VR Training is generally regarded as an incedibly impactful form of employee training. It’s immersive, memorable, interactive, and can transport you to situations you simply can’t repeat easily in real life. Whether you’re training new employees or long-tenured ones — there’s so many ways to incorporate VR into your learning & development curriculum.

One question we’ve started to get asked in the last year: How do I know if my VR Training is working? How do I see actual user data?

Obviously, you’ll know if your VR Training is working if your real-life metrics improve. This could be less workplace accidents, more output per hour, better scores on post VR experience tests.

Did you also know you can view employee VR performance directly in your InstaVR console also? We have a wealth of data showing you all about your apps’ usage, and with a little savvy approach to building Navigation Links + Hotspots, you can see exactly what’s happening within your VR apps in real-time.

To underscore this point, we wanted to cover the three most important analytics approaches you can use within InstaVR. As always, if you have any questions, let our sales team know. They’d be happy to discuss how to maximize your use of InstaVR!

Assuming the VR device used by your employees is connected to the Internet, the Reports section of InstaVR will show you everything a user does in your VR training app. This is very akin to clickstream data you can get from web page interactions — it gives you an understanding of how users are navigating and interacting with the app.

It starts with the optional Branding add-on screen called “User ID”. This allows you to easily identify which employee is using the app. We generally suggest having them input their name or a unique identifying ID number prior to launching the VR experience.

Watching this “clickstream” data gives you some valuable insights: What navigational or decision choices did the employee make? Did they finish the VR experience? How long did it take them to complete? Etc.

All of which is exportable to a CSV file, for more easily manipulating the data.

Of course, just having the data isn’t enough. You’ll also want to set benchmarks. How long should it take an employee to finish the VR experience? What is the optimal path for them to take?

If you iterate your app, or have employees re-do the same VR experience again, you can see if there are improvements over time. This is important since the main focus of VR Training is improvement.

2. User Identification of Objects Within Scenes

A great new feature for InstaVR Pro users is Polygon Hotspots. What are these? They allow a user to custom design the shape of a Hotspot within a scene. You’re also able to customize the color of the polygon.

Using Hotspots to have training app users identify things in a scene is particularly valuable. Besides polygons, you can also upload transparent .png files as icons, meaning the user can’t obviously notice the Hotspots in a scene.

You can ask a user — via text, image or audio .mp3 file — to do an action in VR. For example, you can add an audio file asking the user to: “Identify three major fire dangers in this scene, in order from most dangerous to least dangerous.”

In the Reports section of InstaVR, you are then able to see:

1. Did they identify the three correct fire dangers?
2. Did they do them in the correct order?
3. How quickly did they identify them?

You can then stack rank the employees — or even use this assessment as part of your hiring process, as Walmart does.

There’s a lot of value in making your VR Training interactive, and that value is only accentuated when you know you can see the individual results of users.

3. Answering Questions Within the VR App

Traditionally, you’ve had to ask quiz questions of VR users after they’ve taken off the their headset.

But with the flexibility of InstaVR to add Navigation Links and Hotspots — you can add questions, and then see the answers given in real-time in your Console. The answer could come in the form of answering a Multiple Choice question set up using Hotspots and Custom Icons. It could be a simple “Yes/No” question. Or it could be a question where the answer takes the user to a new scene.

A great example of this — though not for a training app — is the World Surfing League + Jeep app created using InstaVR titled “Jeep Sessions: A Surfing Journey in 360.” In that VR experience, you get to choose between a couple different driving and surfing adventures hosted by Jordy Smith and Malia Manuel. The act of which surfing adventure you choose takes you to a new scene, which gets recorded in your InstaVR Console.

You can create an elaborate, multi-scene training application where the user basically answers a  series of questions that determine where they go next.

By looking at the recorded data, you can see how employees react in the scenario. If they are continually choosing the wrong option, you can spend more time either real-world or virtually training them to make the correct decisions. And we know that VR decisions are much closer to real decisions than asking hypothetical questions on paper, so you get more true-to-life answers from your VR Training users.

4. Conclusion

Making a great VR Training app is incredibly valuable. But collecting data on user behavior, iterating the training, and improving employee actions through virtual training is the ultimate goal. All of this is possible through the data being collected within InstaVR.

Now you can report back to your VP of Human Resources or Head of Talent on what specifically the VR Training achieved, and where employees need improvement.

We’ve taken the leap from having to guess what’s happening in the VR scenarios, to fully understanding all user actions. We live in a data-driven world, and the Analytics feature of InstaVR gives you unparalleled access to understanding your employee VR Training behavior. You have no excuse now — the tools are right in front of you to improve both your VR Training and your employees.