Whenever I talk about the future of recruiting, I always mention virtual reality as something we should all be keeping a close eye on. With that in mind, I invited Bruce Ballantine, the creative director of Articise to share a pragmatic view on the current state of the industry and give me a demo of some of their work in the HR space.
In the interview we discuss:
- What is virtual reality
- The difference between virtual reality, augmented reality and mixed reality.
- The power of immersive, interactive storytelling
- Will the latest headsets expand VR into a mass medium?
- The limitations of VR
- Considerations when using VR for talent acquisition
- The future of VR
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast comes from Boone. Boon is a unique platform that’s making referral based hiring effortlessly scalable and infinitely effective. Maximize your recruiting strategy today by visiting Goboon Co to learn more and schedule a demo. That’s Goboon Co and Boon is spelled B double O, N.
Bruce Ballantine [00:00:43]:
This is an Oculus Rift headset. And what you want to do here is spring loaded. So you put it on from the back of the head first, pull it over your eyes.
Matt Alder [00:00:52]:
Okay, I’ve got the headset on. It looks like I’m inside some kind of dome, which is, which is interesting.
Bruce Ballantine [00:00:59]:
That’s all going to change, so hold tight. Here we go.
Matt Alder [00:01:02]:
So the voice has started. The sounds amazing. It’s very immersive, crazy. I can look up, I can look down. I can see struggling customers in a very sort of colorful installation.
Bruce Ballantine [00:01:15]:
Okay, remember to look around because you can see all around you above, around 360 degrees.
Matt Alder [00:01:21]:
There’s stuff going on behind me as well and underneath me and above me. And now I’m on some kind of new build housing estate.
Matt Alder [00:01:31]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 191 of the Recruiting Future podcast. Whenever I talk about the future of recruiting, I always mention virtual reality as something we should all be keeping a close eye on. With that in mind, as you’ve just heard, I invited Bruce Ballantine, the creative Director of Artisise, to share a pragmatic view on the current state of VR and give me a demo of some of their work in the HR sector. Keep listening to hear more about the differences between VR, AR and Mr. The current and future state of the market, and the potential for an increase in the use of VR for talent acquisition.
Matt Alder [00:02:15]:
Hi, Bruce, and welcome to the podcast.
Bruce Ballantine [00:02:17]:
Thanks very much, Matt.
Matt Alder [00:02:18]:
Absolutely brilliant to be talking to you and thank you so much for coming to visit me in my office. You’re actually the first guest who ever has, so thank you.
Bruce Ballantine [00:02:27]:
Not a problem at all. I didn’t have to travel too far to get here.
Matt Alder [00:02:30]:
Absolutely. So could you just introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
Bruce Ballantine [00:02:34]:
Okay. My name is Bruce Ballantine and I’m the creative director at a company called Artisanal. Artisais are a design agency. We specialize in virtual reality, augmented reality and museum installations.
Matt Alder [00:02:46]:
Fantastic. And the reason we’re talking is, firstly, I’m massively interested in virtual reality and I wanted to share some of that enthusiasm with my listeners. And secondly, you know, I know you’ve done some sort of internal comms communication stuff for companies and some stuff in the sort of the HR talent space. Before we sort of talk about that, though, I always think it’s, it’s kind of important that people actually understand what VR is because there are lots of, there’s lots of jargon, there’s lots of things going on. Tell us what’s going on. What’s, what is virtual reality?
Bruce Ballantine [00:03:20]:
Okay, so virtual reality is essentially what it is, is. It’s a means of inhabiting a space. You project a space in 360 degrees around the viewer that enables them to look at any point of view in a sphere around them. Now, there’s some argument amongst people within this sector as to whether 360film belongs in the term, under the term of virtual reality. I would say it probably does, because we don’t need any more terms in this space. We actually need less. It’s overcomplicating things. But a purist would say that virtual reality is where not only can you look around in 360 degrees, but also the position of your head with respect to the room that you’re in alters your perspective. So virtual reality in its purest form allows you to not just look all around, but also to walk around a virtual space. And for the space that you see in the virtual reality sort of area, for the point of view to change as you move around it.
Matt Alder [00:04:26]:
And what’s augmented reality? What’s the difference between augmented reality and virtual reality?
Bruce Ballantine [00:04:32]:
Right. Okay, so augmented reality is, it’s very different, but at some point you can see convergence between the two technologies. I would imagine perhaps 10 years down the road. Right now, augmented reality means a couple of things, and again, there are multiple terms here. I tend to just go with the umbrella term of augmented reality for everything. But basic augmented reality, you would know best from something like Pokemon Go, which was an incredibly successful game. I guess it’s. How old is it now? It’s about a year and a half, two years old. What Pokemon Go did was it took digital content and it superimposed it on the real world. The thing about Pokemon Go was that the content, the digital content, had no awareness of the real world. So whilst it augmented it, it didn’t actually mix with it. And this is where there’s another term. Mr. And that stands for mixed reality. Mixed reality is like augmented reality, but it is content that is aware of the environment within which you place it. So, for example, it would Be aware of a solid, upward facing surface. So if you had a firework and you set off an augmented reality firework, then all the sparkles and bits and pieces and debris that fell from it would fall onto solid surfaces and react and bounce as if the surface were there in their digital reality. The other thing is that with the augmented reality libraries that you have In Android and iOS, they have the ability to pick up the light around them as well. So you can then light the digital content in a manner that approximates the light in the real space, so it mixes that content rather than just sticking over the top. Some people would say that mixed reality is very different from augmented reality. I would tend to see it’s all the same. Just call it augmented reality.
Matt Alder [00:06:21]:
Absolutely. As you say, they’re already too many terms. So I think that most people when they think of virtual reality these days will think about gaming. And you have been doing some sort of really interesting virtual reality installations. Is that the right word or what is the right word for a virtual reality thing?
Bruce Ballantine [00:06:45]:
Yes, I would call it an installation.
Matt Alder [00:06:46]:
So you need some interesting installations in the, in the, in the corporate. In the corporate world. What can you use virtual reality for other than, other than just gaming?
Bruce Ballantine [00:06:56]:
So virtual reality is exceptionally good at giving people a sense of presence, the sense of actually being there. And that’s really useful in a training context because if you layer on a very small amount of interactivity on the top of that, you give people a very rich training environment. And I suppose if we think about the maxim that’s often used within training, that if you tell me something, I’ll forget it, and if you show me, I’ll remember it, but involve me and I’ll understand. The power of VR is that you can get that involvement from people without them physically having to be involved in a training simulation in a physical space, which is often difficult to set up, it could be expensive, might be prohibitive, because people aren’t at the location where you need to provide the training for them. So they then have to be taken to that location. That has all sorts of implications from the point of view of actually flying people around and making them travel. So increasing carbon footprint. So the power of VR is to be able to gather people together in a single space and make them perceive it in such a way that it feels like they’re there. And I guess that encapsulates the term, or the term presence encapsulates that.
Matt Alder [00:08:14]:
So just before we started this interview, I was doing a bit of a demo with one of the sort of virtual reality worlds that you created, which was for rbs.
Bruce Ballantine [00:08:25]:
Yes.
Matt Alder [00:08:27]:
Tell us about that and what it was for and what it does.
Bruce Ballantine [00:08:30]:
So that was an internal communication piece. What RBs were very keen to do was to communicate the sort of changes that they had planned for the organization. And in many cases it was procedural changes internally, but that can be quite a dry topic. And what they wanted to do was get buy in from senior members of staff to the proposed changes. The way that they wanted to communicate that was in a VR piece that blended VR with a physical installation which you mentioned earlier on, and that was a dome projection system. So the first part of the story occurred within the dome projection system. And then at certain point, the headsets we had in this space, there were 50 Oculus Rift headsets were synchronized to start and people put on the headsets to see the next part of the story. And whilst in the virtual world, the dome projection system changed again. So that when they removed the headsets, there was a sort of reveal of the place that the bank wanted to get to. So the start was here’s where we are. The mid part in the VR space was here is people’s experience of the bank, and the end part was here’s where we want to get to. It’s the end of the journey.
Matt Alder [00:09:48]:
Having just sort of been through that experience, or certainly the Oculus Rift part of it, not the I say we’re in my office, we’re not in a dome projection system at the moment. What was really interesting for me is, I suppose my perception of virtual reality in the past, particularly when it’s come to using it for recruiting, has always been sort of quite a literal version of reality. So, you know, it might be the army using it for recruiting and you’re driving a tank, or it might be very much about the actual sort of physical experience or physical space. What struck me as really interesting about that, about that piece was it was kind of much more conceptual. Things were. Things were going on. It was. It was trying to get some concepts about. About change and make me sort of experience the customer’s viewpoint in a. In a. In a kind of a sort of almost not reality type of type of way. And that was, you know, that was really effective. Is that the sort of the art of doing virtual reality in these kind of business contexts?
Bruce Ballantine [00:10:49]:
I think it probably is, but it very much depends on what you’re trying to convey. So it worked very well in this place, in this context to use a narrative driven approach. And it’s something that we’re very keen on our background is all games development. So we come from that sort of narrative structure and it fits certain VR, certain VR pieces very well because if you’re able to provide an engaging story, people will remember it. And that’s the crucial thing here. What you want is recall. You want people to not just experience it and go, oh wow, that was good. I can’t quite remember what it was about though. You’re trying to convey a message and messages that are conveyed in a story structure, they’re very often, you know, you score highly on recall from the people who’ve been through those experiences. So it was, it was a decision that we took because we felt we wanted impact, but we wanted memorability as well.
Matt Alder [00:11:46]:
Absolutely.
Matt Alder [00:11:47]:
And I suppose that if you’re, if you’re actually interacting with something in that, in that virtual world, that kind of makes it more memorable as well.
Bruce Ballantine [00:11:54]:
Definitely, yeah. So interaction, it doesn’t always need to be the case. You always have agency in a VR space. And by that what I mean is your ability to change your point of view and to focus on the things that you want to focus on. That in itself is a very simple form of interaction, but that helps in the recall of what you’re trying to do. When you layer on actual interactivity, give people the opportunity to make choices, then you get a very powerful form of interaction. And the thing that’s good about that, the thing that’s very good about VR in that sort of situation, particularly where it relates to training, is that you can actually follow someone’s thought process. So by tracking where their gaze goes to. Let’s assume we had a scenario where you needed to train somebody so that they had good situational awareness in an emergency situation. And that could be for any number of reasons. Once people start using that simulation, start using that training package, you get to see what their eye is drawn to at key decision making points. Now it may be that they follow the whole training package seamlessly, but it might be that at certain key points in this training experience, their eyes seem to be drawn continually to the wrong part of the environment that you, the place you don’t want them to focus. And it might just be a fleeting glance. It might be something that even if you were an experienced trainer, you would miss, you wouldn’t pick up on it. But because you’re tracking that from within the headset in VR, you can get that analytic data back out and you can see if there is a tendency for people to be drawn to the wrong place. Now that’s Interesting for two reasons. Firstly, it might be that your training package is wrong, so that enables you to refine it and guide people in the correct direction. But it may be that the piece of equipment you’re training them to use, perhaps that’s inherently flawed as well. That then allows you to make design decisions about future, future iterations. So we’re talking about a continual process of refinement, either through the training or through the equipment you’re training people on. And that’s really powerful. And it’s not really something that certainly in traditional training spheres, it’s not really something, it’s not data you can access very easily.
Matt Alder [00:14:16]:
So it seems to me that I’ve sort of been talking about virtual reality as the. As the potential big future for recruiting and HR technology almost as long as I’ve been talking about recruitment and HR tech technology. I mean, it’s something that seems to have been around for quite a while. Where are we with sort of virtual reality at the moment in terms of sort of equipment and adoption? Is it the next big thing? Is it currently a big thing? What’s the sort of state of the industry?
Bruce Ballantine [00:14:44]:
It’s in flux. I guess if you were going to describe it as being anywhere, you would say it was fully in the trough of disillusionment as far as tech cycles are concerned. And that’s largely because when it first became a mass market thing with the emergence of Oculus Rift, it was touted as a paradigm shifting medium. It was never going to be a paradigm shifting medium. It’s never going to replace cinema or television. It’s very, very different. There are certain things that it does extremely well, and we’ve mentioned some of them already. But there are certain things where there are challenges that are pretty much insurmountable. And what you don’t want to do, for example, is put people in a situation where there are high acceleration or deceleration forces. Probably the worst environment you could put somebody in when they first try VR is a virtual roller coaster. Because your vestibular system, your inner ear, is very good at perceiving acceleration. And it ties what it sees in the real world with that sense of acceleration and deceleration. It might be just a sense of lateral G being pushed sideways when you go around a turn quickly. If you see something like on a virtual roller coaster, that high G turn, but your inner ear doesn’t feel it, well, that’s essentially the recipe for motion sickness. I mean, it’s. It’s the same reason that if you feel seasick, you should look at the horizon, because then your brain understands which way is up and can anticipate which way it’s going to move next. So, so VR has real strengths, but it has areas where the limitations are effectively insurmountable. They’re physiological, so you just learn to work with them. And that’s, that’s probably the reason that we’ve got this disillusionment now. And I think it’s also, it’s, it’s translated into people thinking that VR is dead. It’s absolutely not dead. It’s an incredibly strong piece of technology. You just have to use it appropriately.
Matt Alder [00:16:42]:
It’s interesting you talk about limitations because I want to talk about the sort of finish by talking about the future for VR in a second. But I know that lots of people who are listening are probably thinking about how they might want to use virtual reality in their, you know, in their recruiting process or to sort of advertise what it might be to like to work for them as a, as employer. You sort of mentioned those sort of physical limitations. What else should people bear in mind in terms of when they’re thinking about what would make a good virtual reality experience or a good use case for virtual reality?
Bruce Ballantine [00:17:17]:
I think from our point of view, we always try to deliver a virtual experience that isn’t just a facsimile of the real world. So if you’re trying to do, if you’re trying to run a design sprint to come up with a virtual reality experience, don’t start off with the premise of we’re going to replicate exactly what we see in everyday life. Unless you’re training people to operate machinery in an environment like that, try and do something that takes people to a place that they can’t go to. Virtual reality is fantastic. If you wanted, for example, if you were launching a new fuel, if you were a petrochemical company and you had a new fuel, and you want to see what’s different about that fuel, you know, figures don’t really do it, but if what you could do is put somebody inside this fuel, but at a microscopic level, so that they could see how that, how that fuel interacts at a very fine level, then visually it becomes something, it becomes something quite compelling. And that’s useful because obviously you’ll have journalists who are trying to find something to write about this particular event. Well, now you’ve given them a sort of visual framework to write within, and that’s just one. So that’s totally off the top of my head. But anyone out there who owns a petrochemical company, feel free to use that one. It’s that ability to put people where they can’t go, where. Where you couldn’t send them or wouldn’t send them. That’s its power. That’s where it’s really strong.
Matt Alder [00:19:01]:
So that final question. What about the future? As we’re recording this, Oculus brought a new headset last week. What does the future of this space look like? What should we expect and what should we be watching out for?
Bruce Ballantine [00:19:17]:
Well, I think there are a few things within virtual reality. Obviously, Oculus Quest is quite a big. It’s a big play by Oculus. What they’re trying to do there is remove some of the encumbrances that go along with VR right now. And that is things like the tether from the headset to a gaming laptop, which is something that you will have to put up with on all high spec VR headsets. The fact that you have to buy a laptop if you don’t have one. So that’s a significant outlay too, and that you also have to set up sensors so that you can detect the position of the headset. These are all things that one would hope are going to be eliminated. And that’s certainly what Oculus have done, is that they’ve recognized that’s a barrier, another barrier to entry. There’s too much technical setup. What you want is a headset you can pick up and just go with. So I think we see more of a trend towards that. I think we’ll see AR headsets starting to refine themselves. I know we haven’t really talked about it terribly much in this call, but AR is going to be a really big technology, particularly when it comes to training in environments where, again, off the top of my head, just because it was something I tried to do quite recently, hitching a trailer to a car, if you’ve never done that before, there are only three or four key pieces of tech to operate there. There’s a handbrake and a couple of little things to turn around. But if you know that if you don’t hitch the trailer to the car very well, it’s going to roll off down the motorway without you. It’s quite concerning. So in that case, if you have an augmented solution that can look at the trailer hook and annotate it and say, do this first, then do this, then do this, it gives you a degree of confidence. And so that’s just a small example of how you could use ar. But I think you’ll see AR come more to the fore. There’s a suggestion that Apple are coming out with an AR headset, whether that’s true or not, but it seems to be quite a strong rumor right now. One would expect that to be a pretty solid piece of technology. And a lot of the questions that we’re juggling with at the moment with an ar, you would hope that that would answer some of them. But long term, I think we’ll see convergence. You shouldn’t have to have multiple headsets for this sort of thing. They’re very, you know, if you take away the fact that at an optical level, they’re actually very different. The customer perception, the end user perception is that they’re actually quite similar. And I think ultimately, and this may be 15 years away, you’re going to see headset convergence so that there’s only one and that VR and AR all become part of a blended virtual space. And what opportunities that’s going to present for people, anyone’s guess.
Matt Alder [00:22:19]:
Bruce, thank you very much for talking to me.
Bruce Ballantine [00:22:21]:
Matt, thanks very much for having me.
Matt Alder [00:22:23]:
My thanks to Bruce Ballantine. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts or via your podcasting app of choice. The show also has its own dedicated app, which you can find by searching for Recruiting Future in your App Store. If you’re a Spotify user, you can also find the show there. You can find all the past episodes@www.rfpodcast.com on that site. You can also subscribe to the mailing list and find out more about Working with me. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next week and I hope you’ll join me.
