Visualise your response: The problem-solving power of VR and AR

ESG - environmental, social and corporate governance - is climbing rapidly up the agenda, with 70% of respondents to our CEO Survey listing it as a key concern this year, compared with 44% two years ago. But committing to ESG targets is challenging, and many organisations simply don’t know where to start. In this episode, host Emily Khan is joined by Isabelle Jenkins, PwC UK's Leader of Industry for Financial Services, and Tom Beagant, an advisor in PwC's Sustainability and Climate Change team, to discuss how you can use data to set and measure ESG targets that are achievable and aligned to your purpose.

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Rowena Morris (RM): Welcome to the latest episode in COVID-19 Business in Focus podcast, where we explore the business impacts of coronavirus. I’m Rowena Morris, a director at PwC, and I’m your host for this series.

Over the past few months, the coronavirus pandemic has transformed the way we live and work. The social distancing measures put in place by governments all over the world have caused an increase in demand for technologies that facilitate remote working, and this includes virtual reality and augmented reality, both of which offer smart ways to upskill and collaborate, without the need for face-to-face interaction.

In this episode we'll discuss how VR and AR can solve important problems during the current crisis, as most of the working population adjust to social distancing. And we’ll discuss the important role these technologies have to play in helping wider society navigate the COVID-19 crisis.

Today I'm joined by my colleague Jeremy Dalton, our head of VR and AR here at PwC, as well as a special guest: David Ristagno, the co-founder and CEO of Uptale. Uptale provides an immersive learning platform designed for businesses to create, share and track training modules in 360 and virtual reality.

Jeremy Dalton (JD): Hi Rowena!

David Ristagno (DR): Hi there. Thanks for having me today.

RM: Hi there both, and thanks for joining our virtual studio. So Jeremy, to kick things off, can you explain the difference between virtual reality and augmented reality?

JD: So virtual reality is a technology that helps you feel like you're in a completely different environment, whereas augmented reality is more about information. It's where you're still in the real world, but you're being presented with an overlay of digital data, objects and or media.

RM: OK, thanks Jeremy. So over the past few months, many organisations have experienced some challenges as they adapt to remote or socially distanced working practices. So, where do you see VR and AR helping to address some of those?

JD: So, I think there are a number of challenges associated with remote working. We've got a situation where we're trying to engage employees, we're trying to remain connected with the leaders in our company, with our own co-workers, we're aiming to receive effective training, and even trying to socialise with one another in the form of a connection there. Now these are issues especially for key workers – workers such as healthcare workers, workers in logistics companies, supermarkets – how do they contend with the current challenges of the marketplace in our times? Virtual reality and augmented reality are very useful technologies in that sense, that can provide us with a completely immersive environment, in the case of virtual reality a distractionless environment, and make us feel like we are actually there with other people, sharing a space together, and working to solve important problems. And more importantly, I'd also say, in a way that is natural. So if you were to look at current interfaces and how we interact with the digital world, we tend to use a keyboard and mouse, but when we're out there in the physical world, you know, we don't: we use our hands, we write on boards, and those sort of actions can be replicated to a large extent in these virtual environments.

RM: That's a really helpful summary, thanks Jeremy. and of course many of us have been working remotely recently, which means we're having to find new ways to collaborate as you say. So then David, how can VR and AR help us to continue to work together effectively?

DR: So yeah, those technologies can help people from home and from the field. So at home, changes are apparent in the way we work and interact, so we have seen companies investing in VR headsets to enable VR meetings: there are more and more platforms to do that in an efficient way. More and more social events happen, with sometimes even thousands of people meeting in virtual reality or from their PC, so in fact, virtual reality teleportation is kind of becoming a real, practical solution for today, and not just a futuristic idea. On the field it's more about adapting fast to radical changes, so how can you re-train people to adapt to new realities and new urgencies and new situations. VR training is an efficient way to adapt quickly, to bring workers into new situations, to acquire new skills, new behaviours, new know-how, with a very high degree of parallelism, and without physical constraints and risks.

JD: That's a good point, David, actually –  on the idea of teleportation, we’ve undertaken an exercise ourselves where we've analysed a lot of the collaboration and meeting applications in virtual reality, and even beyond VR as well, to understand what are the what are the benefits of these applications, how do they compare to each other, and which ones are effective for which type of meeting or working, because you've got one-to-one meetings, you've got workshops, which are a bit more involved and might need a whiteboarding, splitting up into groups, and therefore you have stronger collaborative requirements. Then there are events, which really scale up in number, so we're talking about, as you mentioned, the hundreds and even thousands of people you're trying to present information to, and maybe also gain feedback from, during the course of the meeting.

Now, since this current situation, we've had to think about how to adapt to that, and there are many solutions out there. Some are more suited to conferencing-type applications, some are more suited to involved collaboration environments and workshops, but regardless, what we found is that for these workshop-type scenarios where we're using virtual reality, it's incredibly powerful to be able to go into an environment that is completely distractionless, that you can make eye contact with each other, where you can split off into groups, and if I go to one end of the room and you go to the other end of the room, we're not talking over each other as we would do in a in a video conferencing call, because the application actually understands and replicates the audio or the sound as it would do in the real world. So I think there are lots of really exciting applications out there, and there are many of them out there right now that can help companies and support them in these collaboration missions.

RM: I love the sound of those workshops Jeremy, and being able to walk into the room and have your different conversations as if it was like real life, it sounds really cool. You mentioned learning and development earlier – how effective are these technologies in supporting rapid upskilling?

JD: We are on the version of releasing a study actually, which should be released in the first or second week of June 2020, and this tackles exactly that point: it answers the question of how effective is virtual reality training, compared to regular classroom training face-to-face, as well as e-learning. And what we found is that people who are trained in virtual reality are actually 340 percent more confident in employing what they learned, and they take 53 percent less time than those who are trained in the classroom and 33 percent less time than those who are using e-learning packages to master new skills. And there are many other details to that report – I won't list them off now but hopefully you can see it when it releases in June this year.

I'll also say that in addition to virtual reality of course, augmented reality plays a pivotal role in supporting businesses through the crisis and even beyond as well. You think about the number of sectors that need to quickly pivot their workforce to work on new tasks, there are a lot of factories where the processes and the outputs are being completely changed, and they're being pushed to support the cause, the current COVID-19 crisis, in developing more PPE and other equipment that will support the crisis, and when you're trying to upskill people so quickly in completely new processes, you need a way to do that effectively but also scalably, and augmented reality can help in that sense by actually seeing what you are seeing – so looking through your view, so to speak – and providing a digital overlay on that real world, telling you what button you next need to press, what lever you next need to pull, in terms of what could be a very complicated process. And David, I know this is your speciality area, and you've got a lot of success here.

DR: Yes, so on our side, it's also all about scale, and how you can really push new skills, new behaviours to people in large organisations. So our customers, mainly large organisations and multinationals, have used AR to digitise their response to COVID for instance, and in the form of virtual reality experiences. So they could digitise in factories how to scale new protective rules from a sample factory, and then duplicate that to all other factories. We have seen that also in retail, how to face customers who are wearing masks, and how to behave with those kinds of customers, or also in retail, how do you reallocate your resources when you are moving from mostly in-store selling to online selling. This is all about reacting fast and sharing the new best practices with the help of this technology.

RM: So there's clearly lots of benefits to training staff remotely through these technologies and I’m really looking forward, Jeremy, to seeing more in the report that you mentioned that’s about to be published. So David, at Uptale, who have you been supporting with VR and AR training and development programmes, and what's been the feedback so far?

DR: So, our customers are using our solution to create, by themselves, those experiences. So they're pretty autonomous, and they use all the tools we provide to them to capture their field and build interactive training. So, as a provider, we have tried to bring some ideas, good practices, remote training and guidance, so each company can, at their own speed, react in their own way to their own situation. Those companies have actually seen that digitising the new behaviours was not just a nice-to-have thing but a must-have thing.

RM: So now this pandemic has obviously created huge problems for society at large, do you think David, that these technologies have a role to play in supporting society’s wider response to COVID-19?

DR: We have seen some big trends actually that could be generalised to a lot of companies. So one is opening constrained locations to keep business continuity. So some customers have decided to build digital twins of their facilities in order to bring the constrained locations to the decision-makers, to the managers. Another trend is reallocating resources and upskilling at the right agility, with the right speed, and the last one is about relocating the essential production to build resilience. A lot of companies have been stuck because their production was far away, and their skills were far away, so they see VR as a way to spread their know-how more homogeneously, and to bring back some remote know-how in-house to better respond to the next disruptions.

JD: Yeah, I think that covers it really well, and I’d only summarise by saying that these technologies have enabled us to create more effective learning, meetings and ways of working where we would otherwise be where we're currently, stuck at home and remote working. And even from a mental health perspective, we shouldn't discount this. It also offers us a way to continue to socialise and connect with each other. and feel that connection in a way that is more powerful than simply seeing pictures of each other up on a screen.

RM: I think that mental health point Jeremy is really interesting, and you've outlined some really exciting benefits, especially how these technologies can help businesses navigate the immediate impacts of the pandemic, but what do you think the long term benefits, David maybe if I go to you first, will be for those organisations that adopt these technologies now?

DR: Those technologies overall respond to a bigger problem. We live in a very fast-changing world and people need to adapt faster and faster to changes. They need to get ready for all the future disruptions, which may be diseases, or technology, or climate change, or war – whatever. VR and AR are technologies that bring intelligence to the real physical world by augmenting it or digitising it with high fidelity, so those are great tools to empower people to respond to global issues with the mandatory agility.

JD: I think organisations can expect to see benefits along the lines that they've been used to, whenever they choose to invest in a new technology, process, programme, whatever it is, they’re usually expecting either to reduce costs, to save time, to create new revenue streams, more efficient operations, and those are exactly the sort of benefits that we can expect from virtual reality and augmented reality, both now and in the future, post-COVID-19.

RM: OK, so you’ve convinced me – what are your top tips for organisations looking to invest in AR or VR technologies to help them navigate through this difficult period? Maybe Jeremy, if I kick off with you?

JD: Sure. I think the first thing is to focus on solving business problems. Virtual reality and augmented reality are very exciting technologies - it's easy to get caught up in the hype and just go ahead and invest in something just because it's popular, fashionable, you heard about it in the news – and don't get me wrong, there are a lot of benefits, business benefits that virtual reality can provide, and I’ve spoken about a few of them just now. But it's very important that we keep those in mind when we're thinking about investing in a VR/AR solution. Throughout your building of such a solution and strategising around it, always go back to what business benefit am I expecting to get from this investment in technology, and you can't go far wrong with that.

Secondly, think about more than just the software. The software is a very obvious one, and is it is the aspect of a VR implementation programme that most people think of, simply because it's the most front-facing thing. Obviously we need VR/AR software if we're going to implement a VR/AR solution, but before that there is understanding the technology, there is designing the solution, and after the development of the software itself there is deploying it, there is analysing it, and those aspects are as important if not more important than simply developing the software. So bear those in mind throughout the programme.

And then finally I would say start small, prove out the case measuring it, and iterate from there. And what I mean by that is, you don't have to spend hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars on virtual reality and augmented reality solutions: you can start with a scoped-down version with a small, local population, and once you actually have shown the benefit within that small population, you are in a fantastic position to then say what is the best way forward - if we've gained from that, let's make a further investment. If it's proven not to be as effective as we thought, why has that been? Let's analyse that, and then let's work out if we do a version two of this VR/AR solution, or even if we find that a VR/AR solution is not suitable for this particular problem, and that's okay as well.

DR: Yeah, so on my side, number one: consider VR and AR technologies as ready for today, because those technologies are here to stay. The devices are ready, the use cases are ready, the workers are ready, so it's not too early to start augmenting the workforce with superpowers.

The second one is close to what Jeremy was expressing: experiment, measure and scale your wins. There are many VR and AR use cases that have proved their efficiency today, if you look online, so try one of them, experiment with a team, define goals, measure and assess the local impact. Then, VR and AR are perfect to scale because they’re digital - so scale your win, measure your global impact, and repeat.

And the third tip is: get ready for the next disruptions, because they are coming, for sure, so build the muscles to adapt to change and to react at the speed of the fast-changing world.

RM: Thanks very much Jeremy and David for sharing those insights and of course thanks to everyone for listening. If you'd like more practical advice, visit our website at pwc.co.uk/covid19. This is where you can find all of our latest insights including our Strategy& “Where Next” series: an industry-by-industry look at where we are today, what we’re learning, and how to respond to new challenges and opportunities. Please subscribe to keep up to date with all of our latest episodes, and until next time, stay safe.

Participants

  • Rowena Morris, director, PwC
  • Jeremy Dalton, Head of VR and AR, PwC
  • David Ristagno, Co-Founder and CEO, Uptale
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