VR soft skill training simulation

Role
UI UX Design / Unity UI Implementation / Motion design

Date
09/2019 - 07/2020

Client
Talespin, PwC, Farmers

Talespin develops virtual human technology as a tool for employees to practice skills that are critical to their professional success. Through a series of lessons and scenarios in Virtual Reality, trainees can be trained for a range of different social or interpersonal skills such as communication, leadership, and conflict resolution. 

When a trainee enters a virtual human training experience, VR provides the environment and medium for the most effective delivery of the training scenario, while AI gives users a counterpart to interact with and carry out the other half of the simulated conversation.

PwC has conducted a study on the effectiveness of learning in VR using a virtual reality soft skills training course created in collaboration with Talespin. The results of the study showed that VR can help business leaders upskill their employees faster, more efficiently, and cheaper than other methodologies. 

My responsibilities

I've worked on the Virtual Human project for about ten months. During that time me and the incredibly talented production team managed to deliver up to ten VR modules, of which we made desktop versions as well. It is an ever evolving product and with each new module we learned something new which we then applied to the next one. I've learned a lot about VR, Animation and unity during this time.
Some of my responsibilities for this project consisted of:

• Creating and maintaining the Talespin VR branding alongside UI UX Designer Marocha Arredondo
• Creating screen flows
• Creating screen designs and assets in AI / PSD
• Prototype and test features
• Create prefabs and animations in unity
• Create Unity UI tutorials to teach the UI/UX team 
• Write documentation on designs
• Work closely with tech to ensure good quality and performance
• Create user guides and marketing materials

Challenges

Some of the main challenges of this project were:

• Making the product scalable so it could be re-used for multiple modules
• Designing within the constraints of unity, the Oculus Quest and the VR environment (3D space)
• Find a balance in making the experience feel rewarding and fun while maintaining a corporate tone of voice.

Previous versions

Based on our findings of each previous module, we improved on the design. Some of these improvements include:

• increasing the font size and line width to reduce aliasing on Quest
• No longer using curved UI due to its cost on performance
• Reduce the amount of text