
Walmart deploys Oculus Go headsets to train its employees - prostoalex
https://www.zdnet.com/article/walmart-deploys-17000-oculus-go-headsets-to-train-its-employees/
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gpm
With old fashioned boring training videos (e.g. safety) and training
propaganda (e.g. anti-union messages) you could easily look away from the
screen. Now they are gluing the screen to your eyeballs so that it's pretty
much impossible to look away and not pay attention.

It will probably work. It's probably a good idea from the employer's point of
view. It feels very dystopian.

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crazygringo
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.

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baxter001
If you think you have to glue content in front of their eyeballs, you've got
bigger problems than fulfilling your legally mandated requirement for check-
the-box training.

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tboughen
And that would be a fair comparison if before trainers were training with
death-by-PowerPoint and now they were doing the same inches from trainee’s
eyeballs.

However I’m hopeful that this new medium leads to interactivity by default,
furthermore there are first mover advantages to be gained from improved
engagement while VR is novel to most users.

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baxter001
"Improved engagement" in corporate training materials? I fear that's a concept
that only exists in the sales literature of training materials creators.

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HeadsUpHigh
I feel that improved engagement used to exist as a positive term before
marketers took it and added all the marketing garbage that comes with it
today. If something makes you less bored with teaching then it's worth looking
at.

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jaequery
After trying VR (Oculus Go) for the first time, I am convinced VR maybe the
future of education.

Being able to watch something in 3D as opposed to just 2D video is like night
and day.

Btw, I'm not talking about 360' videos, I'm talking about the 3D stereoscopic
ones. When I watch a video in 3D, I can actually totally relate to what I am
watching and it is as if I am actually there. It really helps with perception
and understanding the subject.

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jlg23
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!

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chongli
We'll never have enough high quality teachers. The more educated the populace
becomes, the more demand there will be for ever higher levels of education.

Education is a class separator. What matters is relative education, not
absolute.

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keiferski
The question is: are VR headsets going to significantly better at education
than say, a book?

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chongli
I'm pretty skeptical of that. Books are great at teaching kids to solve
integrals and write essays. I haven't seen any evidence to indicate that VR
headsets would help with these skills.

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CoryG89
VR is just a medium. Why would it not be just as capable at teaching kids to
solve integrals and write essays? You may argue that it can't possibly do any
better of a job than a book could, but I think it's unlikely that there is
anything a book could teach you that a VR headset could not also teach you.
After all, you could just digitize the book and read it in VR.

Also, it doesn't matter how good books are at teaching kids to solve integrals
if 90% of them won't even give the book a chance, but can't wait to get on
their headsets.

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pixl97
[http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm](http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm)

~~~
Wingman4l7
First thing my mind went to as well. Hardware sensors and wearable computers
are so cheap now...

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polskibus
I wonder whether they have planned for VR-induced nausea. With such a large
number of headset, the absolute number of affected people will be at least in
the hundreds. Some people just can't use VR at its current stage.

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wincy
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.

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crazygringo
I get horribly nauseous after 15 minutes in VR, but I've never tried the
Oculus Go.

Is this more of a PR stunt, or has the Go somehow solved nausea issues enough
that widespread workplace deployment is now considered feasible?

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nouveaux
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.

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dleslie
I am a VR developer and so have an i9, 1080, Vive, Oculus, and a Pixel2
Daydream; with hundreds of hours emersed.

I experience eyestrain and nausea within five to ten minutes. It takes
considerable effort to overcome.

The tech just isn't there yet for lighting. I am hopeful that real time ray
tracing will provide some solution...

It's not so bad with flat and Tron-like games.

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mattnewport
There's a pretty wide range of sensitivity. I'm also a VR developer and
relatively insensitive to nausea (I was happily playing unreal tournament on
the DK2 which made other people want to vomit pretty quickly). I almost never
experience any nausea these days, even after extended sessions in games with a
lot of motion. I hate anything without 6 dof tracking though, not because it
makes me sick but because it completely lacks immersion.

I've never heard anyone bring up lighting as a factor in nausea before.
There's certainly a lot of room for improvement for visual quality but it's
not something I've heard anyone discuss as a factor in simulator sickness
before. What do you think might be going on there?

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mattnewport
As a data point, our enterprise / healthcare customers (not particularly
technical and not generally gamers or previous VR users) don't bring up nausea
as an issue despite or training experiences lasting 15-20 minutes at times.

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shurcooL
I think VR would be a great way to practice giving talks, especially in front
of bigger audiences, etc. To practice being comfortable in that environment.

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kozikow
Check out virtualspeech

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sbr464
That’s a good link, thx

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FreeRadical
Interesting to see how employees that get motion sickness from VR will be
impacted

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

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deltron3030
AR, and overlaying "ghost scenes" over objects in front of you (e.g. a "ghost
engineer" showing you how to repair iMacs) will be super useful, especially
considering the "rewind" factor that doesn't exist in reality. You could learn
skills remotely that would require the presence in an apprenticeship.

This might be a big source of income for companies specialized in mechanical
engineering. They'd sell those ghost videos on a marketplace..

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skocznymroczny
"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?

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deltron3030
In AR or in a "real" 3D environment, skeumorphism could make a lot of sense
for manual tasks imo. On 2D screens it's a different story, but even there it
helped people to understand technology.

You're training hand eye coordination, and other than the instructor or your
master in an apprenticeship, you don't have formed habits through practice.
You stand in front of an object you want to interact with, and the ghost
basically directs your movement, showing you how to hold or lift components
and the ideal posture.

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JoshMnem
Does that mean that you need a Facebook account to work at Walmart now? People
should have the right to not use Facebook.

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user5994461
How long before the employees get a headache?

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kirykl
I’m skeptical this will achieve their goal of increasing employees’ empathy

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natch
"to train its employees"...

They could simultaneously capture training data for a coming workforce of
robots. What are the chances they aren't doing this?

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

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kerng
These sneaky Google amp links are making it everywhere... so annoying.

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dang
We changed the URL from [https://www.zdnet.com/google-amp/article/walmart-
deploys-170...](https://www.zdnet.com/google-amp/article/walmart-
deploys-17000-oculus-go-headsets-to-train-its-
employees/?__twitter_impression=true).

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kerng
Thanks! :)

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rbanffy
Maybe paying the employees better would help motivate them to learn more
efficiently.

