I returned to MeetspaceVR last week with my friends on the CIPD Coventry & Warwickshire Committee, for a virtual reality experience.
The key word is experience.
I hope you can see the pictures, which give an idea of how it works. You and your team wear goggle, headphones and a battery pack which connects and powers it all. Depending on the experience, you may also carry a gun, which shoots (virtual) laser beams.
What I cannot communicate to you adequately via this medium is what it looks and sounds like inside those goggles and headphones. I was transported to a virtual world of blue skies, deep seas, ancient temples with pathways to the sky surrounded by purple frogs and flying blue whales.
I said it was an experience.
In the second experience we worked as a team to clear a spaceship of alien invaders: think what it must be like being inside a computer game. The Star Wars style walkway across a bottomless abyss was a heart stopper though.
That was the virtual: here is the reality.
We could not experience this from our homes on our computers, zoom like. We had to travel to the centre of Birmingham, then find the entrance which was in one of the most threatening looking cars parks in the city (this is saying something: for my UK readers, if Line of Duty needs another set for a crime scene…).
For me it took nearly 2 hours to get there, slightly quicker on the way home.
You could not get the experience without being in that arena.
It gives an idea of how far technology has developed, and where it is going. What we did for about £20 each is what flight simulators have been delivering for years at a much larger cost.
The effect on your mind is interesting too: you quickly lose the idea this is virtual – even if I apparently died 4 times in the spaceship (where death = your ‘gun’ going white for 10 seconds. If only…)
It is also ‘intense’, that is exhausting. A 15-minute experience leaves you drained yet exhilarated.
The same technology can be used to help people learn. I have seen another example where VR is used to train battlefield medicine – bandages, wounds, drips, but without real blood. You can also use technology to help with presentation skills – practice your presentation to a virtual audience – which could be 10 people around a table or 10000 in a conference hall.
The big learning: the experience is virtual, but it is the experience that matters. As we move towards more face-to-face events, they will need to be a good, maybe great, experiences if we are to tempt people into the room, and away from their technology.
If you want, try it yourself – https://meetspacevr.co.uk/?gclid=CjwKCAjwlcaRBhBYEiwAK341jSuIVN-FwEnQabwxx-RBccveNdKXi_F4UZ5QjbF5UnX5GvZXQTChuBoCahwQAvD_BwE
Buzzword of the Week – Yield Curve
Definition – A yield curve plots yields (interest rates) of bonds having equal credit quality against maturity dates. The slope of the yield curve gives an idea of future interest rate changes and economic activity. There are three main shapes of yield curve shapes: normal (upward sloping curve), inverted (downward sloping curve), and flat.
It is used as a benchmark for other debt, such as mortgage rates or bank lending rates, and used to predict changes in economic output and growth. The most frequently reported yield curve compares the three-month, two-year, five-year, 10-year, and 30-year U.S. Treasury debt.
Alternate View – You would expect the normal: most of the time you get it. Yet the one watch remains an inverted curve, which is historically correlated to recession. As for flat: it doesn’t last long, as otherwise it would not be called a curve.
Coming Up…HR Hot Topics – Florajane Lynch and I will be facilitating a discussion around the return to work – office, home, hybrid – what works? This Friday 8th 1.00pm online – book at https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/online-cipd-cov-warks-hr-hot-topics-networking-meeting-tickets-303467789327?aff=ebdsoporgprofile