The many realities of skills development in TVET

The first thing you’ll notice when you enter the official website of the Swiss Chamber of Tourism under the “Davos” tab is the description of the this Alps destination as “a place of superlatives”. The second thing that will catch your eye is a friendly Roger-Federer-lookalike avatar eager to answer all of your leisure-related questions. These two features are related. And here is how.

In February 1996, John Perry Barlow, founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, wrote A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace in Davos. Barlow’s vision of a self-governing internet, where cyberspace is removed from the physical world, sounds like an anarchist utopia with dystopian elements.

“Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live”, Barlow postulates, foretelling Mark Zuckerberg’s promises in his Metaverse manifesto. “Our identities have no bodies”, he continues.

However, in Barlow’s digital utopia, bodies do exist albeit in a virtual manner – from the advertising industry avatars to the holograms of Mark Zuckerberg’s coworkers in the Metaverse. (Holograms are three-dimensional images formed by the interface of light beams.)

A group of academics at Stanford University and Columbia Teachers College have devoted the past decade to understanding how avatars influence learning. Specifically, Dr. Sandra Okita has published a paper showing that the mere act of having a social interaction with an avatar helped students improve their learning experience. Scholarly papers on avatars in communication and media, as well as in sports and training, present similar results: avatars act as drivers for change in attitude and motivation, his brings us back to the friendly headband-clad avatar of the Swiss Chamber of Tourism website. His sole presence should make us feel connected to a reality that is more “human” and therefore appealing to the average user who will likely spend more time on the website.

REALITY? OK, BUT WHICH ONE? A BRIEF HISTORY OF VIRTUAL AND AUGMENTED REALITY

According to Brenda Laurel, scholar and VR expert, “it’s extremely important to understand that ‘reality’ is a human-centric notion as it rests on human attributes that are not the same as those of a cat or a whale or a microorganism. Of course, one of our many great opportunities in VR is to represent as best we can those other species’ realities.”

Although the phrase virtual reality was coined in 1987 by Jason Lanier, the attempt to give the illusion of being present somewhere else dates back farther. In fact, if the goal of VR is to fool someone’s brain so it perceives something as real when it is not, we can consider those panoramic paintings from the nineteenth century as precursors of VR, at least in their intent of influencing the viewers’ sense of reality. It is that same sense of reality that was tricked in 1895, for a small audience that panicked and left the room where a projection of the arrival of a train was being shown for the first time.

VR historians talk about a first wave of virtual reality, spanning from 1985 to 1995, whose aim was to allow users to take some kind of action in computer-generated environments (that was the virtual component). Augmented reality (AR) was kicked off even earlier, in 1968, with Ivan Sutherland’s Sword of Damocles. In AR the user interacts with an environment (typically a “reality”) that is augmented through overlays that employ sound, sight, or other senses to increase or change his/her perception.

Nowadays, there is a good deal of definitions of VR, all overlapping in key areas. When deploying concept of “VR” now, we refer to computer-generated imagery and hardware explicitly designed to bring sights and audio to the user in a totally immersive fashion. However, according to Laurel, to really convey that sense of reality, technology must achieve not only sensory immersion in a virtual environment, but most importantly, it must provide a sense of presence and a sense of agency. In other words, based on Laurel’s Virtual Reality’s Principle of Action, “A participant must have affordances for moving about in the scene. A participant must be able to take action in the world and perceive the effects. This is part of the larger sense of personal agency” which is “characterized by frequency, range and significance of actions one may take”.

Laurel analyzed the evolution of VR and AR from their inception as powered by three agents: capability, intent and, not surprisingly, invention. Ever-evolving capabilities and intents are effectively shaping the virtual and augmented reality ecosystem, and examples of such are manifold. To mention just a few, in medicine, VR and AR have been providing immersive interactive displays of the patient's anatomy, gaining a meaningful role in planning, training, inter-procedural guidance and rehabilitative therapy.

Novartis, Pfizer and Bristol Myers Squibb have successfully developed virtual reality pharma labs where instructors demonstrate life-saving tasks such as the precise and delicate process of transferring liquid and hand the pipette to students, who safely rehearse the same procedure. AR and VR tech companies are partnering with mental health providers to develop solutions for individuals with mental health conditions and behavioral disorders to provide alternative treatment methods to autism, Alzheimer’s disease, anxiety disorder, phobias, and learning disabilities and difficulties.

Earlier this year, the New Yorker featured an article boosting the positive impact of a VR training for journalists in hostile and dangerous environments. VR goggles on, the training catapults the participants in eerily realistic landscapes featuring screaming mobs, car bombs, violent right-wing activists, and terrorist attacks, among other scenarios. Extremely satisfied participants claimed that this sort of simulations allowed them to safely improve their decision-making skills in ways that journalism schools or even field work could have never prepared them for. It is the sense of reality and of agency that did it for them, so much so that a participant claimed to have “tasted that metallic, get-me-out-of-here adrenaline flavor at the back of his mouth”.

Lorenzo Capannari, CEO of Anothereality, is no stranger to adapting his own mindset to the unpredictable markets demands of the XR landscape: the company that he built has leveraged its experience in virtual gaming to solve real business problems thanks to virtual worlds technologies and immersive solutions. Lorenzo claims that XR training cannot simply rely on skills acquisition, andtrainings need to be engaging experiences. “When costumers are engaged, they are not just trained, they are motivated, and they come back for more”. This goes beyond the Degrees of Liberty allowed by VR technology, it’s about creating immersive environments where trainees have the freedom of engaging in meaningful learning experiences where they are the agent of their actions, whether they are developing the target skills in a first-person VR simulation, or whether they are accomplishing a task through an avatar.

Interaction design has been improved over the years by major enhancements in the fields of machine vision, GPS and Bluetooth, video tracking, eye-tracking, and modeling-and-simulation. New user-friendly inexpensive platforms have been made available to both developers and customers, and the pervasiveness of smart phones, has made possible for AR apps to be embraced worldwide in the spam of a few weeks: think of Pokémon Go as a pioneer of personal agency for all in an affordable AR context.

Learn more about the ITCILO XR Expo 2021 and meet the thinkers and companies that are working to provide innovative inclusive XR solutions for the TVET workforce.