Podcast 23: How will VR/AR/MR work with gamification in HR and learning?

Welcome to this week's A Question of Gamification. My name is An Coppens. I'm the chief Gamechanger at Gamification Nation, and this week's question is a good one. How will VR, AR, MR, and what on earth is the difference between all those, and Gamification play nice? It's a question that comes up from time to time. Because in learning, and in HR, we find that a lot of people have no idea what all the buzz words and all of the... they have an idea, but maybe not a full understanding of what the buzz words stands for and how they can all work together or where they're all separate beasts that you should be treating differently. So, the purpose of today's podcast is to answer the questions of what are these different reality things? Does that combine well with Gamification? Does it not? Should you just do one and not engage with the other? Or, how do you best integrate it into your suite of learning related solutions for your workers, or HR related solutions for your workers? Or whichever way you see fit on using a mix of these things in the workplace. First things first, let's start with the terminology. VR, or virtual reality, is where you typically today need a headset like an oculus rift or a google cardboard or any variety of quality devices in between or above. Basically, what that allows you do to is to escape into a virtual world. Now, in a virtual world, or in virtual reality today, most of the time we need to exclude what is going on around us and we step completely into that virtual space. Which is a great tool for, for example, when you need to simulate environments that people might not be use to. For example, flight simulators are an experience that we could call virtual reality today. Although, we could argue that you could actually play all of it as a mixed reality play because if the person is sitting in the middle of it and touching real equipment but the visuals are displayed on a screen, you're combining virtual reality with reality and giving a lifelike experience even though it's not for real. Simulations, for years have been, in a space in my view, where you find virtual and reality kind of blending together and giving feedback to each other. Virtual reality was designed, originally, with the idea of games. A lot of games, like escape rooms, can be played in virtual reality, but some of the cool games today are completely virtual reality based. If you are not sure what to test or what to try out there's two I would recommend trying. First of all any roller coaster experience, if you're not too afraid of roller coasters that is. And the other one is the play saber where you basically do a massive drum kind of set up and you're trying to keep up with the beat in virtual reality, which is pretty awesome. Or an escape room, of course, where you're in a virtual reality playroom and you need to unlock clues in order to get out. Virtual reality is typically, still today, with headsets which blank out reality. Augmented reality, most of us will have at some point heard of Pokemon Go or at least... you know, maybe not played but at least heard of Pokemon Go the game. Which, basically, brought augmented reality into our everyday, mass presence as such. It's where you combine the camera use of your smart phone with, lets say, fictional characters like Pokemon. And you combine real life and whatever is on your screen together to take some funny pictures, to catch them where they are, where you could be. Further than that, augmented reality is developing and some of the really cool type of material that's coming out is where it is much more seamless so that you don't even need a smart phone anymore. Which you might have holographic screens popping up. You may have heard of HoloLens, where actual human beings are holograms and you can pop up wherever your hologram needs to be for that time. It's basically combining reality with some form of digital augmentati...