Walmart deploys Oculus Go headsets to train its employees

Safety training is there for a reason... anything that helps employees pay attention to that could save their lives or the lives of others, so in that narrow application it feels like a good idea from everyone's point of view.

> Now they are gluing the screen to your eyeballs so that it's pretty much impossible to look away and not pay attention

You could wire a video signal straight into my optic nerves and I'l still tune out if it wasn't minimally engaging. I daydream about things random things, such as a programming puzzle I'm trying to solve, while I'm watching TV shows I love (looking at you Game of Thrones). Does anyone else experience this? Maybe it's an ADHD thing, which I have.

I'm not allowed to give any details, but I work for a major consulting company on a team where we do nothing but build VR training systems for major retail chain clients. The improvements in engagement, knowledge retention, and reduction in injury are very significant. Again, not allowed to say how much, but basically it's stupid for companies like this to not be using VR training these days. It's too easy to build for too great of a gain.

One more optimistic way to look at it is using VR it'll make the "boring training videos" much more engaging. I.e. I can think of that annoying video on plane which I hate to listen to, but with a VR where I'd actually have to open that door and jump in it'd be a much more engaging experience.

Of course with built-in detection that checks that the user has their eyes open.

Something beautiful about a company best known for exploiting workers, Walmart, teaming up with an expert is trampling over our personal privacy, Facebook.

Safety training is a good place to start, there’s a great argument for “it’s important and will save lives!”

Makes one wonder where the next stop on the road to our cyberpunk dystopia will be. Rift v2 will probably have eye tracking which will be a godsend to advertisers and if we all have them on our faces employers would love to know what we’re actually paying attention to.

The future is going to be great, awful, but great.

I get your sentiment, but people can still close their eyes if they don't want to pay attention. I would imagine most people find VR more engaging, and when it comes to safety, that is an important feature.

the next step is to tie the employees down to a chair while watching the training material...

Welcome to walmart training camp!, some of you are here because some kind of incident/accident during your usual workflow, please take a sit on this special brainwashing machine while some of the assistants tie you down on the sit... It will last only 12 hours for the first seven days and after that we will have a quiz and you can go back to work.

With a VR headset, no one can see you eyes are closed...

Probably has a cage full of virtual rats being released onto their face. I love Walmart!

If your subject benefits from a 3d representation at all. I dare to say: most do not, just as most do not benefit from video.

I think the real revolution in teaching will be when we have enough well educated, well paid teachers. Imagine the level of immersion that could be accomplished with real-time individualized lessons!

I think VR will be the future of a lot of things. I used to think it was sort of fad, like 3D movies but maybe a little cooler.

Then our GIS department bought one and I’ve tried it a few times now. I always feel constrained when I go back to my two monitors.

The interface and technology in general has some way to go, but I think VR will be the biggest tech revolution in my lifetime and I’ve been around since before the refrigerator was a common thing.

can you elaborate? because nothing you mentioned has anything to do with education. the expected use of VR in education reminds me of the failure of nearly every other forced use of technology in education.

my mom was a teacher, and i clearly remember the required use of powerpoint to be a major detriment to her teaching. as another example, i was horrified recently during a volunteer opportunity at a local high school at the use of chromebooks in the classroom. it seemed like such a blind use that served no purpose other than to further seaparate the students and teachers from social interaction and communication.

i think something like dynamicland is the only technology that has promise to be used as an educational tool.

We now know that tech isn't an high impact factor when it comes to learning quality. This is based on John Hattie's profound research work covering 1200 meta studies: https://visible-learning.org/hattie-ranking-influences-effec...

Anything that requires hand/eye coordination is waiting on a good VR implementation.

I would totally pay $60 for a VR game that has you building a house from the ground up or doing woodworking in as much detail as possible (even if it's individual stages and tasks without a proper physics sandbox).

> VR maybe the future of education.

This implies having children using these headsets for extended periods of time. I hope the (auto?) calibration of future headsets gets real good, otherwise I fear there are some risks, messing with the eyesight of children.

Potentially awesome, sure. Just, not too fast.

I would be interested to see what you say after a couple hundred hours. VR has a very strong novelty effect. I thought it was incredible and amazing the first times I used it. And then, as it became no longer novel, I just gradually stopped.

I'll note that "3D is the future of education!" has a long history. Stereoscopic photos were the future starting in the 1850s. During WWII, the US Department of Defense bought 100,000 View-Masters and millions of reels because 3D content was more effective and engaging for training. But somehow those futures never happened. This one could well end up in the same historical category.

I'm curious whether it will be a deeper problem for propaganda, though. Would it affect memory even more to be able to recall visceral memories of an event as seen in VR, when that event has never actually occurred, say?

VR is dying like 3D TV...expect lots 'o shills to be out selling the message.

As someone who develops VR on a daily basis, I'm skeptical that 3D over 2D is the key. When I first tried on a headset, and watched a video from up high, my fear of heights kicked in. Now I'm almost completely immune to that effect, but I still routinely do things like try to set a tool down on a virtual table. I suspect VR will be good for hands-on training (where it's more about the sequence than the "feel" of it) and psychological training (how to deal with an angry customer), but maybe the psychological benefit wears off like my body's reaction to being up high in VR.

First thing my mind went to as well. Hardware sensors and wearable computers are so cheap now...

Thanks for sharing! Thought provoking read and a good walk through how a society like Star Trek's 23rd-century Earth might arise.

This has been scaring the shit out of me since I first read it. Brilliant story

I’m someone who is hyper sensitive to motion sickness. I’ll throw up after maybe five minutes of reading my phone as a passenger in a car. Mass transit is a boring hell, and it seems to be cumulative with a long recovery time. I went to Disney World last year and each day it became more difficult to ride the relatively tame rides without measured breathing and a lot of breaks.

With all that said, I can handle VR as long as it doesn’t interfere with my proprioception. That is, no movement of the camera independent of my actual head moving. As long as that holds true, and the system doesn’t lag (fixed by “time warp”, thanks John Carmack). As long as those conditions are true I can play VR without breaks for several hours at a time.

If the frame rate is high (90+) and the shadows are perspectively correct to reality (almost never), then you ought to be fine.

This isn't true for 99% of VR experiences, mind you. ;)

I'm not sure what you mean by VR but if you have not tried HTC Vive or Oculus Go, I suggest giving it a try. Everyone I know who has issues with motion sickness or traditional VR can play many games comfortably in modern VR.

Check out virtualspeech

First publications in academia on that front were more than 25 years ago. First apps trying to do that were actually quite a few years ago, but they're quite obscure because they're quite scary, oftentimes.

The lessons are very short and we told the Walmart folks to repeat them, for spaced repetition.

Except it’s all very anti-cyberpunk. Mostly because the vitriolic and perhaps self destructive (aka: the “punk” part) rejection has been very anemic so far.

“Punk” as self destruction to express disdain for norms is a requirement, otherwise the future is merely “Cyber” and in that sort of septugenarian congressional “Information Superhighway” privatized by Enron interpretation of the word.

It’s not really “cyberpunk” until cruising for back alley bionic implants becomes a reality.

True, education was also one of the oldest uses of 3D, well before it became economical for games (3d simulation technology was later ported to some arcade machines), since the early 1980s. For ex, simulations for training first with the military and pilots.

But this takes it to another level and doesn't require a specialized set up for tooling or being in a particular location (custom simulation room).

"Ghost engineer" sounds like AR skeuomorphism. Why have a ghost engineer showing you how to repair iMacs, if you can have your AR headset just show you on the iMac which part to replace and how?

Exactly. "Walmart deploys 17,000 Oculus Go headsets to train its machines"

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