual reality collaboration. And there's not only just one product for each one of those categories, there's hundreds in some cases. Just think of all the different texts media that we have.

Adam (12:03):
All right, one more before I let you go. What is your one bold prediction for technology in 2040?

Dan Eckert (12:09):
I'm going to actually answer this question in two different ways. I'm going to answer, say, what in the next 10 years and then what in the next 20 years. The first one is really around transparency, technology becoming more and more transparent in our life. It's going to become invisible. It's going to disappear. To date, we really don't notice things like electricity. They're just there all the time. You plug it in and works.

 And technology, we've been on this journey for 50 plus years of technology becoming more and more embedded into our lives, but the reality is it will eventually becomes transparent. We already don't have user manuals for mobile applications. You don't even get one with your mobile phone anymore. It won't be long before it will just self-assemble and become part of the fabric of the way you live.

Within the next 20 years, I actually see some extensions of the human condition being augmented by technology. And I'm not talking about exoskeletons where you'll be able to lift more or run faster or anything like that. I'm talking about actually being integrated into our bodies be it sensors, be it augmented vision as part of your glasses or, more importantly, your contact lenses. I truly see that technology is going to be moving more and more into the biological over the next 20 years than just the things that we have today, the devices that we have today.

Andrea Mower (13:25):
One of my favorite quotes is that there's a very little difference between vices and devices. And I think that in 2040, 20 years from now, we'll be a lot wiser because there'll be a lot more opportunity to study the anthropological impacts of technology, and we will keep the technologies that benefit us and get rid of a lot of things that are kind of a waste.

Adam (13:53):
Daniel Eckert, Andrea Mower, I really, really appreciate you all taking the time to stop by today.

Dan Eckert (13:58):
Excellent. Thank you very much.

Andrea Mower (13:59):
Thanks for having us.

Adam (14:00):
Thanks for listening to another episode of Tech While You Trek. I've been your host, Adam, and we will talk to you again next time when we share with you more on how to digitally upskill yourself and your organization.

Speaker 4 (14:15):
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