What data can you track in VR? It’s the million-dollar question businesses are asking as they push to make their VR dreams a reality. By using an agile analytics tool to measure specific training points, organizations can hone the effectiveness of their program. As more organizations explore potential use cases for VR training, people are tuning in to hear more about how learning metrics are integral to a smart business plan.
Immersive training engages learners with real-world scenarios. In fact, VR is most powerful when simulating what a bad day looks like. While shadowing typically goes smoothly, things can go downhill fast on the first day on the job. Unless a trainer is still hand-holding new hires throughout daily activities, new employees are left to troubleshoot uncharted waters on their own. Now, imagine if you could accurately measure how trainees self-correct their errors during the onboarding process. It’s an absolute game-changer to visualize how learners respond to a potential crisis, helping to determine how these metrics impact the bigger picture.
When organizations take a top-down approach to productivity, an extended reality system can help illustrate the mutually beneficial exchange of providing employees with immersive learning experiences and receiving valuable training metrics. By capturing performance data, businesses can address root causes for workforce deficiencies, implement training solutions based on those metrics, and experience the broader business benefits from the collective skill advancement of their workforce.
Better Training Outcomes
Moving the needle in your organization starts with better training outcomes. If tangible results are the unanimous motivator for adopting VR to enhance your training program, concrete data will pave your road to success!
A strong ROI requires effective learning experiences. In order to facilitate strong learning reinforcement strategies, organizations must first understand which areas of training learners need the most support. XR tracking pinpoints these types of deficits, reduces errors, and prepares employees to perform at their best! A powerful extended reality system not only gathers and displays metrics, but can also deliver content to a fleet of headsets while integrating your existing learning management system.
4 types of data you can track in VR
XR’s rise to the top can be attributed to learner-centric immersive experiences that engage employees 4x more than traditional forms of training. Custom VR programs can be tailored to an organization’s unique needs and record where learners need the most support. Depending on your organization’s training goals, many VR programs vary with the level of guidance.
1. Body Ergonomics
With the help of tracking body ergonomics – the interplay between the controllers, headset, and extended reality system can evaluate if learners are putting themselves at risk for injury. In high-risk industries, employers know the benefit of good posture. Tracking body motion can ensure that learners use safe lifting techniques in warehouse environments, accurately display proper hand signals in high-traffic or airline runways, and so much more.
Safety and efficiency aren’t mutually exclusive. Each and every critical component of employee performance can be addressed with VR training. VR provides real-time feedback for how many times a learner was prompted to correct their actions and the exact movement that made them fail. The benefit of this data-driven approach is the ability to correct granular movements tracked in VR with numerical evidence.
2. Eye Tracking
Eye tracking data provides a distinct lens on what learners prioritize and focus on during training. The cognitive science behind eye tracking points to learner behaviors during VR training modules.
For example, eye tracking in VR can be used to see if the learner maintains their gaze in the right direction during a driving simulation. By measuring the duration of a learner’s fixation during training, revealing their level of focus in real-time. Say the objective of your forklift training is to teach learners to look behind them while in reverse. Eye tracking allows us to monitor whether learners are accurately spotting themselves, helping prevent costly mistakes.
3. Full Session Playback
What if you could see your training program from the learner’s point of view? With video capture technologies, organizations can provide instant feedback after reviewing learner sessions.
Just as a team watches film after a big game, full session playback allows your organization to record every action within a training module, play back the highlights, and implement necessary learning reinforcement to enhance performance. By recording full training modules, your organization can watch a learner’s training experience from start to finish.
4. Interactions & Scored Elements
The interactive nature of VR allows employees to learn by doing. By tracking interactions within a VR experience, learner accuracy can be measured and analyzed. Scored elements motivate learners. By grouping training sessions by region, organizations can even use their extended reality system as a leaderboard to encourage healthy competition.
After identifying which KPIs will best serve the broader goals and objectives of your organization, tracking specific performance metrics will help L&D leaders visualize the progress made with immersive learning experiences. For example, Mercury XRS measures performance metrics like speed, angle, and distance as learners hone their welding skills with Lincoln Electric’s Voyage Arc. By merging scored elements with gamified learning, your training success comes full circle.
Custom Dashboards
Training metrics are unique to each organization, making custom reporting an essential feature in nearly all forms of data collection. Your immersive learning programs shouldn’t be an outlier.
If you’re looking to assess completion rates, a simple dashboard with pass and fail rates, time to completion, and insights on how learners complete tasks will offer easy, shareable reporting. On the other hand, organizations looking to identify deficiencies can build a dashboard reporting on which learners failed to observe their surroundings while operating power industrial equipment, a heat map of where the majority of learners struggle to complete tasks, or a report of which employees are failing to execute proper body movement during physical tasks.
Custom dashboards allow businesses to make smarter decisions and tailoring your approach is key to extracting meaningful insights. The one-size-fits-all model simply doesn’t apply in any aspect of XR training. By prioritizing precision over fluff, you pave the way for a data-driven approach that enhances the effectiveness of your immersive learning programs.
It’s All In The Details
If you can’t measure something, how can you improve it? By accessing real-time training metrics with the right XR management system, VR training can unlock meaningful data points that guide strategic decision-making. Every movement, interaction, and choice can be tracked and recorded.
Want to learn more about how your organization can generate the data and analytics you need to calculate your ROI, KPIs, and performance metrics? Mercury XRS helps you to accomplish all of the above with ease.
