While many people are interested in the potential applications of AR and VR in the entertainment space since that industry is so consumer centric, we want to take a look at the other types of companies that stand to benefit from AR and VR technology and how localization can help aid the adoption of both. Here are a few applications to keep an eye on.

Healthcare & Mental Health

The healthcare industry is arguably one of the most exciting industries for VR to make an impact on. From improving surgical efficiency to simulating health conditions so doctors can have more empathy to helping patients decrease pain, VR has the potential to majorly improve the healthcare industry. There are also advances being made in the mental health space thanks to Virtual Reality Experience, which is a treatment that is showing promising results in having positive effects on patients and providing a calming effect on patients’ minds.

Education

Education tends to be slow at adapting to new technologies because of how bureaucratic their acquisition processes can be, but even so, some institutions are taking notice and venturing into the space. Because VR is attractive to young students, it is quickly becoming an integral part of field trips, educational games, and other learning experiences.

As students progress and pursue higher education, VR can also make an impact. For example, medical students can use VR to simulate surgeries so they can learn and practice in a safe environment. When using VR, students can make mistakes that they can learn from without having to worry about the very dangerous results that could occur if they made mistakes on a real patient while learning.

Not to mention, VR is really making a splash in the field of e-learning, which can benefit students of all ages.

A great example of how AR is contributing in education environments is the medicine program at Case Western Reserve University. They are able to project an image of the human body that they can interact with through the use of HoloLens glasses.

Employee Training & Recruitment

Businesses who are looking to improve their recruitment and training processes can find that VR can help them make progress. When recruiting new employees, they can use VR to assess an applicant’s skills, without requiring them to come to an office in-person to interview. With more and more companies hiring remotely, VR can bridge a gap that would be difficult to fill otherwise. Once they hire an employee, they can also use VR to train them in a safe environment. This is especially helpful for very hands-on roles where technical training is required and where safety issues are a concern.

Retail & Sales

From training to the sales floor, retailers can benefit from embracing VR and AR. For example, through VR, employees can interact with products and can learn about them in a way that is superior to just reading about them. AR can also be used to show customers what a product would look like in their home, making it easier for them to visualize how a potential purchase would impact their daily lives.

How Localization Comes Into Play

The key to VR’s success in all these different industries and spaces is the immersive experience this technology provides. That being said, for it to be successful, this immersion has to be accompanied by “localized worlds”, where all the speech audio is in a language the user understands. If visual cues or prompts include text, these elements also need to be translated. Otherwise, the user will find herself in a world they can’t make sense of, the immersive experience will be shattered, and the ultimate goal (whether it’s learning a skill, healing trauma, or just disconnecting from the real world and getting some entertainment) won’t be achieved.

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Understandably, creating L&D materials in English is a popular choice for global organizations that feel they neither have the budget nor time for translations, but assuming people understand English is one thing and assuming they understand the cultural differences is another. The clash is inevitable.

While you’re likely to start with an English training program, there are a few things you can take into consideration and do in the development stage in order to make its localization easier and more cost-effective.

Choose Function over Form

Everyone loves a beautiful design, but when it comes to creating effective L&D training materials, the function must take priority over form. This is especially true when creating L&D content that requires localization. For example, adding animations can be visually appealing and add a fun flair to the L&D experience. However, when you have to localize complex design elements repeatedly, you may find those extra special touches don’t justify the cost of localization. Before choosing design elements, think about how they will affect your localization needs and if they provide enough value to justify localization.

Choose Your Layout Wisely

When you translate written content, this can affect the visuals of your L&D content greatly as other languages can take up much more or less space than written English text after translation. More often than not, other languages take up more space than English text. When choosing your initial layout, it helps to be strategic knowing that your space needs may change. Leaving a decent amount of white space in your original design can make a huge difference. While you can request that the localization specialist keep their new text concise and your designers can shrink the size of the text a bit, having more white space available to add expansive text can give you some much-needed breathing room.

Make the Choice Between Subtitles and Voice-Over

In an ideal world, you would localize all voice-over and subtitle content in your L&D materials, but this cannot be easy to pull off budget-wise as you would need to not only translate the subtitles and voice-over scripts, but hire a new narrator and record new audio content in all target languages. You may find that you need to choose between localization with just subtitles, voice-over, or dubbing to accommodate your budget. Think carefully about which format will best highlight your training materials.

Be Patient

The localization process is one that is best not to rush. To start, it can be helpful to wait until your source content is complete to provide the localization specialist with editable files. This will not only save you time, but money.

It’s also a good idea to coordinate timelines with your localization partner to ensure that the turnaround is viable and won’t require compromising quality to get the job done on time. Your localization partner will be able to advise which steps are needed to complete the project correctly and how long it should take.

The Takeaway

How can you make it easier to incorporate all of these tips into your L&D plans? Don’t leave planning the localization step for the end. If you keep localization needs in mind from day one, you’ll save money, time, and a headache.

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Employees Learn Better

Even if your workforce all speaks the language of business—aka English—, providing employees with access to training materials in their native language can help them learn better. Doing so can also make them feel like they belong to a more inclusive workplace environment. You can help avoid unnecessary misunderstandings and can make it easier for them to retain information by allowing them to learn in their native language. If you can provide your employees with resources that make thriving in their job easier, why wouldn’t you?

Employees Get Maximum ROI on Learning Initiatives

When employees understand and retain educational materials better, that clearly benefits their personal and professional development, but their employers also benefit. If you’re going to invest a lot of time and money into creating learning initiatives and then are going to have your employees commit more time and resources to consuming that content, you want to get the most ROI possible. When you provide localized training materials, you can help increase productivity and can enhance retention of the learning materials — all of which end up benefiting you as their employer.

Companies Create a More Equal Workplace

Employers should take whatever steps possible to create a more fair and equitable workplace. One way to do this is to give all employees, no matter what their native language is, the same level of opportunity when it comes to improving their skills and reaching their full potential at your company. If a company doesn’t localize its training materials, they risk putting non-native English-speaking employees at a disadvantage. While they may not mean to do this, they may make it more difficult for their employees to grasp critical concepts by not localizing their training materials. If you want a global workforce, you need to support them properly and localization can help you do that.

Companies Enjoy Optimal Resource Utilization

When you expand your workforce globally, you must also enhance your training efforts to make them work on a more diverse scale. While localization is an investment, that investment will pay off and save you time and money in the end by helping you make the most of the resources you already have. When you localize your global training program, you create a better company culture, help employees learn better, and make a fairer working environment, and as a result, your employees will thrive. You want all of your employees to have the best chance of understanding and retaining learning materials and localization can help you reach that goal.

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For Onboarding Employees

For new employees, the onboarding process is extremely important. It can also be very overwhelming and quite frankly — boring. The onboarding process typically includes an introduction to the organization and its history and key figures within the company, tackles important HR issues, and helps the new employee adjust to the company culture. 

Through games and virtual interactions, VR can make the onboarding experience more engaging and lively, helping new employees weed through a lot of important information in a way that keeps them excited and ready to learn more. Because of COVID-19 restrictions, some companies are even using VR to offer office tours to their new hires safely at home. 

The employees at Ericsson’s USA 5G Smart Factory in Texas utilized VR during their onboarding processes and had almost no face-to-face interaction during their initial training. Instead, they learned directly from their peers in the company’s smart factory in Tallinn from 8,000 km away, thanks to VR-enabled virtual collaboration and knowledge sharing. No travel was required and Ericsson found the process to be more efficient and productive. 

For Practicing On The Job Skills 

One main component of corporate training is to help employees learn how to do their jobs. Employees can practice the skills needed to perform a job across a variety of industries and roles using VR techniques to make training easier and more effective. For example, to make miners’ jobs more safe, cost-effective, and productive, there is VR technology that simulates situations miners encounter at real blast walls. These VR trainings can help them perfect their craft in a safer and less expensive way than building these skills at actual blast walls. 

Airline pilots are another great example of how someone can build their job-required skills in a safe environment. Pilots can interact with virtual cockpits that offer an interactive image of the control panels. They can watch videos of flights from the cockpit jump seat that provide a realistic 360-degree POV. They can also undergo a virtual tour of the aircraft to learn more about their future work environment. 

Compliance and Safety

Employee safety should always be a top priority of employers and VR techniques applied to corporate training can help accomplish that goal. Not only can employees learn the safety and compliance rules they need during e-learning, but if you add in VR, they can also put what they’ve learned into practice to make sure they know how to do their job in a safe and compliant way. There are creators working on OSHA compliance courses that utilize VR techniques.

Jobs that require building muscle memory and to retain important safety information (such as someone who works with live wires) can benefit greatly from practicing their skills in a zero stakes virtual environment. The costs and risks that can come from making mistakes in a VR simulation are practically non-existent, whereas people can get severely injured or even die while training in the real world if they need to perform dangerous tasks. The construction, fire safety, manufacturing, medical, and transportation industries can all benefit from VR in compliance and safety training. 

Why VR Improves Corporate Training

VR offers immersive and engaging experiences that can result in employees learning better and faster during corporate training. That being said, VR is not enough to make up for serious e-learning barriers. For example, language is an important component that can’t be overlooked in corporate training, even when VR is involved. When creating training materials it is imperative that language does not become a distraction for the employee. Localizing e-learning courses into different languages and taking cultural variances into account can help ensure that all of your employees fully understand their training material, feel supported, and stay engaged.

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When it comes to integrating VR into the workplace, the possibilities are endless. However, there are a few key benefits that companies are currently experimenting with that are worth considering. 

Improving Corporate Training

One main benefit of using VR in the workplace, is that employee training and onboarding can benefit greatly from these applications. There are many ways VR can play a role in corporate training, from making basic training materials more engaging to allowing them to practice vital on the job skills in a safe environment. VR applications to e-learning can help increase information retention, can create low stakes practice opportunities, and can allow employees to fully visualize what certain work assignments and environments will look like. 

Collaborating in Interactive Virtual Rooms 

Remote teams can greatly benefit from the connection potential that VR can offer. With more and more employees working remotely than ever before, they may be struggling to communicate in their new digital environment. For example, some employers are embracing collaborative and interactive virtual rooms that utilize 3D visualization features enabled by VR to provide a better replica of in-person meeting experiences for remote employees. These rooms use spatial computing technology to help foster staff collaboration in a more realistic office environment and can allow them to perform more typical in-person teamwork activities, such as writing on a virtual whiteboard like they would in a real life conference room. 

These 3D conference rooms can give employees the option of adding photos, videos, sticky notes, and text to a virtual white board in a way that feels collaborative and engaging. In these virtual rooms, employees may be able to see a 3D representation of an upcoming product design and they even have the potential to add notes directly to the 3D model in real time. These are just a few examples of how VR can make certain aspects of remote working feel less remote.

Creating Virtual Events

With countless in-person events cancelled in 2020 and with so much uncertainty about the future of large gatherings, VR provides a unique opportunity to overcome social distancing barriers. Those who run professional conferences in particular are eager to resume operations and VR can allow them to convert an in-person conference into a fully interactive virtual event. 

Virtual avatars allow attendees to network digitally in a way that feels personal but also doesn’t require physical social interaction. Panelists can host sessions from simulated, 360° rooms where viewers watch and submit questions from the safety and comfort of their own homes. Conference hosts and guests can host in-depth technical tutorials, can present new products, and can initiate thought provoking conversations all with the help of VR.

Satisfying Social Needs

While working from home has its perks, there is no denying that it can get a bit lonely from time to time. VR provides a socially receptive environment for employees to interact with their colleagues by providing the possibility to feel like they’re in the same room together, even though they are in different locations. For most, the biggest struggle to adjusting to working remotely was missing the consistent social interaction a job can provide. Luckily, VR is ready to rise to the challenge of making working remotely feel more social.

The post A Look at VR and a World of Possibilities Amid a Pandemic appeared first on Terra Translations.

Evolving the Workforce through Corporate Training Post COVID-19

Unfortunately, the toll of the pandemic is being felt in rising unemployment numbers. This means many employees may find themselves needing to adapt within their roles to accommodate staff changes at their company. Training is essential for helping employees adjust during this transitional process. Whether or not a company is currently operating remotely or in-office, e-learning can be beneficial to the corporate training process. 

According to the McKinsey Global Survey, 87% of executives reported experiencing, or expect to encounter in the coming years, skill gaps in the workforce. E-learning can help fill in these gaps and can extend corporate training opportunities far past the office. 

The Benefits of E-Learning for Corporate Trainings

Whether or not a company requires corporate training post COVID-19 be done remotely or in-person, there are two major benefits of e-learning worth considering. E-learning training is both cost- and time-efficient. Reusing training content and removing the need for a valuable employee to conduct training will save time and money, especially down the road once more and more employees have used the e-learning training materials. It’s easy to see why, even before the pandemic hit, 98% of all companies were planning to be using e-learning by 2020.

Speaking of saving both time and money, good e-learning training can help retain employees. Forbes found that 40% of employees who did not receive sufficient training left their job within the first year. If you invest in creating solid digital training processes, you may just find yourself with a more engaged, more skilled, and more satisfied workforce. 

Taking Advantage of Learning Trends

For corporate training to succeed, practical training that prepares employees for their actual job is necessary. Gamification is a fun and rewarding example of how e-learning can be optimized to help employees succeed. E-learning courses can utilize gamification techniques to train and engage employees through game thinking and game mechanics that encourage the learner to solve problems. 

Businesses can take advantage of e-learning trends that equip their remote employees to learn new material and apply what they’ve learned to their work quickly, all while allowing them to gain access to educational content and aids. These e-learning trends include: mobile learning, microlearning, gamification, and video-based learning.

A World of Opportunities

Another door that e-learning opens up for corporate training post COVID-19, is the ability to provide training to employees in their native languages. When employees learn information in their native language, they’re likely to have a better comprehension of the material. It’s less likely that they’ll have to worry about terminology or some piece of key information falling through the cracks.

The proper translation of corporate training materials is a great step to take towards a more skilled workforce.

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