True immersion for AR/VR: reaching results in your LMS

Augmented and virtual reality are the ever-shiny tools that you keep hearing about at conferences and in industry blogs and publications. There's a reason the learning community is eager to don a pair of goggles and see a new reality. Immersive technology has huge implications for learning. By the end of 2018, eMarketer estimates that there will be approximately 51.2 million AR users and 36.7 VR users in the United States. There's no shortage of use-cases for immersive technology in learning, either. Everyone from instructional designers to CLOs can think of a scenario for AR or VR-based instruction.

We love AR/VR, too. This month, we've been hard at work creating immersive realities for amusement parks, distribution centers, and retail stores. We can't wait to unveil some of these experiences at DevLearn.

However, what good is a new reality if we can't capture value from it? What's the point of training anyone if we can't measure their success?

Roundtable is answering this question by building an integration between our learning-centered AR/VR experiences and our learning management system. This integration captures completion and reports it back to the LMS - ensuring that your learners aren't just trying a new training technique, but they're actually getting credit for it in the LMS. This creates a fully-integrated learning experience that spans platforms and technologies. We're working with clients to identify how we, as an industry, define success in AR/VR experiences.

Everything in the experiences we build can become a learning component and can be communicated back to the LMS. This means that we're not testing on the experience itself, but the interactions within the experience.

Take our most recent point-of-sale AR experience, for example. During the experience, the learner is faced with multiple tasks from listening to the guest, entering a correct order and offering the correct upsells. This allows the learner to try and test the POS machine before making costly mistakes with real customers. That experience can be marked as complete within the LMS, just like an eLearning module or ILT component. However, we’re taking this even further by tracking on-screen interactions within the experience so that we can not only help our clients test for success but also areas where more training is needed. If Jim repeatedly gives Sally the wrong order, doesn’t properly offer the right upsells, or doesn’t even look Sally in the eyes when communicating with her in his AR experience, our client can see those metrics and evaluate where they need to spend more time instructing Jim.

The point is that AR/VR is an amazing tool for learning, but it doesn't mean much until it's tied back to your LMS. We create the LMS, the custom AR/VR experiences, and now, the integration between the two.