With global events over the last year speeding up existing trends towards remote working and virtual experiences, major tech companies are banking on virtual and augmented reality events, training and workspaces becoming major factors in the future of business. Accenture and Facebook have recently announced their plans to use virtual and augmented reality in the future. Both companies are planning to focus on virtual reality and augmented reality tools and services. They are investing in not just the technology but also the training to ensure their businesses are ready to lead the future of VR in business.
Facebook Recruiting European VR Specialists
Facebook is already at the forefront of virtual reality technology as the parent company of Oculus VR, and will create 10,000 new jobs within the European Union to help realize their vision of interconnected online virtual spaces, which Facebook is calling a metaverse. The social media giant already has development teams throughout Europe, including teams that played a key role in developing the hardware used in Oculus VR. Now it is seeking new recruits for its offices in France, Italy, Spain, Ireland, Germany, Poland and the Netherlands.
The recruitment drive aims to build teams of specialized virtual reality and networking engineers to bring Zuckerberg’s metaverse to life. Facebook is at the forefront of developing the metaverse concept. The metaverse will not be a single product owned by one company, however. Instead, Facebook and other leading tech companies see it as a platform comparable in scope to the internet. As companies develop products and spaces for it over the next decade, it will enable people to work, learn and socialize across connected virtual spaces. At this stage, it is too early to say how this will work. However, many expect it to have an enormous impact on how we work and interact, similar to the internet.
The metaverse is far from the only new virtual reality project Facebook is working on, however. Back in August, the company launched a free VR workspace platform for Oculus Quest 2 owners, dubbed Horizon Workrooms. Already in use at Facebook, the platform aims to allow easier collaboration between remote workers. It enables users to log into a shared VR space to replicate the experience of in-person interactions. The platform includes many of the features and integrations we expect from workspace apps, such as Slack.
OneBonsai plans to be one of the first companies to integrate with the metaverse platform once it releases. The standardization it offers will make it easier for clients to adopt and make effective use of VR training applications. OneBonsai clients already use the OneBonsai VR Platform to quickly scale Virtual Reality training applications, and integrate them into their own training processes. These training modules have proven to improve retention and increase trainer – trainee ratio. With a growing portfolio of training modules, OneBonsai aims on bringing VR Training to companies large and small.
Accenture Buys Record Number of VR Headsets
Accenture is a multinational IT firm that delivers a range of software and tech to businesses. These include extended reality (XR) services that combine VR and AR. This week, the company made headlines by purchasing 60,000 Oculus VR headsets to train its new recruits. This will be the largest deployment of VR headsets by any single company to date. Accenture has not confirmed the full specification of the headsets they have purchased, but in a tweet giving more details about the announcement, Accenture CEO Nick Rosa describes the tech they are providing as “full 6-DOF self-contained latest generation VR headsets”. This leaves many to speculate that the company will be using the latest Oculus Quest 2 device.
The IT services and consulting firm plans to fill more than 125,000 new roles in the immediate future, and many of these new hires will be joining the company’s significant contingent of remote workers. Accenture had already brought almost 120,000 new recruits into the company over the last year despite the pandemic challenging the company’s usual approach to onboarding and engagement. As lockdowns led Accenture to focus heavily on training its new recruits remotely, its leadership team saw that these recruits were missing out on the excitement and connection with their new job that in-person training can provide, prompting their massive investment in immersive VR training solutions to deliver the engaging experiences that their new remote hires were lacking.
Remote Training Using VR
The newly acquired headsets will be distributed to these new joiners to enable more engaging experiences and more direct interactions with their instructors and new colleagues during the course of their remote training. While Accenture is primarily using VR training to recreate the social aspects of training and onboarding, this is only one of the benefits VR training can offer.
OneBonsai has developed a wide range of VR training tools to enable its clients to provide hands-on practice in situations that are too difficult, dangerous or expensive to simulate in the real world. Offering both off-the-shelf and bespoke VR training modules, OneBonsai has solutions for organizations large and small. Accenture is using VR and AR for a lot more than just training their new recruits though, and provides a range of XR services to its clients. Besides creating immersive training experiences similar to those they are using internally, Accenture also provides clients with VR services to help design and optimize the layout of physical spaces and product placements.
While it is hard to predict how the development of virtual workspaces will unfold, it is clear that VR tools and training not only provide vital engagement to remote workers, but also create learning and development opportunities that are only possible using VR and AR.
Is your business ready for the future of virtual reality?
OneBonsai can help your business take advantage of the latest VR technology; get in touch today to find out more.
