Role Play is better in Virtual Reality

There are several techniques that are used for soft skills training in industries such as customer service, corporate leadership, healthcare and sales among others. The primary goal of any such training is to enable professionals to deal with difficult situations they may encounter in the real world. The theory behind training is that exposure to such circumstances will help enable quicker and better decision making. For several decades, live role playing has been seen as an effective methodology for soft skills training. There are several advantages that role-playing offers in contrast to other passive training methods.
 
•   It provides a safe space in which learners can make mistakes and try out new strategies of problem solving without being subject to the risks that are associated with such situations in the real world.
•   The active nature of the learning, requiring 2 or more-people to be involved automatically lends itself to new learning stimulus that includes cultural diversity, language, non-verbal reactions, personalities and other human characteristics that are not independent of the learning goals.
 
For role play to be effective, there are certain pre-requisites that include actual physical locations, authentic real-world scenarios, and good actors / consultants all of which reinforce the concepts of situational plausibility and place illusion - two key constructs whose origins and importance I have described in a previous blog. In addition to these pre-requisites, the role playing scenario must be recorded so that participants can watch and reflect upon their performance. It is this combination of being in a realistic stressful situation and reflecting on the performance after the role-play that makes it effective - in other words, experiential learning occurs when role-play based learning is executed well. However, all the pre-requisites of role-playing make it logistically expensive and difficult to execute in a manner well-suited to learning. It is here that we can harness the power of virtual reality and avatars, to scale and amplify an existing training methodology. This is the essence of what we do at Mursion. In fact, several years of studying the VR alternative to role-play using avatars has led us to believe that this methodology is not only easier and cost-effective to scale while increasing outreach, but also maybe better and more effective than traditional role-playing techniques. 

Firstly, for learning to occur, it is important for one to experience a certain amount of discomfort. With traditional role-play, it may be difficult or awkward for an inexperienced role-player to push the learner outside of his/her comfort zone, without breaking the illusion that the situation is real. It takes this sort of pushing to trigger the mistakes that are so costly in real life. If a simulation is to inoculate the learner against the emotional reactions that trigger bad decisions, this pushing is essential. In VR, the mask of being behind an avatar enables the role-player to push the learner to take risks. The role-player is never visible to the learner – the learner never catches the role-player’s gaze; they never “connect” as humans. In fact, studies have shown that social influence is greater during interactions where a human is behind the avatars during these conversations. Thus, the role-player feels liberated to push the learner in ways they would find very hard to do repeatedly in a live context.

Secondly, in the traditional sense, a role-player may not physically resemble the individual(s) who pose the real-life interpersonal challenges. The concept of standardized patients in healthcare are a prefect example, where it is very difficult to recreate a pediatric scenario of a 5-year old child with a medical condition for obvious reasons. With VR, avatars can be built to look and sound precisely like the people that you encounter at work, and with whom you may have negative interactions. This becomes critically important when issues of age, race and gender matter to the simulation. Additionally, environments can be customized so that it feels as though you are having the conversation in the same work environment where the conversation takes place. All of this allows us to meet the pre-requisites needed for effective role-play in a cost effective and logistically convenient manner.

Virtual reality technology and Artificial intelligence can help scale and create a very effective method of experiential learning.

At Mursion, we focus on blending live human performance with AI-driven avatars to blur the learner's sense of what is real and what is not. Machine learning is used to gather role-player intent, digital signal processing (DSP) technologies are used to mask the role-player’s identity and advanced low-cost networking paradigms support bi-directional communication between multiple learners and multiple avatars within a single simulation session allowing us to scale training to the maximum. We are often asked the question of how this approach is scalable if a role-player is always needed in the system. The answer is multi-fold:

• A single role-player can play several avatars simultaneously on screen. This allows us to create simulations such as pediatric scenarios where a learner (doctor / nurse) must deal with a complex situation involving parents and a child. The possibilities of such scenarios across other verticals such as leadership training are many as you can imagine.
• Multiple avatars can be tailored to match any age, gender, or ethnographic profile on screen, allowing us to create scenarios around diversity/inclusion and implicit bias and study them in context.
• Multiple learners can remotely login to the same simulation session with multiple avatars and take turns practicing various strategies while others shadow the learning. And in each case, the very same simulation can play out very differently exposing learners to the concept of multi-exemplar training - another concept that I discussed at length in a previous blog.
• The role-playing sessions can all be run remotely. Role-players are simply subject matter experts who can “inhabit” the avatars from the comforts of their home. Simulations can be designed so the role-players can simply be themselves to pose the learning challenge.  Learners can experience the simulations from laptops, using VR headsets or on their mobile devices wherever they are located. In essence, this combination of VR and AI has helped turn role-playing into an anywhere-anytime activity.
• If we were to create purely AI-driven avatars, we would require a very large amount of data to create authentic interpersonal exchanges. In addition, we would need continuous programmatic content creation rather than having a flexible platform where content can be tailored in real-time. In our particular case, it is better to place the human at the end of the chain rather than in the middle (see relevant blog).
• And most importantly, all the data from the simulations is recorded for review and reflection eliminating the need for extensive logistics and planning. We are currently building algorithms for behavioral analytics in the context of these complex simulations and have identified new techniques that allows us to tie them back to ROI measures for organizations.   More on this to follow.

​In the last 4 years at Mursion, we have seen evidence of learners trying their hardest to beat the simulation. In their effort to win, learners take conversational risks that they would never take in a live role-play. These strategies sometimes work, but more often than not, they fail. And it is this failure that prompts learners to reflect, learn and be better prepared. If you are trying to incorporate cutting-edge VR & AI simulations into the professional learning and development curriculum at your organization, come visit us at Mursion. And with that, I’d like to wish all of you a wonderful and prosperous 2019!