Immersive technology with Mark Gröb of UPS
Imagine you’re a new driver
So imagine you as a driver. It’s your first day on the job, right? You come into UPS and they say, “Okay, you’re mandated to spend an hour each day, your pre-trip, going through a curriculum activity at a one-to-one simulator before you head out on the road.” You go to that simulator and it’s really just a retired package car that’s been revamped to be basically a car simulator, right? So you sit down at the driver’s seat and you can drive and do proper simulations based there, but you can do other things now.
Now what you can do, say, in the driver’s shotgun seat or the passenger seat in the vehicle, we’re running 360 degree video shadowing programs where the shadowing program is really active recordings of previous drivers that have been trained in the methods, and they’re talking you through a verbal script as they’re actually driving on the real road. And using a VR headset, the person can sit in that passenger seat and from the same perspective as the content was shot, they’re going through someone’s actual daily trip learning about how to identify hazards, doing certain practices as they drive to be extra safe.
XR Do-ers, boots on the ground
When we talked, you talked about a phrase called XR doers.
XR doers are what I call my subject matter experts. Part of our practice at Immersive Tech inside of UPS is we train subject matter experts per the business groups. And I always call these members of my extended team, I call them XR doers, because what it is is the subject matter experts are really the people within that business group that get the things done. You could always have somebody that gets trained and okay, they know how to do it. But what we currently look at inside of a company like UPS is we want people that are going to act, they’re going to do things, they’re going to be unstoppable, as Carol loves to say.
Or these are people that they sat down, they’ve learned about the technology, they learned about what we describe as our best practices or standards or guidance around that, because it’s those people, not senior executives, not Mark Grobes, it’s those people that actually get things done. Because they’re the ones, they’re boots on the ground. The best people that do the work are the people to find the right solution, because they have the experience, they have the knowledge. AI can’t unfortunately yet do that, right?
Or maybe fortunately.
In my opinion, I think it’s something realistically, depending on what the work is, it never will happen, because a lot of things in logistics do not transfer digitally well, because it’s a very physical aspect of getting something from point A to point B. So it’s one things where Immersive Tech sort of gives us that human interaction, that human interface to that digital. And that’s where these XR doers are so important, because they’re the ones that identify the pain point and they say, “Hey, you know what? This is the problem. Is it a case where maybe this technology is useful to solve that problem or is it not?” And having people that understand the limitations of the technology improve and create successful use cases.
Good design makes situations real
People that are really the boots on the grounds, they know best because they’re most familiar with the problem and the context around it. So having them involved into the designing process is really key. Because now at this point, you have someone that knows what the problem is and the knowledge required to solve that problem, able to discuss it, design it, integrate it into this really amazing interactive sort of platform that when it’s properly designed, it really accelerates the point of their learning.
If someone can do a particular activity and it’s as realistic as possible to that activity, and they don’t have to rely on a real circumstance or a real business problem to happen, you [inaudible 00:04:02] simply press a button and the problem happens, right? The reps to solve that problem, accelerate their learning. Having the understanding of what the problem is, the knowledge elements behind it, are key to the design of how you build it. Because one of the disadvantages to this type of technology is it is actually so versatile. You can actually easily go down the wrong road to trying to solve the problem, and that’s why the design is key. Understanding what the pain point is, what is the logical or proper process to solve that problem, and if there’s any sort of safety or regulatory concerns around that process, integrating all that into that particular solution design is key.
XR will augment, accelerate learning
How do you think everything you’ve been talking about will impact education? Outside of UPS, outside of companies, but in terms of education in general, I’m guessing that there must be a lot of ways in which these technologies can be used. You talked about hard skills, soft skills, I imagine, have you thought at all about how they might be used in high schools or professional schools?
I had a previous startup with one of my old colleagues. We looked at AR technology in that space, so I might be a little jaded or biased, but I think generally, the XR technology has a lot of opportunity potential. But I would kind of throw in the little caveat of be careful, because a lot of people, when technology is new, they always have the assumption that it can replace something instead of augment learning. I see the future of education and this technology having a role in the sense of accelerating that learning process, not replacing the technology, the core education aspect, but really giving teachers tools, curriculum material to teach their students faster, teach them in a sense of immersive learning is far accelerated. People will talk about when they use VR or AR, right? When it’s properly designed, people will discover that to them, it may feel it was been two hours, but the reality was it was 10 minutes, right?
So that concept of learning, they feel they’re learning two hours of material, but it only took them 10 minutes, right? That aspect to me is where I see this space really sort of accelerating that. And you see that right now in the medical areas as well. There are a lot of the medical fields, doctors are able to virtually practice and get “reps” of certain procedures in a simulated environment, where simulated environments is low risk, high reward.
That in education is where I see a lot of this really going. The idea of the Jetsons and wearing a VR headset and 10 minutes later you now know how to fly an Apache or whatever it is, in the Matrix. I think that’s a little science fiction. There’s a lot of research and science that still has to go into that, but I think as an augment learning tool within education, I kind of see that as two years, three years, I think hopefully it’ll be accepted and we’ll get away from the concepts or the mentality of what a lot of people have right now around VR, of it being really just a VR console or video games, right? A majority of people, when you say VR, they think video games. It’s sort of the core, because a lot of the technology comes from that space. But I think in the future and in education, my hopes is that this technology will have more activity within that space, for sure.
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