Workplace soft skills XR training with Talespin

Talespin created a spatial computing platform for talent development and skills alignment for the future of work. The company’s no-code content authoring tool, CoPilot Designer, enables anyone to create VR training content that simulates conversational role play with virtual humans to build soft skills. Talespin accelerates learning, makes learners more confident and increases knowledge retention.

Talespin’s proprietary platform offers an enterprise solution for creating immersive learning content, distributing and measuring its effectiveness. With a view to the future of work, Talespin enables a personalised, immersive approach to learning so people can explore career paths and learn critical workplace skills that are essential to both businesses and workers. The company’s products include a content authoring tool powered by generative AI, a vast library of ready-made soft skill VR training content for enterprises, a consumer XR learning app, and a skills analytics dashboard for measuring training progress in real time.

Immersive learning around soft skills

Talespin has studied the way that companies train people to work, and how that has changed. Remote and hybrid workforces are here to stay, but there are many training needs that have traditionally been addressed face-to-face, whether in the office or by traveling. As the workplace depends less on in-person transactions, companies turn to spatial computing to handle training events and modes remotely.

Talespin was founded with a focus on AI and automation. Its principals began to see that automation can perform task-based work, but it can’t communicate ideas, offer constructive criticism or be a team player. As companies automate more, the need for certain workforce skills, such as building rapport, resolving conflict and negotiating compromise, becomes more acute. Talespin thought that one way to train people at the scale needed today was through immersive, interactive training with a foundation in virtual technology.

Understanding different viewpoints

“Talespin wraps powerful learning paradigm around the biggest skills in need,” says Kyle Jackson, CEO of Talespin. “Building virtual reality into training requires us to put the power of creation into the hands of the business, but nobody has been doing that. VR has been in the hands of skilled practitioners who aren’t familiar with the challenges of the business. So our platform provides VR and content tools to businesses so they can manage their own training needs.”

Naturally, it’s not easy to train people on emotional intelligence and soft skills virtually in an immersive setting. “We aim to address this,” says Jackson, “with a series of learning events centered around role playing that leads to a shift in mindset.

For example, if you want to train an employee in communication and collaboration, you need to put yourself in the other person’s shoes, which is hard to accomplish. But the essence of soft skills is that you’re trying to close the divide between viewpoints. People understand things differently, and our tools help companies educate their workers on how to help close the gap between different viewpoints.”

Talespin’s approach appeals to enterprise customers who understand that the difference in viewpoints requires better skills in finding common ground. But once employees get a handle on those soft skills, they can communicate through problems more effectively.

No-code content creation tool for VR training

Talespin built its platform around the requirements of standard tools used in the learning industry. It added a “world-building mindset,” in which learning designers answer questions like “How do I display this?”, “What am I simulating?”, “What’s the space?” and “How do I represent that?” Those concepts have existed in film, television and gaming for a long time, but not in broadly distributed, enterprise-led functions. Jackson sees most of the upskilling in that mindset, not in the ability to use a software program.

“Our tools are simple,” says Jackson. “We’ve aimed them at learning designers and people who are familiar with their business, but not with 3D, development, coding, animation or extended reality. We’ve pushed those tools into the background and automated them. Because we provide the foundational systems, learning designers can simply describe the problem they’re trying to solve. They know the context of the business, the world it exists in and their ideal outcome. And our platform helps them build a training module. It will cast the virtual humans, write their dialogue and offer decision choices. It will build that around the world they know, so they can review it and publish it.”

Using Snapdragon Spaces for VR

Talespin had followed Qualcomm Technologies’ progress in publishing reference designs of AR and VR hardware. When Snapdragon Spaces™ XR Developer Platform launched, Talespin investigated it as a way of standardizing and simplifying the development of content and platforms in spatial computing. Simultaneously, Qualcomm Technologies surveyed the landscape and identified Talespin as a valuable player. Building their experience with Snapdragon Spaces SDK, the company experiment with Image Tracking, Local Spatial Anchors and Spatial Meshing features.

As more hardware providers emerge, enterprises ask for more types of devices. That means more hardware for platform builders and developers to support. To Talespin, the value of Snapdragon Spaces is that it helps them address that trend by easily supporting hardware like the Lenovo ThinkReality VRX .

VR experience highlights:

Enabling virtual training in soft skills. Helping company employees to effectively resolve conflict, communication and collaboration.
Developing VR training content. Talespin’s platform makes it easy for anyone to develop interactive, VR training for critical workforce skills.
Focusing on content development instead of technology. Talespin focuses on greatly reducing the skills and resources needed to create XR content, making it possible for anyone to rapidly create XR thanks to no-code and AI-powered tools.

“Our engineering team found that there’s a strong, collaborative community around Snapdragon Spaces. They were able to quickly evaluate the cost-benefit trade-offs and decide which features to support.”