Virtual reality workforce training by Uptale
Uptale’s cloud platform enables enterprises to digitize field training and improve workforce efficiency using VR. Whether beginners or experts in VR, users can create and deliver their company’s immersive learning experiences in VR, then deploy them at scale and analyze the results.
(c) Uptale
The Uptale VR platform includes authoring tools that enterprises use to develop immersive training experiences from 360-degree videos. Content creators build out workforce training with a variety of interactions, such as quizzes, complex exercises, information panels and videos. They can add advanced features like voice recognition and interactive, 3D models that trainees can manipulate.
A large portion of Uptale’s customers use the platform for in-field instruction, such as safety training, standard operating procedures, quality field visits, sales training and even soft skills. One customer, a global automobile manufacturer, uses Uptale to digitize their standard operating procedures on the production line. Their instructors can train more effectively without having to be present on the plant floor, and trainees can avoid making mistakes or slowing down the line. Over the years, Uptale solution has proven that the adoption of XR technology can provide significant benefits for more than 200 companies such as Stellantis and Alstom. A training school manager at Stellantis declared that her teams successfully reduced training time by 2 and significantly increased their efficiency using VR.
Always having to keep up
“This is a good time to be in XR,” says Sebastien Leang, co‑founder and CTO of Uptale. “Customers in both education and the enterprise see the efficiency and ROI of XR training, which means that the market is maturing. We spend less time now convincing people of the value proposition.” Uptale does more than help its customers catch up with the XR market; it helps them keep up with their ever-changing training needs. “It’s important for our customers to keep their training up to date,” adds Sebastien. “When their procedures change or a new rule takes effect, customers don’t want to have to spend months re-developing their training modules. They want to be agile in creating and updating those modules. Our platform lets enterprises to add or modify their training in a few hours and quickly deploy it to a target group of employees.”
Uptale has its own keeping up to do. As more hardware manufacturers launch new devices for VR and XR, market demand rises and enterprises take notice. After a successful pilot, enterprises want to deploy the devices on a large scale, so Uptale has to be ready to go big inside those companies. That entails working closely with IT departments to ensure a smooth, secure deployment of, say, the latest VR headsets. It has to be easy to order them, to connect them securely to Wi-Fi, to download the apps and content, and to configure everything for use.
The Lenovo connection to Snapdragon Spaces
As part of that work, Uptale is in the process of porting their application to many of the most popular VR headset brands. On the way to going big within one enterprise customer, they had the chance to work closely with the team at Lenovo and port their player app to the Snapdragon Spaces XR developer platform that runs on the Lenovo Think Reality VRX headset. “It was easy to integrate the Snapdragon Spaces platform with our app, which is built on Unity,” says Leang. “Thanks to Snapdragon Spaces compatibility with XR Plugin management and XR interaction toolkit, the integration was smooth, the port to the Lenovo VRX didn’t take long and the new version of the app performs very well. We were able to launch quickly at feature parity with the previous version.” Since Uptale specializes in virtual reality, they’re concentrating on the VR capabilities of Snapdragon Spaces, such as managing the camera and controller interaction on these next-generation VR headsets. The developer team is also integrating Hand Tracking feature so users can manipulate 3D assets directly with their hands, without relying on controllers. Leang plans on integrating Uptale’s workforce training with the AR capabilities in Snapdragon Spaces. “For the future, we plan on adding AR to our platform,” he says. “We look forward to including the features of Snapdragon Spaces, including Positional Tracking, Local Spatial Anchors, and Object Recognition.”
XR experience highlights:
- Training operational teams. The Uptale platform abstracts training content beyond physical constraints through interactive VR modules.
- Updating smoothly and easily. Uptale enables trainers and content creators to respond to rapidly evolving needs of employee training in hours, not weeks.
- Keeping up with new devices. Even as hardware manufacturers release new devices for VR and XR, Uptale stays ready for deployment in enterprise-scale training programs.
“Qualcomm Technologies has been very responsive in improving the code and helping us integrate Snapdragon Spaces, which our engineers find powerful yet easy to use.
The platform is a safe bet for the future. Since Snapdragon platforms are present on most of the headsets on the market, you can’t go wrong by integrating with Snapdragon Spaces.”