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Immersive Imagination
66 Plays2 years ago
For those who can’t imagine how their words and actions can affect others, there are immersive learning opportunities to fill that gap and offer virtual practice to improve human interaction.
Featuring Christophe Mallet of BodySwaps.
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Transcript
Why are difficult conversations challenging?
00:00:00
Speaker
Difficult conversations are, well, it's in the name, they're difficult. Part of that is because they're unfamiliar conversations. Once we haven't navigated in the past, and so therefore not having that learned past experience puts us at a disadvantage. But what if there was a way to take a detour around the difficult part and just go straight to a confident and experienced conversation?
Introduction of podcast and guest
00:00:27
Speaker
I'm Lauren Andrews Brown, your host for this episode, and we're here today to have a not-so-difficult conversation with Christophe Millay. You're listening to How Humans E-Learn Together, discussing the impact human-connected interactive experiences can have on the human capacity to learn.
00:00:47
Speaker
This is a podcast for trainers, educators, learning and development professionals, coaches and mentors, the educational technology community, and anyone who wants to leverage new ways to reach lifelong learners. And to look at what others in the e-learning industry are doing to make that happen.
Regrets in conversations and learning from them
00:01:07
Speaker
Today, we're speaking with Chris.
00:01:10
Speaker
then we all have like a thousand conversations we can remember with, you know, like partners and family members and friends that we wish we had done differently. And often it stems from not thinking about it. But the worst is when you like really thought about what you were going to say and it failed nonetheless. Chris is an XR and education entrepreneur with a steadfast career in the sector. Christophe has been leading the way for immersive learning.
00:01:38
Speaker
When I did my first internship, 2008, in a consultancy company in Paris, all suited up that kind of job. At the end of the six months, I had a review with my N plus two, who had never seen my work up close, was just kind of reporting what has been told to him. And he said, okay, Chris, he did some good things. You're smart. So we will offer you a job once you graduate next year.
00:02:04
Speaker
but just don't expect to go too far in that career because you stutter and so we will never put you in front of clients.
00:02:12
Speaker
And following that, I spent a solid six months not being able to answer the phone. And I think that was a display of very poor soft skills from the part of the manager. By the way, I obviously never joined that company.
Improv workshop and the birth of Body Swap
00:02:28
Speaker
And it's a year later that I did a workshop, which happened to be improvisation theater, that I realized I could actually be silly in front of people. And that changed my life. And that's also why I created a body swap all the years down the line.
00:02:40
Speaker
So yeah, sub skills can definitely be life-changing for yourself and those around you. Absolutely. You know, you just reminded me a story I just want to share with you really quickly that has always stuck with me since I was a kid. So my father ran a big film production studio in New York and that's how I got into filmmaking. I must've been maybe like eight or something, maybe even nine. And we were walking by the dressing rooms and you know, when you just hear a voice,
00:03:07
Speaker
It's like instantly recognizable. And I was walking by and I was like, dad, is that Rufasa or is that Darth Vader?
00:03:16
Speaker
And he's like, actually, it's both. And it was James Earl Jones. And I'll never forget him introducing himself to me. And he stuttered. Like one of the most recognizable voices, someone who, you know, completely coined himself on his voice. And when he was off script, he had a stutter. That just made me realize we're able to overcome anything if we're given the confidence and the opportunity to.
Chris's journey into VR and its applications
00:03:39
Speaker
Chris, how can you introduce yourself?
00:03:42
Speaker
Yes, absolutely. As you may hear, I have a slight French accent and that's because I was born and raised in Paris. I moved 12 years ago to London, spent five, six years in social media, having no idea at the time how much you would change the world. About six, seven years ago,
00:04:00
Speaker
On a rainy day in the winter, I met with Julien de Noel in a pub and he had the very first version of the Oculus Rift, which was this headset that later was bought by Meta or Facebook as they were called. So we were in a pub and he showed me this
00:04:17
Speaker
VR experience where someone had recreated a painting in 3D by Vengog so you could walk around a recreation of the night cafe and so I essentially picked up my drill from the floor, quit my job and I started an agency with with Julien and so for a few years we did VR storytelling. So I know you have a career in filmmaking and there's a lot of interesting question in how you tell a story in a medium where
00:04:43
Speaker
where the viewer has so much choice as an agency. So we did that for a few years. And then one day in about 2018, we were contacted by an education company who wanted to help teach soft skills or communication skills to nurses in psychiatry. And the original idea, which was everyone's original idea with VR is like, can we put you in the shoes of a suicidal patient?
00:05:14
Speaker
create empathy from the part of the nurse by having the nurse experience what it's like to be suicidal. Can you see, Lauren, a problem with that approach already? Yeah, there's a lot of safeguarding issues that could be an issue, mostly for the nurse as well, because people who are on the brink of that situation and that desperation, that's not something that you can willingly inflict on someone else.
00:05:43
Speaker
Well, yes. I think you're absolutely right. It's interesting you said that because a few years later, we did a safeguarding experience. Even though we had to tame down the content of it to not trigger any bad memories, we still had to be very careful with warnings and so on. But in that specific case of the nurses in psychiatry, the main issue was
00:06:06
Speaker
You cannot recreate in a 15 minute experience what it's like to be suicidal because it's not a condition that is visual and audio in essence. You might be able to create some empathy with a film, like a 90 minute, two hours, third person following of a character where you as the director can choose everything that's happened and where the gaze of the user goes.
00:06:30
Speaker
embodying someone who is suicidal just doesn't work. And so what we did instead is we identified an issue which was that if you're learning to be a nurse in psychiatry, you're going to learn a lot of things in the classroom, right? The knowledge stuff and practical stuff. And then you get placed in a hospital, a psychiatric hospital,
00:06:50
Speaker
where you're supposed to be supervised, but in reality, you're going to be left alone with patients because doctors have better things to do. And so you can imagine young people in their 20s having discussions with suicidal patients for which they're absolutely not prepared. And what you see here is there's a gap that exists between the classroom and being able to do your job in the real world,
00:07:17
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And that gap normally is called experience.
00:07:21
Speaker
You learn, you do it again and again, you have a supervisor who makes sure that nothing bad happens and then you become better. But you cannot learn by trial and error when you're talking to a suicidal patient. There's just too much at stake for the patient and for yourself. So that was kind of the original idea here. It's like, well, can we use virtual reality and virtual humans and all of that to create a safe space in kind of a low stakes simulation
00:07:49
Speaker
where you're going to be able to practice talking with suicidal patients without actually having any consequences if you're not doing a good job.
Understanding XR, VR, and AR
00:07:57
Speaker
Absolutely. And for anyone who may not know, Chris,
00:08:01
Speaker
What is the difference between XR and how is it different to VR and AR? Because we're throwing out a lot of terms here and I just want to lay the groundwork down. Yes. So the X in XR stands for extended reality. So that's the umbrella term under which you're going to find AR for augmented reality and VR for virtual reality. So it's a big term. The difference now if you look at VR and AR in virtual reality
00:08:28
Speaker
your entire reality is virtual, right? So you put on a VR headset.
00:08:33
Speaker
And everything you see in the headset, all the elements in there are fake elements, virtual elements that have been created. And the sound, of course, that comes in your ear comes from that piece of software. So it's virtual as well, right? That's virtual reality. Augmented reality is when what you see in here is mostly real, but you overlay something on top of it.
00:08:58
Speaker
So easy example is if you're going to do a filter with Snapchat or Facebook, you see your real face and you're going to overlay the face of some makeup or the face of a cat or whatever on top of it. So that's augmented reality. You can have an application with your phone by IKEA where you're going to place a virtual sofa in your real room to see how it would look. That's augmented reality.
00:09:25
Speaker
So looking at it from the perspective of human connection, because that's a lot of what this podcast talks about, is what are the benefits of learning through XR when it comes to learning with other humans? Because otherwise, I might just think that I'm just learning from a machine.
Enhancing learning with XR technologies
00:09:39
Speaker
Yeah, it is a little bit weird to say that you're going to learn to be better with humans by not learning with humans.
00:09:48
Speaker
I think the first element is engagement. So we work a lot with colleges and universities, and the first thing they say is it's hard to engage students, to literally get them to show up and intellectually engage with what we're trying to teach. And that's maybe the lowest hanging fruit with virtual reality, is when you put the headset on, it's taking over 100% of your audio-visual input.
00:10:15
Speaker
There's no looking at tiktok on your phone at the same time or looking through the window or whatnot. You are there because you have no choice. That's very much the first layer. The second layer I mentioned is the psychological safety.
00:10:31
Speaker
So in virtual reality, there's two ways to do it. You might go into a virtual room and chat with other real humans who are connected in that room, right? The way you would on Zoom, except you wouldn't see their face filmed by a camera, you would see an avatar in three. So that's synchronous kind of virtual reality, social VR. But that's not what we do. What we do is asynchronous in a way that you're dealing with virtual humans, which are essentially like characters in video games.
00:10:59
Speaker
right they have a script to be recorded you can interact in in a different ways and. What that means is if you compare this to let's say a workshop or role play in the real world is you safe right you get no judgments you know.
00:11:18
Speaker
you can make mistakes, no one's gonna have hard feelings or judge you. And so that psychological safety is necessary for people to engage and to actually try stuff. And I think the third level, which makes it quite unique is the idea of being able to reflect and having a coach in speech marks, but that's automated. So on the reflection part,
00:11:46
Speaker
In VR, you can interact with an avatar in your own voice. So for example, after listening to a suicidal patient, you're going to try to give us some advice on how to cope better when things are tough in the morning. So you're going to do that in your own voice. But because you're in virtual reality and you're holding some controllers in your hands and you have a headset on your head, we also know how you're moving your body.
00:12:12
Speaker
What enables us is to do the body swap and that is to have you sit in front of your own avatar, listening back to what you said from the perspective of the virtual human. Let me repeat that so it's clear.
00:12:27
Speaker
You're talking to Susan, who is a suicidal patient, and you're telling her for two or three minutes how to cope better with her days. When you're done, you're going to find yourself inside Susan's body, sitting across from your avatar, and your avatar has your voice and your body language. It doesn't look like you, but it has your voice and your body language. So it's kind of like out of body experience meets self-reflection. So you learn a lot from watching yourself.
00:12:53
Speaker
If you think about the last maybe like fight you had with your partner or something like this, do you really know how you came across? Maybe you thought that you came across great and authoritative, but they thought you were the worst person in the world. So that moment of self-reflection is interesting. There's so many times where self-taught practice is sometimes the best way. Whenever you're trying to prep for media engagements or something, they always recommend you
00:13:19
Speaker
to self-record yourself. And it sounds ridiculous and like such a time waste, but actually you learn so much just by watching and hearing yourself back and how to improve.
Impact of VR avatars on behavior and perception
00:13:28
Speaker
But it's hard, right? I mean, it requires a level of discipline. Have you done it? Have you recorded yourself and watched yourself?
00:13:35
Speaker
Yes. Yeah. And it's not easy, but, you know, there are ways to make it easier and to make it more motivating, but it's really hard to get started and just say, I'm just going to press the record button on my phone and I'm going to do this several times because it just feels like such a waste of time.
00:13:50
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, you're absolutely right. You learn a lot. But for a very simple reason, it's like when you're talking, you're focusing on what you're saying. You cannot process at the same time how you come across. You cannot be in two angles at the same time, if that makes sense. So in VR, you can watch yourself, which is already quite strong to be sitting across from yourself. It's different from watching yourself in a video. Because first, you have this illusion of sharing the same space. But secondly,
00:14:20
Speaker
The avatar you pick for yourself in VR doesn't have to look like you. Which I think is really interesting because that's an experience we don't get in real life, in everyday life. Yeah, and also the first thing when you watch yourself back, right? If you watch a webinar you've done and you watch yourself back, it's going to be like, ah, I look like shit.
00:14:42
Speaker
Or like something, something, something like that. Where your avatar doesn't look like you, it doesn't matter. But it goes a little bit deeper. There's something called the Proteus Effect. And it's well documented. It's been a lot of studies. And the Proteus Effect says something along the lines of when you have a body in virtual reality and you create that illusion of virtual body ownership,
00:15:09
Speaker
you will adopt behaviors that you subconsciously associate with that body. So let me give you an example. They did a test. We had three groups who'd find themselves in VR. And in VR, they would be in front of a bongo drums. There would be another character pre-recorded. And their job was to try and follow the other character as best as they could in terms of playing the drums.
00:15:36
Speaker
And they were told that a test was about how good they could be. In reality, the test was not about that.
00:15:42
Speaker
Group A, they only saw their hands in virtual reality, like paper white, just their hands. Group two, in VR, there would be the drums and a mirror in front of them, and they would see themselves as a Caucasian male in a suit. And group three, in VR, they would see themselves in front of a mirror, and they would see themselves as an African-American male in a casual outfit.
00:16:08
Speaker
What they measured is how much the people in each group moved their body. And for some reason, the people who saw themselves as African-American moved their body more when they were playing. How weird is that? Right? That's interesting. And an interesting thing to try and measure as well. Not something that's very straightforward that I would have thought of when it came to, you know,
00:16:33
Speaker
choosing a different color of skin for your character? The question here is, that's also demonstrating some racist biases, but the kind of completely subconscious, you could argue, harmless one, but that still exists. But you have other, less controversial one, one where they did
00:16:56
Speaker
It was a negotiation game, live negotiation game in VR, and they just gave people avatars of different sizes. You would be one meter 60 or two meters tall. And they found after many experiences that your height in VR had a direct impact on the result of the negotiation.
00:17:17
Speaker
on how aggressive you would be. There's another one where they would give people conventionally... I mean, they would give them a lot of avatars that looked in different shapes or form, and they would ask them, you know, how hot do you think you look as your avatar? Do you find yourself ugly or pretty?
00:17:35
Speaker
And then they put all kinds of people in VR at the same time. And they measure the distance. So in VR, you can walk, right? So you can walk up to someone and speak with them the way you would in reality. And what they found is the uglier the participants perceived their virtual body to be, the more distance they would put between them and the other people they were talking to in virtual reality. And that's instantaneous.
00:18:04
Speaker
So you can instantaneously change your behavior in a social setting based on the characteristic that you subconsciously associate with your body.
Real-world impact of BodySwaps on confidence
00:18:14
Speaker
And you can picture yourself having a body of a different gender, age, race, instantaneously. So which makes it interesting in VR, right? Because you almost have an interest of pushing people to choose a body that's different from theirs so that they forget their subconscious biases or that they adopt new ones that are positive in that specific environment.
00:18:34
Speaker
Does that make sense? Oh, absolutely. That makes total sense. And I think the most interesting thing in all of that is
00:18:41
Speaker
how we can unlearn our learned behaviors that we've inherited from other humans in a virtual world, which I think is really interesting. There's a case study that I saw from BodySwaps that I'd done that I think is worth mentioning here. In 2021, BodySwaps worked with George Brown College in Canada to make a job interview simulator session for their students and their confidence levels more than doubled, kind of similar to what you were talking about, taking
00:19:08
Speaker
the real world and, you know, put it into the virtual world. But now I'm curious, was there any follow up with those confident students on how many actually landed jobs afterwards to see if they took those soft skills that they learned in XRVR into the real world?
Cultural differences in VR training
00:19:24
Speaker
So not with George Brown, even though we're still working with them, because sometimes getting that kind of data is tricky. We did, however, do another test with a company in the US that I cannot name, but I'm going to tell you what they did, because that was a randomized control trial. So what that company does is they hire, and I mean hire graduates from good universities in the US, and they train them for free.
00:19:49
Speaker
to place them as contractors for the likes of Facebook, Google and Amazon. So they place them as contractors for two years and they take 50% of that fee. So you graduate, you get free training and a job at Amazon and then after two years, you can become a full-time employee. And then they get between $50,000 and $100,000 per graduate that they managed to place.
00:20:14
Speaker
So for them, for those guys, that conversion from I've hired that guy to a place team at Google or Facebook is everything for their business.
00:20:21
Speaker
And so what they did is they did a test where we gave them a license for body swaps. It was during the pandemic, so they didn't even do it in VR. They did it in 2D. And they had a group in the US and a group in India. And each group was divided in two, one group that was doing body swaps in their own time on PC, and another group that received the regular provision for job interview training, which is a one-to-one mock interview for an hour with a career advisor.
00:20:50
Speaker
and a two-hour Zoom call as a group to discuss some of the best techniques for job interviews. What they then did is everyone had a behavioral interview with a psychologist who didn't know who did what and had to rate them. What they found is the people who did body swaps in the US were marginally better than the people who did the regular stuff.
00:21:19
Speaker
But in India, the body swabs group outperforms the human supported one by 30%, which is huge. And do you want to hazard a guess as to why there was such a difference between India and the US? They did it multiple times in India? No, it has to do...
00:21:40
Speaker
with psychological safety and the importance of psychological safety. So in the US, having a one-to-one with an interviewer on Zoom is fine, whether you're a woman or a man. But in India, specifically for women,
00:21:58
Speaker
being able to do it in their own time on PC, not judge, as opposed to having a one-to-one with a carrier advisor, which can be very scary or awkward from a cultural perspective, was something that was really appreciated. It allowed them to really get into practice, whereas otherwise they would just have that weird encounter and move on. Absolutely. I can see how beneficial that could be for that kind of a cultural setting.
AI feedback in VR training
00:22:25
Speaker
And also as an American, I can see how
00:22:27
Speaker
Easy it would be to just kind of be to think oh, yeah, I can just have a one-on-one and then move on But it does make a difference and it's not easy for everyone though That's something one thing that I can see body swaps folks is on is self-assessment So the way the way works for job interview training to take an example. Um
00:22:45
Speaker
It's not just get into VR, answer a bunch of question and watch yourself. That would be good in and of itself, probably. You would find that you stutter or use filler words or whatnot. But it's different. What we're saying is, first, you're going to spend time in modules to learn the techniques one by one. So just like if you're a football player, you don't play 11 aside games all week long. You're going to do drills.
00:23:13
Speaker
So similarly, you go in VR, and you're going to do a module on breathing and posture. And that's it. You're going to do another one on understanding how to weave a story around your strengths, and then tie that to the company or job that you're applying for. And then you're going to do another exercise on the car technique, which is context action results, in which you're going to practice answering a bunch of really weird questions with the beginning and the end.
00:23:43
Speaker
Once you've mastered all those techniques, then you can go into the simulator, answer a question, and watch yourself. So you can already analyze yourself in regards to what you've learned. Am I applying the car technique? Is this a convincing story? And so on. But then the cherry on the cake is that because the voice was recorded and the body movement was recorded, we can provide you with a ton of data.
00:24:11
Speaker
how fast you spoke, whether you use filler words, how you moved your hands, whether you looked at the person you're talking to, all of this is very basic. But then you also have some semantic analysis. So everything you say is converted into text.
00:24:26
Speaker
and then we can look in that text. We can look in that text for specific keywords, but now is, you know, Chad GPT and Bard and other AI, you can start to analyze things like intention and structure. So that means you can enter a simulator, pick whatever job you're applying for, get questions for that job, and then get a virtual coach in AI that's gonna give you hyper personalized feedback on your answer specifically.
00:24:55
Speaker
Once you have this, you go back in a simulator, you answer new questions and you watch yourself again. And what happens then is when you watch yourself again is not only have you improved, but you have been the witness to your own improvement.
00:25:11
Speaker
So that boosts your confidence and that boost in confidence called self-efficacy. Self-efficacy is the strongest driver for behavioral change. That's the one thing before you go into the interview or even before you apply that gets you to go, right, I can do it. I got this.
00:25:27
Speaker
It's what gets you the job in the end. Yeah, it's what gets you the job. It's the biggest difference between the kid who went to Eton and the kid who was born in a county state, right? It's not the intelligence. It's confidence that inherited. And what we can do with this technology is kind of an accelerator to try and plug that gap in confidence. Where do you see things going in the future just to wrap it up for us?
Future of AI and XR in training simulations
00:25:54
Speaker
Yeah, I think what's very interesting is what's happening at the conference of AI and XR. AI, and it's all over the news now, but
00:26:06
Speaker
is now being extremely good at creating text and analyzing it. So what that means is the analysis of what someone says can become a lot more sophisticated. You can now generate conversations that are infinite, right? It's not perfect yet. We have to be very careful with the limitations, but the simulating conversation and analyzing them, we're getting a lot better at this with technology very, very fast. But that's only really interesting
00:26:35
Speaker
if you believe in the simulation yourself. So that's only if you're doing a simulation on giving feedback to a sexist employee, for example. If you're doing that with a chatbot, it's not that interesting. You don't have the real pressure of having someone in front of you who's looking at you, right in the eyes and crossing their arms, right?
00:26:53
Speaker
So when you add this thing into virtual reality and you can simulate environments and have avatars and humans that look and react the way humans do, then you start creating the conditions of performance that mimic reality. And I think we are approaching fast that visionary of a flight simulator for difficult conversation. So that's what's exciting for the future.
00:27:19
Speaker
So we started off talking about difficult conversations and I think we've now ended with difficult conversations and I think the biggest takeaway for me was that it all comes down to practice, like you said, and being able to practice in a safe space, right? Absolutely.
00:27:35
Speaker
Thank you so much, Christophe, for joining us today. And if you'd like to get in touch with us regarding today's episode, previous episodes, or anything else, send me an email at laurenatgamoteca.com. That's all for this episode on how humans e-learn together, supported by Gamoteca. Until next time.