strivr – Page 2 – Augmented & Virtual Reality Confabulation

October 14, 2017

Fidelity Using STRIVR to Train Employees Using Google Daydream

Virtual reality (VR) training company STRIVR is already well known for its immersive teaching systems which are used by the NFL, NCAA, NBA and NHL for their athletes. It’s not just sport that STRIVR is interested in, using its expertise to help major companies like Wal-Mart, United Rentals and now Fidelity to train employees on customer service, management, and empathy.

Fidelity is a financial services company that’s been using VR as a means to help improve its customer service by allowing call handlers to see the other side of their conversations with callers.

“The training is a choose-your-own-adventure experience, bringing the trainee into a virtual call center to help understand the impact of listening and helping the Fidelity customer through real-life scenarios,” Fidelity’s Adam Schouela explains in a blog posting. “Throughout the training, the Fidelity employee is “transported” between the call center and the customer’s living room to view the environment, facial expressions and personal perspective.”

Fidelity Empathy Training3

In one simulation Fidelity associate Sam: “observes the customer is staring at a pile of medical bills. In the background is a pair of crutches, and he can see she appears stressed and frustrated. He is then presented with a series of options of what to do next, and applies what he learned about this customer’s situation to guide her through the transaction.”

“He was able to observe what happened immediately following their phone call,” Schouela continues. “The customer calls her adult daughter, who is either happy to hear the outcome of her mother’s call, or is upset that Sam didn’t provide certain options. The trainee is able to quickly sense the impact of the help he provided and observe the feelings that are created as a result. He is transported back to his desk to assess and re-evaluate certain steps he made in the conversation.”

This type of VR training is useful in all types of situations where companies have to deal with customers remotely, giving a great sense of what they might be going through and how best to handle what can be stressful situations.

As STRIVR continues its training expansion to more industries, VRFocus will keep you updated.

August 31, 2017

VR Is Changing Sports: More Than 30 Teams Use STRIVR Training While SyncThink Diagnoses Concussions

Sync Think’s concussion diagnosis VR kit aims to accurately and quickly identify players who are injured.

A pair of companies are leading the charge to change professional and college sports using VR.

We’ve previously covered STRIVR, a startup which emerged from Stanford, as the company works to evolve training for football and other sports. The startup even extended out to the corporate world to train Walmart workers. We’ve now confirmed with the company more than 30 teams are using STRIVR with notable additions entering the winter and spring seasons including the US Ski Team, German National Soccer Team, Chicago Bears, Baylor Bears (college football) and the Chicago Blackhawks. STRIVR captures 360-degree footage allowing players to put on a VR headset to extend their training beyond the hours they spend on the field, slope, pitch, or rink. The startup has been rolling out its technology to more and more teams over the last few years.

Another company called SyncThink is working to diagnose concussions more quickly and accurately using VR. With an injured player donning a VR headset with eye tracking technology inside, and proprietary software powering the system, SyncThink aims to track eye movement patterns that are a signature of concussions. The company recently announced roll-outs at Iowa State and the University of Texas, which join Stanford University. The company expects to announce more partners in the coming months.

The classic way of testing for a concussion would be for a physician to move their finger in front of the player’s eyes and see how well it is followed. Using cameras and infrared lights inside a VR headset, though, SyncThink aims to objectively track the precise eye movements of a player. The below chart from SyncThink shows the eye movements of a healthy person and one suffering from a concussion. The jerky movements traced in the red indicate a concussion. As time passes you can see the movements more closely resembling the baseline.

SyncThink’s technology enables teams to “get an assessment of how the brain is functioning in real-time,” according to Scott Anderson, the former Director of Athletic Training at Stanford University, and SyncThink’s Chief Customer officer.

These companies are far from the only ones attempting to use VR to change sports, but they are doing real-world roll-outs aimed at making individual teams both better at the game and healthier in the long run. We hope to hear detailed results in the coming months and years that indicate how successful these efforts are at changing the game.

Tagged with: STRIVR, Sync Think, training

August 10, 2017

NFL Refs Using STRIVR’s VR Training Platform to Prepare for New Season

The NFL continues to maintain its strong relationship with VR technology, now employing the STRIVIR platform to train some officials. According to a report by SportTechie, the virtual reality training company has been working with the NFL’s Officiating Development Programs for the past nine months, presenting game scenarios in a VR headset from a referee’s perspective to supplement the limited opportunities for real-world practice.

According to the report, Strivr began working in earnest on a VR training program for the NFL offseason after the Super Bowl in February, providing officials with “life-like situations that put them into a game scenario so that they can react to plays much as they would on the field.”

The Strivr platform provides 360-degree capture of a game scenario, offering a convincing first-person perspective from an appropriate position on the field—an immersive upgrade over the standard video footage previously used by the Officiating Development Programs for training.

Perhaps the best way for an official to gain experience in a real-world NFL scenario is during the preseason (which recently began), a series of exhibition games which take place before the regular season kicks off in September, but such opportunities are very limited, and don’t offer the endless repeatability of VR training.

Improvements to replay technology in sports is a double-edged sword for referees; while the regularly-used ‘replay review’ system helps officials to make certain tough calls, the multiple-angle, slow-motion footage often works against the referee in many other situations, highlighting any mistakes during high-pressure moments. Having unlimited access to equivalent scenarios any time of year in VR could surely have a positive impact on officiating consistency.

“Refs are under a huge microscope and with replay, if they get something wrong, it’s seen,” Strivr CEO Derek Belch said in an interview with SportTechie. “This is how we take officiating to the next level and addressing some of the same issues players have.”

Strivr’s training platform was already well-established in the NFL from a player’s perspective, thanks to existing partnerships with seven NFL teams, providing off-field training in VR. The company claims that their technology speeds up reaction times, and helps to improve performance and decision-making. The company has enjoyed success in VR training in several sports, and scored a $5 million Series A investment last year that allowed them to expand their performance training into many corporate sectors.

The post NFL Refs Using STRIVR’s VR Training Platform to Prepare for New Season appeared first on Road to VR.

June 3, 2017

Walmart Using VR To Train Staff

There are some situations that can’t be adequately prepared for and only experience can teach people what to do. Some who have worked in retail would say that is the case for situations such as the mad rush of Block Friday or the run up to Christmas. Walmart, one of the world’s biggest retailers, is seeking to address this by using virtual reality (VR) to teach its staff.

Working in partnership with STRIVR, a VR start-up company that has previously worked with colleges and professional athletes, Walmart have developed a 360-degree video training program that includes various scenarios related to areas such as customer service, management or the Black Friday rush. The program offers the trainees on-screen cues inviting them to make decisions based upon the scenarios they encounter.

The training program began after STRIVR met with Walmart and began a pilot scheme in January 2017 which was rolled out to 30 Walmart training centres, which was used to fine-tune the VR experiences to make sure they were meeting the requirements of Walmart staff. The VR training programs last from 30 seconds to five minutes, and act as a complement to traditional training methods.

The STRIVR VR instruction program is being rolled out to all 200 of the ‘Walmart Academy’ training centres to help educate the estimates 150,000 employees of the retail chain that go through the training each year. Walmart management hopes that by the end of the year each training centre will have an Oculus Rift headset and high-end gaming PC to run the VR training content.

STRIVR CEO Derek Belch told TechCrunch: “We don’t do anything that is not a good use case for VR,” he said. “We have experiences for the lowest-level bagger all the way up to the store management. When you have literally the biggest company in the world as your first enterprise customer, that’s kind of a big deal.”

VRFocus will continue to bring you news on VR in training and education.

April 29, 2017

This Week in VR Sport: VR for Training In Basketball And VR At the Gym

It’s the weekend again, and what better way to relax than by taking in the news on what has happened this week in the wide world of virtual reality (VR) sports in the past seven days? This week, Hockey and Basketball are increasingly making use of VR for training, and VR is encouraging people to work out more.

Washington Sports Teams Using Oculus Rift for Training

Businessman Ted Leonsis is the owner of three sports teams bashed out of Washington D.C, The NHL Washington Capitals, the NBA Washington Wizards and Women’s NBA Washington Mystics. He is also someone who has invested in VR technology for the benefit of his teams. Coming from something of a technology background at AOL, he believes that VR will come to affect everything from player development to spectator experience: “It’s an inevitability, if you will.” he said.

The system used by the Wizards, Capitals and Mystics originated at the Virtual Human Interaction lab at Stanford University and is called STRIVR. STRIVR is now in use by seven NFL teams, three NBA teams, one major league baseball team and the US Ski Team. The various teams are all seeking to enhance their performance using VR technology.

Conditioning in key to performance improvement, which involves, quite simply, doing the same thing over and over again in realistic settings the correspond to the real environment where those skills would be used. The difficulty is that after a certain amount of practice, the body wears down, as practice doesn’t generate the same adrenaline rush as the real thing. Using VR is a potential counter to that, as it can simulate the real environment much more closely, thus generating the same rush and performance improvement.

For owners such as Leonsis who want to develop young athletes, the approach makes sense: “You draft players in the NBA where the kid goes to college for one year and then you put him on your team, and in the old days you’d give him a loose-leaf book with words and scribbles,” Leonsis said. “It looked like geometry homework. And you’d say ‘Well, you’re a rookie and we’ve already got starters and backups and you’re not going to participate very much, you’ll do a little in practice.’ And then we expect these players to get it. And why would we expect that when we’re not even teaching them the right way?”

Get In Shape With the Help of VR

A start-up company in Germany named Icaros have developed a VR exercise machine that allows users to get a full core workout while experiencing a deep sea dive or flying through the air.

Icaros founder Johanner Scholl is hoping to tap into the addictive quality of videogames combined with the immersion of VR to make exercise more interesting and pull users back into the gym time after time: “There’s no comparable thing you can do at a gym,” said Scholl, “I love road-biking and snowboarding, but I love to do that outside. In VR, I love to do stuff which I always dreamt of, but that I can’t do in reality.”

Over 200 gyms worldwide have already installed the VR workout machine, which cost $10,000 (USD) each, though a cheaper version designed for home use is being developed, aiming for a price point of $2,000.

Not all fitness experts are convinced by the technology, however. The fitness industry has tried various high-tech solutions to encourage exercise, such as putting TVs on treadmills, to little avail.

“A lot of this technology is being adopted by people who exercise already and not that much by people who are new to the game,” said Mr Remco Polman, head of exercise and nutritional studies at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane. He added that the only real way to enjoy exercising was by sticking with it, rather than trying to use gimmicks or technology.

Only time will tell who is correct in that debate. VRFocus will be there to inform you of the results whatever happens. This Week in VR Sport will return same time next Saturday. Keep an eye on the site for other VR and AR content.

February 18, 2017

This Week in VR Sport: Training And Trade With Both Kinds Of Football

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.

STRIVR_header2

“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.