Like many companies today, you’re looking to expand your workforce’s capabilities using VR and you’ve started to have a bunch of questions on which headset to choose. Do you go wired or wireless? Do you want room-scale or stationary? What about refresh rate? What does screen door mean? And, most importantly, what do all of these mean when it comes to training?
Affordable and Portable
When it comes to enterprise training, the two most important considerations right now are cost and portability.
Cost, first and foremost, because it’s cost. One of the major perks of switching to VR for training is the savings over in-person training, be it the cost of the trainer or, in some cases, flying staff out for training events. The range in prices for VR headsets is wide, ranging anywhere from $300 to $10,000, and that’s not including the cost of the PCs required to run some of them, so figuring out what’s best for your budget can be tough.
Portability is the other key ingredient. Until recently, VR headsets required a high end PC and multiple peripherals to run them. This made it difficult, if not downright impossible, to distribute them to your staff for training, even if you have a centralized training area. This is doubly impacted by a shift to work from home, where shipping a full set of VR training equipment to your staff’s house would be a nightmare.
These are two of the primary reasons we have chosen to target the Oculus Quest 2 for all of our enterprise VR training solutions. It’s affordable at $299/$399, depending on model, and highly portable being a stand-alone headset. These features leave the Quest 2 in a category of its own.
Affordable Doesn’t Mean Cheap
When we were determining which platform to build on we weren’t just focusing on affordability and portability, however. We were looking for the best-in-class system available for VR training, and in that area the Quest 2 still wins hands down.
Take, for instance, headset resolution and framerate. This helps to determine how immersive an experience is, which in turn improves the overall training experience. The Quest 2’s near-4k per eye display eliminates the screen door experienced in older headsets, increasing immersion for better training. Framerate helps with immersion, as well, but is also important at reducing VR sickness. The Quest 2’s ability to maintain a 90hz refresh rate allows for a smooth, natural VR experience for your employees.
The Quest 2 is also able to do full room VR and hand tracking, giving your employees a more visceral experience which helps build stronger memories during training, leading to better learning retention. Give your employees the ability to walk around their environment and experience training with their own hands and they will be more inclined to use the VR headset for training over and over again.
About ForwardXP
ForwardXP creates ground-breaking VR training experiences that enable our clients to re-invent how they train their staff on anything from medical diagnostic procedures to complex and highly dangerous electrical equipment work. Our VR training programs have proven more engaging and effective compared to traditional classroom or web-based experiences, are more scalable, and allow training that would either be too dangerous or costly to conduct in real life. We have also built our own proprietary system for VR data collection and analysis; STARS, providing our clients with real, data-driven insight into how their teams are using VR training.
Learn more about ForwardXP.
