AIXR VRAwards 2019 ‘VR Enterprise Solution of the Year’ and LTAwards 2019 ‘Best Simulated Virtual Environment for Training’ finalist

An immersive experience that covers common situations that occur in office environments, training staff in personal vitality & resilience.

The Learning Need

Stress-related illnesses are on the rise across the UK. Increasingly, employees don’t feel equipped to deal with the demands of the modern work environment.

At the beginning of last year, Lloyds Banking Group looked to tackle this problem head-on with the use of immersive technologies to help develop their employees’ personal vitality and resilience.

 

 

 

 

Solution

The experience was designed to help employees at Lloyds Banking Group increase their emotional resilience – their ability to cope with stress and to bounce back from setbacks and uncertainty – as well as identify signs of low resilience in themselves and others. It was one of the first-to-market soft skills products that used immersive technology.

Designing With the Audience in Mind

Following a year of preparation, VR/AR knowledge transfer workshops, and some early R&D experiments, Lloyds made the decision to invest in developing this innovative piece of digital learning.

 

 

 

 

Within the experience, learners need to navigate workplace conflicts. With the backdrop of a company restructure, you need to move around an office and interact with colleagues to look for signs of stress and help improve their emotional state.

For the experience to be effective, it needed to have a sense of realism. That’s why Make Real lived-captured human facial expressions and used professional voice artists to create the content. By using the latest front-facing depth cameras on the iPhone X, Make Real live motion-captured facial and mouth movements of the voice actors for a cost-effective way of creating realism.

 

 

 

 

Make Real put inclusive input design at the forefront of this project ensuring the experience was not only easy to use, but representative of everyone in the workplace.

Lloyds conducted a survey of 200 employees, to measure the impact of this VR experience. These learners gave an overall score of 4.1 out of 5 when asked to rate the effectiveness of this training. Not only was the experience seen to be impactful in this way, but it helped Lloyds also achieve a £127,200 saving in their training expenditure in its first year.

 

 

 

 

STUDIO: Make Real