2021
The Year of Partnerships
A year so full of growth, we have barely had the chance to stop and share half of it, until now.
This year started off with a debut on Australian national TV, as Channel 10 featured us in the season finale of the feel good docuseries on Australian innovation 'Advancing Australia'.
Our year exploded from there, working with the biggest and largest number of clients to date, building some incredible partnerships, creating new innovations, technologies and making some big moves into new markets, notably healthcare.
Key Clients of 2021
A Day In A Lifetime
Diversity, Inclusion and Allyship in Nursing
Mayo Clinic
Co-designed with the Mayo Clinic team and their employees, drawing from the lived experiences of the nurses at Mayo Clinic. A Day In a Lifetime is a series of short VR experiences focused on hospital staff and patients highlighting issues of bias, racism, discrimination, difficult conversations and allyship.
Beyond Just Perspective Taking
This experience pushes beyond just perspective taking. We have users go back into scenarios as themselves, and talk/interact as they would in real life. The goal was to really drive practicing being comfortable in uncomfortable situations where allyship was required. A fire-drill for high stakes social interactions. Driving the principle of doing something when you see something.
Replayability and "being comfortable with being uncomfortable"
The goal was to make the practice element of these experiences as replayable as possible. Ultimately we wanted this experience to be just as valuable on the users' 100th time as it was on their first exposure to the scenario. Immersing users in difficult moments and allow them to step up, be brave and practice allyship in VR.
We believe this will set a new standard for simulation training and innovation within healthcare and hospitals more broadly. Once this program has been rolled out and evaluated, we will make this publicly accessible for other healthcare providers across the globe.
Diversity in Clinical Studies
GSK
An application designed to help GSK improve diversity within clinical trials, offering a truly accurate insight (co-designed with patients and Study Coordinators into what it is actually like in clinical trials. Including honest conversations about historical concerns in clinical trials around issues of diversity and ethics.
Access and Inclusion
Central Coast Council
Designed to shift attitudes about access and inclusion for people with a disability. There are two key pieces, one focused on a wheelchair accessibility for a beach, and the other on sensory input for a shopping center.
Unpacking Bias
An interactive journey from BLM
Viacom CBS
Our Training with ViacomCBS continued from 2020 through 2021, with some exciting data to come out to it.
Unpacking Bias is an immersive journey focused on Bias and Inclusion, remotely delivered and closely codesigned with employees using real, lived experiences to ensure authentic and realistic responses and interventions.
Virtual Reality has been proven to enhance perspective-taking – the ability to look beyond your own point of view – and allows people to practice different behaviors in a psychologically safe environment. Like an unexpected fire-drill, it allows learners to face uncomfortable yet everyday situations. Participants are given an opportunity to recognize bias (and learn where they may have missed it) and make decisions on how to act and react. This creates an empathetic learning experience, and an opportunity to become better allies.
Think Ahead
Advance Care Planning
Multicultural Community Council of the Illawarra
The Multicultural Community Council of the Illawarra (MCCI) are the lead agency for Partners in Culturally Appropriate Care (PICAC) in NSW and ACT. PICAC is a national initiative funded by the Australia Government that aims to equip and support residential and community aged care service providers to deliver culturally appropriate care to older people, from culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) communities. MCCI has identified that better information provision, education and training are required to improve the care provided for older people from CALD backgrounds.
These 2 apps have been built using real-life scenarios from a facilitated feedback process. Together, they aim to:
Deepen awareness and understanding of others’ experiences that may be different than one’s own
Support cultural competency in palliative care and end-of-life conversations.
Demonstrate strategies to improve communication with people from culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) backgrounds
Finding Common Ground
by Equal Reality
We updated an experience we designed in collaboration with a world-leading bank in Australia in 2018, to now run on the Oculus Quest 1 & 2.
This experiences is based on a real-life scenario that happened to an employee of the bank in their personal life. While trying to sign up to a gym member program with their partner, they were met with harsh discrimination, which had widespread negative effects for the brand. This program is designed to share that experience with colleagues for two purposes:
To understand the feeling of discrimination
Practicing proactive behaviour expected from team.
Inclusion and Perspective
Telco
Built for Oculus Quest VR, and Flatscreen VR. This experience is based on real-life scenarios that have been workshopped with a leading telco on two topics:
Conversations and microaggressions in a meeting room environment.
A behavior practice experience as a manager in a retail store facing bias against a staff member.
The experiences are designed to create a shared and immersive experience that will result in honest and vulnerable conversations around bias and inclusion.
Key Partnerships
People Tech Revolution - Production Partnership
People Tech Revolution are experts at co-design and making sure the right people with lived experience are involved in the design process. We have worked closely with them for half a decade. This year our partnership took a big step forward as we shared with them our VR Creators Suite, a set of design tools to start producing their own VR experiences.
This allows us to collaborate closely with them on production, and for them to produce products when we are at capacity. We have had over twice as many builds this year thanks to this ability to expand our production, including the first completely external build by PTR.
While right now access to these tools are limited to our most trusted partners like PTR, we will be opening them up more next year.
AWS & KINSPACE - ER Metaverse Learning Platform
Our Virtual Experiences build awareness, allow people to practice behavior and deliver an experiences like it was a lived memory. However it is the conversations after the experiences that often bring the most value to our users.
Being able to discuss how it feels with collages, look at the same experience from another perspective or the decisions others made offers extra layers on the experience that can bring some big "uh-hah! moments".
Because of this, we usually deliver the experiences in workshops. Either in person with a VR headset, or online with our web-browser experiences.
With the rise of working from home has seen a lot of progress in flexible working, and we wanted to see that continued and explore new ways to offer what we call "the experience around the experience".
Partnering with AWS & KinSpace we have been piloting a learning program on a custom ER Metaverse Learning Platform for delivering self-guided experiences remotely and on-demand.
This is an e-learning platform we are developing to integrate with Virtual Reality, designed for seamless immersive learning experiences anywhere, anytime.
Additionally we have build a few other courses on the platform including:
Everyday Inclusion. An interactive journey on intersectional bias with Virtual Reality
VR Facilitator Training. How to train VR facilitators to create safe spaces for learning in VR.
VR for Immersive Learning. Your complete guide to successfully using VR in Immersive Learning
Victual Reality Tech
100 Pico Neo Headsets
We are very excited to be working with Pico & Mayo Clinic, on the Pico Neo 3 for the first time.
Mayo Clinic have ordered 100 Pico Neo 3 headsets to role out our training. The largest order of headsets we have ever had.
We have found the Pico to be the best headset manufacturer we have had the opportunity to partner thanks to their outstanding enterprise development support and quality of their hardware.
Hand Tracking
Our virtual reality experiences will be even more immersive, and without controllers!
Our hands are the part of our body we see the most. The more life-like we make the hand interactions in VR, the better the virtual embodiment.
Snapchat - Live AR Role Playing
Early this year we created live augmented reality role playing avatars, for video call platforms using snapchat as a plug-in for zoom (or any other video chat platform).
Meta Humans Graphics
Making use of Unreal's new life-like Metahumans.
New Content Library
We have a new library of content available on our website for those interested. From Oculus Quest experiences, Flatscreen experiences, Courses and Support Material.
Flatscreen Web-browser Simulations
Our web-browser simulations became a supplement to all of our VR headset experiences, and allowed for scalability and ease to share and use. Perfect for things such as large scale Zoom workshops and on demand learnings.
This year general quality improved, voice interaction, and further data collection was added.
End of Year Press
Rick and I have been named in the Worth Magazine, showcasing top 100 entrepreneurs working to make a serious impact both personally and through their businesses
What is next? Our vision of the Metaverse is open and inclusive.
VR Voice Interaction and immediate feedback
VR Metaverse Classrooms - for when people cannot have conversations in person/face-to-face
Further partnerships in product and distribution
Build community of qualified VR educators
NFT licences to VR library
Web3 Integration into our ER Metaverse Learning Platform
ER Token and DAO focused on Diversity, Inclusion and Accessibility - allow our community and supporters to help drive our future in a open and sustainable way.
Collaboration platform with smart contracts on Solana
Open up our tools to other artists, companies and projects to use. More on this to come.
We plan to write more about the industry trends we are paying attention to and what is next for us, if this is something you're interested in hearing about. Leave a comment on this post.
Signing off for 2021 from Brennan, Rick, the team and partners at Equal Reality
