Originally a virtual reality (VR) training solutions provider for sports teams, Strivr has since expanded its focus towards the enterprise markets, now partnering with companies including BMW, Fidelity, JetBlue, Verizon and Walmart. Today, Strivr has announced the completion of a Series B funding round, securing the company a $30 million USD investment.
The round was led by Georgian Partners with existing investors GreatPoint Ventures and Alumni Ventures Group taking part. Franklin Templeton and Prologis Ventures joined the round as new investors. The new funding will allow Strivr to further its immersive learning solutions for enterprise use cases, designed to help companies improve workforce engagement and performance.
“With more than 1.5 million training sessions conducted in VR and over 22,000 headsets deployed across our customer base, Strivr has developed the world’s only end-to-end software platform for the delivery of immersive solutions to elevate workforce learning and performance,” said Derek Belch, founder and CEO of Strivr, in a statement. “We are thrilled to leverage this new round of investment led by Georgian Partners to more rapidly accelerate the adoption of Immersive Learning in the enterprise and take the next step in connecting immersive data to real-world performance improvement.”
In addition to the funding round, Strivr has announced the issuance of a patent by the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) covering the measurement of training data in VR. The company has developed an algorithm which uses sensing data from sources like head, hand, and eye movements, as well as physiological data, to predict how performing a task in VR will translate into a real-world situation. Thus giving clients a better understanding of how VR will benefit their particular industry.
“With the rapid increase in large enterprises embracing Immersive Learning to improve performance, we are now able to connect employee learning with business outcomes using completely new types of data,” said Tyson Baber, Partner at Georgian Partners, who has joined Strivr’s board of directors. “We believe in Strivr’s team, mission, and methodology, and are very excited to partner with them as they deliver the next generation of predictive, workforce analytics.”
Strivr has now managed to raise $51 million in venture funding. As the company continues to drive immersive learning forward, VRFocus will keep you updated.
Saturday means another trip into the area where the world of virtual reality (VR) interesects with the world of sport, presumably represented by some sort of Venn diagram. This week in there is an incredible mix of sports – whether or not you consider them all to be one – but it is all still a bit US-dominated.
VR Praised By College Football Coaches
Not a week goes by without some kind of American Football related story being included in our Saturday sport round-up, and if you were hoping the Super Bowl spelt the end of those for a while I’m afraid you’re mistaken. We may be in the post-season but that only means it is a time for reflection, and after its first season in full use as a coaching tool for many professional and college teams VR has proven its worth as an aid – at least according to one coach.
Speaking in a video to Fox Sports, Texas Tech coach Kliff Kingsbury described the vital role the team’s system – provided by STRIVR – is playing in developing younger players.
“College football is incredibly competitive. You have some of your top-tier programs who get the five-star players. If you aren’t getting those players, you better find advantages elsewhere. And virtual reality has helped us dramatically.” It’s also changing the way players prefer to look back at archive tape of their opponents and themselves, as Kingsbury explains. “One of the bigger things is that I see them wanting to go use the virtual reality,” Kingsbury said. “It’s not easy to get them to watch the standard film anymore because they want to put [the VR headset] on, they want to see it and hear it from that perspective. Because that’s how they play.”
Another college coach Matt Rhule of New Baylor will be bringing the technology on board next season after being thoroughly impressed by what he has witnessed in his previous coaching role. “I’m a huge, huge believer in virtually reality. We had it for the last two years and won 10 games in each of those years. I think the eyes are one of those untrained aspects of football. Everybody talks about ‘speed’ and how fast a guy is. But it’s also about recognizing players and structure, and I think instincts can be learned and taught, so that intangible thing becomes tangible.”
Manchester United Tean With Swissquote For 360 Degree Series
Manchester United’s captain Wayne Rooney, along with teammates Sergio Romero, Marcus Rashford and Anthony Martial have teamed up with Swissquote, one of Manchester United’s commercial partners, to be a part of a new series of videos that will see show the “synergies between FX trading and football”. With the first video in the 360˚ series called “Take the Lead” looking at the direct similarities between a player and a trader.
If this sounds a bit silly to you, yes you’re right, it is.
It does however use the 360 degree vision in an interesting and creative manner however, offering a splitscreen view, or two lots of 180 degrees between both parties. Episode 1: “Take security” features Rooney preparing to leave for a game, with future videos set to show Romero going through his morning routine, Rashford engaging in a video call with former Red Devil’s star Andrew Cole, and Martial getting dressed up smartly for an event. All with a trader equivalent doing the same thing.
We might be but a day away from Christmas, and indeed just over a week away from bidding adieu to 2016 and greeting 2017 but, as we so often say, virtual reality (VR) continues to develop and no more than in the world of sport.
New York Jets President Lauds VR
Our first story comes from the world of the NFL, an area we’ve touched on frequently this last year. Neil Glat, the President of the New York Jets recently undertook an interview with Sportechie.com in which he described the efforts being undertaken by the franchise to utilise technology – including VR.
Later describing VR as a “key initiative” going forward into 2017, when first asked about what tech had blown him away in recent times. VR was the first thing mentioned.
“We are very excited about what is going on in virtual reality and digital ticketing. We believe strongly in both and have robust initiatives for each.” He explained. “Through our partnership with STRIVR Labs, our football operations staff uses the technology for player development and on the fan engagement side we have utilized it to enhance our game day experience. Specifically, through our VR Lounge, we have created an immersion zone that has enabled our fans to experience such things as running out of the tunnel with the team, standing in the center of the locker room and witnessing up-close, in-game action. It has become one of the most popular pre-game destinations, consistently serving hundreds of fans every Sunday.”
It’s A Time For Giving In Baltimore
Meanwhile, if you can’t get a head-mounted display this Christmas and you live in Baltimore, you may have to look to your own American Football team for the cause. ABC News reported the unusual story that the Raven’s quarterback Joe Flacco gave the teams offensive linemen all VR headsets for Christmas.
That’s 14 systems for the squad – can anyone have spent more on VR systems this Christmas?
VRFocuswill return with another look at how VR is impacting sport next week.
STRIVR Labs, a company focused on using VR for sports training, plans to use a new $5 million investment to expand the scope of its “experiential learning” platform.
According to a press release from the company, Strivr’s $5 million Series A investment was led by Signia Venture Partners with participation from BMW i Ventures, and AdvancIt Capital.
Strivr was co-founded by former Stanford Cardinal kicker Derek Belch and Jeremy Bailenson, the founding director of Stanford’s Virtual Human interaction Lab. The company now counts 25 professional and collegiate teams among clientele making use of its VR sports training technology. The platform has been used by players to review more than 50,000 different plays and scenarios for thousands of collective hours, according to Strivr.
Now the company plans to focus on the broader category of “experiential learning,” which includes enterprise training for areas like sales, operations, customer service, safety,
and HR.
“STRIVR’s success to date has come from being able to improve reaction time, pattern recognition, and decision making in athletes—the same outcomes sought by organizations of all types and sizes. STRIVR is already off and running with its platform expansion, as the company is already working with a handful of Fortune 500 companies on comprehensive training programs utilizing VR,” the company writes in its announcement.
Strivr’s refreshed website also shows the company focusing on more general branded VR content, with a bent toward measuring engagement data and analytics insights.
When Derek Belch was a kicker on Stanford’s football team in 2007, he took a class with the Virtual Human Interaction Lab’sJeremy Bailenson where he was exposed to virtual reality technologies for the first time. Belch asked Bailenson if it was possible to use VR to train football players, but the technology wasn’t ready yet back in 2004. Fast-forward six years, with Oculus Rift VR development kits readily available, Belch started a master’s thesis project with Bailenson to study how to use VR to train quarterbacks.
Their pilot program had promising results, but not enough conclusive evidence to be able to say for sure. But the response from football players and coaches was so overwhelmingly positive that they decided to start a company called STRIVR Labs to put their research into practice. They quickly signed up Stanford, Vanderbilt, Clemson, Auburn, Arkansas and Dartmouth as their first official partners to continue their research, and they also started working with NFL teams including the Cowboys, Cardinals, Giants, Vikings, and Jets.
LISTEN TO THE VOICES OF VR PODCAST
I had a chance to catch up with STRIVR Lab’s Chief Science Officer, Michael Casale, at the Experiential Technology and Neurogaming Conference in May. Casale was brought on by Bailenson to help advise Belch’s master’s thesis on learning transfer and category learning techniques that would optimize the learning process. He’s continued this transfer learning research by working with elite athletes at both the collegiate and professional level at STRIVR Labs since it moved from an academic research project into the real world.
Casale was hesitant to report on specific quantitative evidence since there are a lot of proprietary metrics that they’re using internally, but he said that there’s been a lot that’s been reported within the mainstream press. The San Diegeo Tribune reported that Stanford quarterback “Hogan’s pass completion rate jumped from a 65 percent average over the first 10 games of the season, to a 76.3 percent average over the last three games – right around the time he started using the virtual reality trainer to study defenses and make decisions.”
The article emphasizes that correlation is not causation, and establishing learning transfer from VR technologies to the real world is still an open problem. But there’s a strong indicator that VR is having a huge impact when looking at Arizona Cardinal’s record 13-3 season with VR early adopter Carson Palmer telling ESPN that “I think it’s improved my stats. It’s improved my knowledge of our offense.” ESPN speculated that “It might not be a coincidence that Palmer had the best season of his career, throwing 4,671 yards and 35 touchdowns, and finished the season with a career high in quarterback rating (104.1) and QBR (82.1).”
Casale hinted that there’s a lot of value that’s being gained from VR training that might not explicitly show up within the existing statistics that drive fantasy football leagues. Being able to detect an oncoming blitz and dynamically changing the play before the snap is one example of a skill that can honed within VR, but not directly measured on the field. Quarterbacks can also watch themselves from the 360 footage and they can then work on correcting their throwing motion and footwork in the offseason.
A vital part of the training is being able to have more interactive coaching sessions where the quarterback can re-watch different defensive positions and talk about how they would change or adapt their play. Here’s some footage of a Stanford quarterback reading the defense and telling his coach what he sees.
Rather than translating X’s and O’s of a play from a 2D whiteboard in their mind, quarterbacks can prepare and watch what the field actually looks like from VR reps. Carson Palmer was learning 171 plays in 5 days using STRIVR Labs VR system installed in the comfort of his own home.
VR locomotion is still an unsolved open problem, and so most of STRIVR Labs’ VR training for football, basketball, football, baseball, and soccer is shot using a stationary 360 camera, but they’re looking to be able to move around as well. It’s likely that they would have to move to a CGI environment for that, or perhaps there will eventually be a breakthrough in volumetric digital lightfield capture. But for now, they’re focusing on training quarterbacks, goalies, watching pitches, and shooting freethrows.
One big challenge facing STRIVR Labs is that their sample size for elite athletes at the collegiate and professional level is still pretty small, and so determining the optimal combination and sequence of physical and virtual reps is one of the biggest open questions that they’re still trying to answer. This could explain a big motivation for why they’re considering expanding and scaling into high school training as well.
As the 360 video capture process evolves and becomes more mainstream, there’s not going be a lot of technological barriers for other competitors to start to enter into the sports training space, but knowing the optimal training combinations and VR production best practices is going to help STRIVR Labs maintain their current leadership position. And just as Sabermetrics revolutionized the ability to more objectively track impactful baseball players, then I expect that STRIVR Labs to come up with their own set of new objective measurements that use VR technologies to track the progress of learning and performance of elite athletes. And given the objective success that VR early adopters have seen, we can expect that virtual reality sports training is here to stay.
The round was led by Georgian Partners with existing investors GreatPoint Ventures and Alumni Ventures Group taking part. Franklin Templeton and Prologis Ventures joined the round as new investors. The new funding will allow Strivr to further its immersive learning solutions for enterprise use cases, designed to help companies improve workforce engagement and performance.
“With the rapid increase in large enterprises embracing Immersive Learning to improve performance, we are now able to connect employee learning with business outcomes using completely new types of data,” said Tyson Baber, Partner at Georgian Partners, who has joined Strivr’s board of directors. “We believe in Strivr’s team, mission, and methodology, and are very excited to partner with them as they deliver the next generation of predictive, workforce analytics.”
When Derek Belch was a kicker on Stanford’s football team in 2007,