Virtual reality technology is great for playing games, watching movies, and exploring places that would otherwise be hard to explore in person. Now it seems like VR can also be used as an employee training tool, or at least that’s what the folks at Walmart are doing in using VR to help train their employees.When it comes to employee training, there’s only so much theoretical knowledge that a company can pass down to its employees, and the rest will boil down to real practical experience. By using VR to train their employees, what Walmart is doing is simulating certain situations and then ask employees to make choices based on that.
The VR curriculum is produced by Strivr and will be deployed at Walmart’s 200 “Walmart Academy” training centers across the country, with plans to fully deploy them by the end of the year. There is also hope that if successful, it could be expanded to stores and not just the academies.
Some example situations that employees will face include dealing with spills or the Black Friday rush. According to Strivr CEO Derek Belch, “We’re using computer vision to map scenes, so we literally know exactly where someone’s looking. If they don’t look at [the right place] and press the button indicating that they have seen the stimuli that we’re looking for, we know.”
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