Brain Food for Pioneering Spirits: What’s actually behind virtual reality and augmented reality, and how are they changing how we learn? In Room #862 of the Deep Talk Club, under our overarching theme “Pioneering Spirit with brAIn,” neuroscientist and learning-technology expert Dr. Franz Hütter joins as guest for our expert talk, digging into immersion, body-schema illusions, exposure therapy, psychological safety in VR training, and where extended reality is headed as it converges with AI. Listen in on the examples that came up and the perspectives that emerged in dialogue…
Note: This session was recorded live in German as part of the Deep Talk Club, so the video above is German-language audio only. What follows is an English translation of the conversation, lightly edited for readability — the back-and-forth between the moderator, expert guest, and participants is preserved, but the original timestamps and speaker names have been left out.
A wonderful good morning to everyone. Today we welcome Dr. Franz Hütter with “Virtual Reality” and “Augmented Reality” as our guest for the expert talk. Dr. Franz Hütter is a scholar of both the humanities and natural sciences with many years of experience in business as well as in research and teaching. A degree in linguistics shaped his passion for successful communication. Ten years of communications responsibility at an automotive IT company and ten self-employed years in learning and development married that passion with practice. His curiosity about the foundations of success also led Franz, in parallel, into the fields of neuroscience and genetics. He earned his doctorate on gene variants that influence the capacity for empathy, researched and taught at Essen University Hospital, and has taught applied cognitive neuroscience at the business psychology faculty of a business school since 2012. The focus of his professional work today is a Scientific Trainer program, through which he awakens the innovative research spirit of learning and development professionals and makes HR functions more effective through powerful cutting-edge research. His award-winning “Net of Brains Community,” honored with the 2022 German Demography Award in the category “New Work Brought to Life,” serves as an incubation space for breakthrough innovations and radically new paths in the further-education market. Franz Hütter offers forward-looking programs, such as Neuroscience and Future Learning in virtual reality, for anyone who wants to professionalize learning and development training, coaching, and consulting on a scientific basis, and further develop themselves professionally and in business. What exactly is behind these terms, virtual reality and augmented reality, and how does all of this connect to our current overarching theme, Pioneering Spirit with Brain — that’s what we’re talking about today. And with that, once again, quite officially, a wonderful good morning, dear Franz. I’m delighted to welcome you back at my side today.
Thank you for the invitation. I’m really delighted too.
Yes, wonderful. Let’s start by looking at the terms virtual reality and augmented reality — maybe not everyone knows them. Could you first say a bit about the difference? What actually are they?
Right. We all know augmented reality, for example, from the head-up display in a car — something gets overlaid onto real reality, in that case maybe from the navigation system, the directional arrows, or I hold my app up in front of Cologne Cathedral and it shows me the history of Cologne Cathedral, or of a plant, for example — I discovered this recently when I was in the Black Forest, and the woman I was out with there, who by the way will come up again later because she has a lot to do with virtual reality, Petra Schlerit, said, I have an app, we can identify the plant with it. And then it gets overlaid, so to speak, showing what kind of shrub or herb or whatever it is. That’s of course something that’s very, very relevant for learning too — not just for plants, but now, for example, in industry, I can use these kinds of options to have something displayed, like how to repair a machine, or where I can press certain levers, and so on. In medicine, I can display a body, say, internal organs, overlaid onto a real person, and so on. And then there’s virtual reality — there I have the headset on, I always call it this opaque sandwich box in front of your face, though I think they’re going to get noticeably slimmer very quickly now, so you get better wearing comfort. In any case, I fully immerse myself in a parallel world and see nothing of the outside world. And now the trend is very strongly toward mixing the two — meaning I can, for example, switch between virtual reality and augmented reality. That’s the case, for instance, with the Pro model from Meta, the Meta Quest Pro, where I tap the housing and can switch from one world into the other. And of course each mode has its own merit with regard to learning, and this new mixed reality, where virtual objects mix with real objects, so to speak — where I can now place a conversation partner or an object right in my own living room — that’s probably a significant step we’ll be able to increasingly bring into application in the near future.
Yes, wonderful, thank you, thank you so much. So with augmented reality, it’s essentially a kind of extension of the environment we’re in, through digital elements that get added, and with virtual reality, it’s about immersing yourself in a completely different real-feeling environment, so to speak, a simulated environment where a lot of it feels very real to us and we somehow lose ourselves in it. You actually use the latter in the training and education context — could you go into that a bit more? How does that play out, how can we picture it, what actually happens there exactly?
Yes, maybe briefly on how I got into this. Coming back to the Black Forest — Petra Isabel Schlerit attended a talk I gave on neurodidactics, I think in early ’21, then called me and said she’d like to talk to me about this virtual reality thing. At the time, for me, well, I knew it was applied in therapy, of course, but otherwise mostly in gaming, and I thought, okay — she sent me a headset, and I really, really quickly used it a lot, and I thought, my didactic heart beats faster, because I discovered that in virtual reality I can make complex things immediately graspable. You might need to know, in the background, that part of what I do in my training programs is really guide colleagues into a fairly deep scientific understanding of how learning happens, what emotions do in the brain, and so on, neuroplasticity, synapses, and so on. That means you’re working with videos, with instructional videos, we discuss it on a concept board and so on, but it still stays two-dimensional, and something three-dimensional like human anatomy displayed two-dimensionally just isn’t quite the same, and certainly not processes happening at the smallest microscopic level inside a cell. One of the first things I did was try to rebuild a synapse, and suddenly I was standing inside it — and there are really great tools where, without a single line of programming code or anything, I can build entire worlds for myself. And of course, what did I build? Ion channels — and I can, I don’t know, take the neurotransmitters and shoot the ions across the synaptic cleft, and suddenly, and that’s when my didactic heart really started beating faster, complex things become graspable. And when people are there with you in virtual reality and can actually perform these processes themselves, that’s something you could only recreate in a real seminar room with enormous effort — I don’t know, would I have to give people little balls, or somehow build an ion channel out of papier-mâché? In any case, a terrible amount of transport effort and all sorts of things — and this way I can just build it for myself, and I can reuse these spaces, and these are things that are of course incredibly exciting. Now, it’s relatively clear in the natural sciences, where you’re constantly confronted with three-dimensional objects, but the whole thing can also be transferred to complex business processes — a roadmap, a project plan — there too I can actually plan paths, I can build in the stumbling blocks along the way, and so on, and that’s simply the reason I find this technology incredibly fascinating.
Yes, really great, how you describe that — you really get a picture of it, you can really imagine it. Now I find it really exciting, because there are always so many discussions about how much will actually stay in our real world, in inverted commas, and how much something like virtual reality will increasingly be used in the future too. We have countless fields of application, so to speak, that keep developing further here, up to, I don’t know, maybe in the future we won’t need to travel to another city to go shopping anymore, but can bring the shopping experience from New York right into our own living room.
Exactly.
And there really are so, so many possibilities emerging here, some already in use and some still emerging. And for some people who’ve never tried it themselves, it’s sometimes a bit hard to grasp. But you just said it’s also used in therapeutic contexts, for example — I’ve heard, for instance, when it comes to fear of heights or something like that, that you no longer have to go somewhere to try certain things out, but can essentially bring it into your own living room and still have it feel as if you’re actually in that reality — not that you feel like you’re sitting at home, but that you really lose yourself, I’ll call it that, in this reality, in this other environment. Maybe you can say something about that from a brain perspective — what actually happens there? Or can we even tell the difference or not, and if not, why is that?
It’s actually quite striking. My first experience with it was already two, three years before I owned my own headset. That was at the Media Markt in Wuppertal, and they already had a game there where you climb up a skyscraper and then onto a plank, the Richie’s Plank Experience — meaning you’re on the 40th floor, you walk out onto the plank, and in the game you can actually fall off, and it would have been a bit of fun to see what happens if I step off this plank — and I noticed I couldn’t leave the plank, I couldn’t manage to jump off it, even though my conscious mind knew a hundred percent, I’m standing in the Media Markt in Wuppertal on this ugly carpet, nothing can happen. And that’s also one of the reasons we really need to be careful here, and why, when we apply this professionally, training is needed — because if someone, as you say, has a fear of heights, or is vulnerable in some other way, we obviously mustn’t traumatize them by applying a bit of group pressure, oh come on, don’t be like that, just do it — you wouldn’t do that in a professional context anyway, but as you say, in a therapeutic context, and there are efficacy studies. And these efficacy studies also lead me to your question about what happens in the brain. First of all, there are two areas where there are a lot of studies showing that VR is very helpful. One is exposure therapy — heights, spiders, needles, all that stuff that’s easier to bring in via VR and that has a comparable effect, of course embedded in the overall therapeutic concept, exposure therapy. The only difference is that I no longer have to go up a TV tower with the person, which takes effort. And that, by the way, also touches on the topic of the benefit in industry — in industry, you no longer have to transport a few tons of heavy machinery from A to B, but can let people learn wherever they are, without much effort. The second area where the therapeutic efficacy studies show very, very good effects is the area of body-schema disorders, because in virtual reality I have avatars, and I identify with the avatar very quickly, because in the brain, I see that I’m moving my hands in the virtual world, and in the real world I’m also moving my hands. That means, in principle, the brain synchronizes what I feel through my change in body position, through my movements, and so on. That’s exactly what also gets visually depicted in the VR headset. And so, I don’t know if some of you have seen this video of the rubber hand illusion — the body schema essentially gets transferred onto this virtual body I have. And that’s something very powerful. If I now, for example, make myself bigger — and in some programs I can do that with a click on the hand controller, changing my avatar — how do I come across then, and how do I feel? There’s a study that nicely shows that negotiation partners who choose a bigger, broader avatar, more massive, negotiate more confidently. And that opens up a few possibilities for how I can play with that, and how I can gather emotionally strong experiences that way — and the main effect of the whole VR thing is probably intensification. It’s this big buzzword, immersion — we fully immerse ourselves in an alternative reality. With e-learning, I can check emails on the side, even in a seminar room I can still look out the window or do something else, but with an opaque sandwich box on your head, that’s just not possible anymore. That means I’m fully in it, and we now also have EEG correlates via event-related potentials, where you can measure the degree of this immersion. And if I’m fully in it instead of just present, I’ll react much more strongly to emotional experiences — like height, like closeness and distance to other avatars, like in a constellation exercise in VR, for example, certain emotional events, symbols — I’ll react much more strongly. That means this emotional amplification, we know, is a significant factor when it comes to neuroplastic impact. Emotions and all the neurotransmitters like dopamine and noradrenaline that get released when things get exciting, when I get a bit stressed, or when I have some kind of success experience, are, put simply, the fertilizer sticks in the neural flowerpot, and enable the growth of new synapses and new connections, neural networking. And that simply gets amplified through this intensification, through this focus that’s possible in VR. And that of course applies in both directions — if I have good experiences, that can significantly increase learning speed. But, it has to be said, the risk is of course bigger too. I once heard about someone who just threw people into shooter games or first-person shooters or whatever in a seminar context, and something like that can of course also traumatize more strongly than if I just show it as a video. That means it requires competence and an inner attitude and an ethics in its use, and then this can really make a significant contribution to something we need more urgently than ever today — namely learning speed and depth.
Yes, wonderful, thank you, thank you so much. And it’s really exciting, because over the past few days we’ve opened up various different topics and keep noticing that there are always different perspectives on things. On the one hand you can use it very positively, on the other hand there are also concerns and reservations at times, depending on which technology we’re talking about. And here too I find it really exciting, because you’ve also mentioned the dangers here — and we keep noticing that, basically, both the problem, in inverted commas, and the solution is the human being. That means the tool or technology behind it that we use isn’t what makes it good or bad, but the possibilities of how we actually deploy it. What I find really exciting is, you said at the start that you discovered your love for this, whether it’s the brain or whatever, because things that would normally need to be presented three-dimensionally can be presented very well, three-dimensionally, in the training context, to increase this learning experience. But you also said later that, because of this insulation, in inverted commas, that happens, this feeling that you’re immersed in this space, that you’re actually not distracted, the way it might be the case today when we have Zoom meetings — especially now during the Covid era, there were a lot of people working from home in home office, and there were a lot, a lot of side effects that were also perceived as disruptive. So this would be a technology that goes a step further, where you could say, here we can “switch off” a lot of things?
Yes, exactly, that would be one way to consciously control that, and of course we’re all looking with great anticipation at the Apple Mixed Reality headset that’s likely coming out a week from Monday, which will probably set entirely new standards again. I think the time when headsets, in terms of wearing comfort, are relatively — where you can say, okay, I can wear this for a few hours too, but I have to get used to it first — that’s constantly improving, and I think what’s important is always increasing the possible actions, meaning I think there will be a lot more options to switch between modes, but I’ll be able to consciously control that — similar to how I can already put my phone on do-not-disturb mode today, or set my devices to work mode so certain things don’t pop up, WhatsApp, emails, and so on. It’ll probably be similar soon, that I simply have the option, with a headset that also looks pretty sleek and is fairly comfortable to wear, to replace my screens and then consciously control whether I want to be left alone right now, or stay fully in immersion, to use that term again, or whether I want stimulation from outside — and if I increase these options, I think I simply have greater flexibility.
If we look at the senses again here, we don’t really have things like smell and touch involved in that sense. Can you imagine there being further additions or something in the future regarding that? So, say, a trainer runs a training session, uses these VR headsets, or has them used, and maybe beforehand sends the participants something, saying, please light a candle at this point or similar — are there already tendencies where you can recognize certain things there?
There are certainly developments, and I don’t know how fast they’ll reach the market. There are several patents currently in progress and being trialed, for very complicated chemical-physicochemical apparatuses placed around the face area, where scents get synthesized from basic substances. Scents, like tastes, are often a mixture of various base aromas. So it’s possible this will come at some point — of course, because the sense of smell is a very, very powerful thing. Personally, I’m not counting on it yet, and I’d probably also be hesitant about whether I want that, having some kind of olfactory cartridges planted in front of my nose. But when it comes to haptics, quite a bit is in development. There are of course gloves that already convey the impression that I can grasp an object. There are vests with certain apparatuses, actuator motors built in, so I can feel a touch. Or also, I have to say, shaking my head a bit, from my perspective — being able to simulate a gunshot or stab wound. You notice that a lot of the technology driver here is of course the gaming industry, that’s where the corresponding money comes from. I always take that kind of thing fairly calmly, because I think it drives the overall development forward, and how we then deploy it remains, so to speak, up to our own standards. I don’t think that’s going to play a big role in the first few years of VR deployment. We can be glad, for now, if the overall adoption doesn’t proceed too sluggishly. But I think the next real, big step toward practical usability is something that’s already happening now, and that’s that the cameras on the headsets are getting good enough that the whole body gets depicted. We often only had half-bodies in VR, meaning legless avatars. Now, thanks to better cameras and better analysis algorithms, the headsets can already give us lower bodies too, which is already something, and the next thing is that, thanks to face tracking and eye tracking, realistic facial expressions are also becoming possible, and that’s something I’m actually looking forward to more, in practical application, than, I don’t know, the smell of the ocean or a flower meadow — and it’ll be interesting whether hay fever comes along with that too, who knows. In any case, realistic facial expressions and gestures are, I think, the next big step toward even greater practical usability.
Yes, wonderful, thank you, thank you so much. You really made me laugh, with the hay fever and the flowers too. And here too, with the example you brought in, with these gunshot or stab wounds, being able to simulate that — again it comes down to, it depends on which context it’s used in. With the police, that’s certainly, in inverted commas, very helpful in training, if you haven’t experienced a gunshot or stab wound yet. Whereas whether I need that for gaming, in inverted commas, is something we can certainly smile and debate about. And here too we’re back at this point — ultimately it comes down, to some extent, to what we make of it, how we use these technologies, how we deploy them. And you mentioned this area of responsibility and ethics — you already described very nicely that if I haven’t had training, and maybe I’m not aware of the risks, I could really traumatize a person in a training context, for example. Maybe you could go into this risk area a bit more — are there further factors you see, or is that the main aspect we can cover here?
I think there are a few safety aspects. One is physical safety, and that’s, for example, why we always go into VR with another colleague present, who takes on the assistant role during the training phase and simply watches the avatars of the seminar participants, because it can happen that someone notices, even with the current state of the technology, from body posture, that something’s off, and you go over to them, hey, can I help you with something, is something not working — good supervision, essentially. It becomes really relevant, for example, if you say, oh look, there’s a couch over there, and then you should actually point that out to people, because after a few minutes in virtual reality — if you sit down for real, pay attention, lift your headset up a bit, check whether this virtual seating actually corresponds to a real one, whether there’s really something to sit on, otherwise they just end up sitting on the floor, which of course isn’t desirable. The guardian systems are already good enough now that they generally detect these safeguards when another person moves into the headset’s protective zone. That means you don’t knock out relatives or cats or dogs in VR quite as easily anymore. But you still have to keep these safety aspects in mind — with some experience they’re relatively quickly under control. The other thing, of course, is the topic of psychological safety. We notice this especially with real teams, maybe even hierarchically mixed ones — it’s very, very important to proceed gently there, so everyone can save face, because it can happen that some people get into the technology faster and can operate the buttons on the controller and move around in VR, while others need a bit longer, and it’s important to frame that as completely normal, that everyone of us needs time to find our way into any new technology, because people often get confronted with the topic very, very quickly and put themselves under pressure, or don’t want to embarrass themselves in front of their own employees. I once had a senior executive in there, a very experienced leader, who said, wow, now I understand what we’re doing to our people and what we’re actually putting them through when it comes to digitalization — because now I feel it myself, how it can feel when, for ten minutes, you’re saying to yourself, am I the idiot here? And those are often valuable experiences, because I can then make that a topic too. But I don’t want to give the impression that this takes up a particularly long stretch of time — it’s simply important to do an onboarding. You first meet over Zoom or Teams, you give precise instructions, I also always keep the Zoom or Teams meeting running, so to speak, as a safety net, in case something doesn’t work with the headset, then the person in question can speak up and get support — and this topic of psychological safety is quite important. And then, of course, in virtual reality, there’s dealing with height. I can definitely use height in a didactically meaningful way to amplify the corresponding emotional impact. My partner, Sandra Mareike Lang, once did this with a conflict management training — the Glasl escalation model, some of you will remember it — the last three stages go in the direction of, I don’t know, doesn’t matter, even if I go down with it, we’ll destroy each other, and so on. And she actually rebuilt these stages, and the last three stages, which go into the conflict stage of mutual destruction, she built over a chasm — and then you look down and see, like, 200 meters into the gorge — and if you handle people right, asking beforehand whether anyone has any issue with heights, for those people there might be other, flatter-built stages, in a safe space, whatever, or just stepping stones on the ground you can place in the virtual world. But something like that, if it’s well and professionally framed and built, can of course significantly amplify the effect — also with critical paths in project planning, I can use height to represent danger to liquidity, or to deadlines, and so on. But there, I’d say, of course you need VR training, but the more important thing is bringing prior experience in dealing with people — meaning an experienced leader, an experienced trainer, consultant, or coach actually has, and that’s really the demanding part to learn, and whoever already has that competence in their toolkit will also handle people mindfully and effectively in virtual reality.
Yes, wonderful, thank you, thank you so much. Given the time, I’d like to open up the hand-raising now, to give you one more chance, Franz — is there anything you’d like to add before we see if anyone else would like to join in, with their own experiences, questions, or similar?
I think, overall, this is a time when I keep being delighted by colleagues who are really curious. I think there are several topics worth researching right now — the topic of learning and VR, the topic of learning and artificial intelligence. I think we’re living in a time where so much is changing, and with all the challenges, so many new opportunities are also emerging, that we can build entirely new learning and development approaches, and together move into a stronger future readiness. And so I’m just glad that I see a great sense of new beginnings everywhere among colleagues, and that’s something that personally makes me very happy too.
Yes, wonderful, thank you, thank you so much. So I’ve already opened the hand-raising, in case anyone would like to join, you’re warmly invited. Just a quick reminder, the room is recorded the entire time — anyone who joins automatically agrees to that, and we have three small room rules: a profile photo where you’re clearly recognizable, first and last name, and at least one sentence in your bio. Anyone who doesn’t want that for whatever reason is welcome to use the chat to share thoughts or a question. And if you’d like to join, please make sure to do so quickly with the hand-raise, in inverted commas, because Franz needs to leave right on time today due to a follow-up appointment, so we’ll make sure to wrap up right on time here too. And with that, I’d like to warmly welcome Stefan at our side — a wonderful good morning, Stefan, what do you say about the topic, or did you bring a question?
Hello Stefan.
Yes, good morning Yasemin, hello Franz, and happy Friday to everyone else here in the room too. Yes, I’ll say, when it comes to my own touchpoints, if I start with augmented reality, that began for me around 2007/2008, when all these iPhone generations, and Android too, started really understanding how to present, I’ll say, added-value experiences with these tools. There’s an app, an info app, that’s still around today — it’s called Around Me. And when I use it, no matter where I am in Germany, I can just open the camera, and via augmented reality it shows me, through my camera, where the nearest gas station is, the nearest park, the nearest football field, and so on, depending on what I want to see. I find that really exciting — you’ve given a lot of examples. Before I get to VR, I’d say, and I think you’ll agree with me, dear Franz, that augmented reality triggered one of the biggest movements worldwide, namely in 2015/2016 with the app Pokémon Go. That was one of the biggest mass movements of people since World War II. That shows the relevance augmented reality can have when applied correctly. Sure, there was a cult license behind it with Pokémon, but it took on a scale that, to this day, I’ll say, marketing agencies still take as the prime example of how you can excite people, and how disruptive concepts can achieve the greatest possible success.
Absolutely.
And it’s just simple too — it was incredibly fun. Of course it also had, as always, we sometimes deliberately talk about how everything has its dangers, but I always found this assessment correct too — we’re the ones who can steer this, who can, so to speak, regulate it. What do we do with this technology? But generally, augmented reality is a huge amount of fun, and I still use it deliberately today — of course I don’t have that playful joy anymore of trying out every single app, but it’s still fun to use in the info space, and especially when you’re traveling and don’t know an area, and you have a great or well-made augmented reality app, that’s definitely a wonderful addition to your own knowledge, for further education. In the VR space, you gave a lot of great application examples — earlier there was the example with the police. I have an addition there — the Dutch police have been using virtual reality for crime scenes for ten years already, meaning it gets recorded beforehand with a corresponding camera, 360-degree cameras, and then the whole thing gets programmed so that, via VR headsets, the corresponding detectives can then go through this work again very intensively in retrospect, essentially being able to walk through the complete crime scene again and again in 360 degrees. And that’s a very, very successful method. And then, I believe you also mentioned this, VR is used very, very successfully in pain therapy. There are a lot, a lot of clinics offering this, especially in areas with very anxious patients, or when it comes to children, where outpatient procedures are also needed, then the child gets calmed down, in a positive sense, via the VR headset. Those are all exciting fields of application. My biggest area — we’re back at the ugly carpet at the Media Markt in Wuppertal, because I’m from Wuppertal, my agency is actually in Düsseldorf, but I also have offices in Wuppertal, that’s my hometown, and it’s one of the greatest cities we have in Germany — but everyone’s proud of their hometown. What I want to say with that is, in the gaming space, or generally gamification with blended learning, so when we really have well-made VR applications — and I’m very, very curious about the conference next week that you mentioned with Apple, that will definitely be a game changer in this space. And we’ve had this experience too — we’ve been in this VR space for almost 15 years, and one of the biggest giants in the tech industry, namely Google, has unfortunately shut down all of its VR projects, but is now also tinkering with a solution, because of course Microsoft is also back with various solutions, just like Alphabet, or of course our colleague Mark Zuckerberg with his Metaverse. There are just so, so many great applications, and I just like that with gamification, people can choose their own pace, just like in high-quality games. And there are a lot of studies — I’d like to ask you again, do you have a current study on hand that really shows the clear success with blended learning, or generally with the use of VR combined with gamification?
In combination with gamification, I don’t have a study on hand right now, but I’ll take that as a research assignment. There are quite a few studies now beginning to show the successes with VR. There’s, well, the classic is this PWC study, where they used a kind of VR with pre-programmed avatars — you could say that’s already a kind of gamification too — I believe it was on the topic of inclusive language, or inclusive leadership, and there are already gamification elements like scoreboards and similar included there. There’s an evaluation of that — I can definitely send that to you if you leave me a message.
Yes, very gladly. Of course I’m always trying to stay up to date in this field, both as a private user and of course as an agency owner. Sure, I can research that myself too, but I’m always happy when we cross-pollinate each other with information in the network. Because I also notice with you, dear Franz, that this is a topic that’s exciting because we’re always primarily the private person who brings this playful joy to the topic first.
Absolutely. The child is the explorer, who first looks at what new things they can play with. And then, secondarily, comes the practical application. But I think that’s actually the primary thing.
Exactly. And it’s really, really a lot of fun. A few weeks ago the PlayStation 5 VR headset came out — of course with the usual product scarcity we know from Sony, which backfired for them with the PlayStation 5 itself, but now with the headset they’re doing it again so that you can barely get a unit. But in the end I had the chance to test it, and for a long time I thought VR was just a huge hype topic. I always saw the point in it, and I noticed that the manufacturing industry in particular has been making really big strides with VR for a long, long time — especially in mechanical engineering, for example, VR is becoming irreplaceable in the production phase, especially for optimizations, a lot of agile teams also use the VR space. I remember that Audi Canada already started using VR back in the 2000s, so that prospective buyers, whose new vehicle wasn’t there yet, could already experience it with the VR headset. And we’re talking about something that happened 15, 16 years ago now. So it’s a slow development — I think we promised ourselves a bit more, that it would be this huge leap. But I can very well imagine that next week it’ll actually finally happen with the new Apple XR Reality headset.
I think I’ll be glued to the screen, even more excited than for King Charles’s coronation — that’s for sure. And on the topic of industrial applications, which Stefan just touched on, I can add something too, and we can happily share this as a link afterward — just in time for LearnTech, from the Institute for Corporate Education, so the eLearning Journal group, a paper has come out that gives recommendations for action from the perspective of the Head of Learning, and it’s specifically about these industry stories — for example, it describes a company where 3D printers, huge machines, get serviced at the customer’s site using augmented reality and mixed reality, meaning service technicians no longer have to travel from A to B, the machines no longer have to be transported for training purposes, the systems have longer uptimes, no longer need to be taken out of operation, and so on. So that might be interesting for some of you too, to keep these industrial applications in view, because that’s essentially the world of the clients we also connect with in consulting or agency services.
Yes, wonderful, thank you, thank you so much. And yes, as I mentioned earlier, we’ll make sure to wrap up right on time here so Franz can get out punctually for his next appointment. Thank you, dear Stefan, for your, well, for your contributions across various areas and your question too. I’d like to warmly invite you back into the audience, so we can now slowly move toward wrapping up together with Franz. I have one more question, Franz, regarding our overarching theme, Pioneering Spirit with Brain — how would you assess that? How important is this? Where do you see the connection to this overarching theme, and how important is it, actually, for me to engage with these kinds of topics and aspects?
May I ask for clarification — do you mean the effects of VR from a neuroscientific perspective?
Quite generally — you’re welcome to look at it from a neuroscientific perspective, but also just answer the question very generally, however you prefer.
Right, exactly. I think, of course, knowing certain fundamentals of how it works is really, really helpful — also, for example, regarding the safety aspects, who’s allowed to wear the headset and so on — that would also be a topic, asking whether someone has a predisposition to something like epilepsy and so on, so there are a few exclusions like that. But the big topic I see is really directing our gaze toward the opportunities, and I think it’s important, in that sense, to engage with these technologies now, because we sometimes still have this mentality of, I’ll wait until the thing is fully matured. The thing is, with VR we’re in a situation similar to artificial intelligence — we’re not going to come out of the beta stage anymore, we’ll always have solutions with ever-faster innovation cycles. I think it’s especially important right now, when it comes to EdTech, these education technologies, to simply make contact, try things out, see what’s out there, how it feels, for example, to do a coaching session where, for the big picture, you travel to the Matterhorn, and for a deep dive, with one click on the controller, you’re at the sea and maybe walking underwater watching the fish, how it feels to symbolically burn old belief systems in a crackling campfire, and how it feels to experiment with height, or with closeness and distance, for example trying out conflicts and constellations, virtual constellations in a VR space. Just having seen these things, tried them out, and above all staying interested and keeping up with the technical developments — which, as mentioned several times, next week, what happens with the Apple headset. And of course one story is that, for a while, it seemed like this whole VR thing had become somewhat old news — since November there’s been the hype around ChatGPT, and I don’t want to downplay that at all, quite the opposite, I use ChatGPT extremely intensively, and it’s a very, very important technology, but it seemed like everything to do with the Metaverse had become old news, like it was a bubble that burst. The thing is, the Metaverse isn’t just Mark Zuckerberg — it’s something expressed across many, many systems, there are hundreds of companies working on similar technologies and deploying them too. The thing is, it’s going to keep moving into more and more different areas, because there’s also the 2D Metaverse via screen — all these apps are becoming more and more interoperable, meaning it’s not necessarily the case that I need the headset for the first step in. Some things can just be experienced via a web browser, and then, if I’m curious about the web browser, people say, okay now I’ll try a headset, and notice, this is a completely different experience with full immersion. And if you look at the market, for example in America — Sandbox, Roblox, and so on — those are all huge players, but with millions of people online, where community experiences arise, a lot in gaming, a lot in games and social VR — but the first area where we’re already noticing a lot of others following suit is in fashion — Prada, Gucci, Porsche Design, and so on have branches in virtual reality, and pretty breathtaking revenue is already being made there in some cases, and that’s a market we, including in education, shouldn’t just leave lying there. And the last big step, I think, is that artificial intelligence connects with all the Metaverse technologies — VR, augmented reality, mixed reality — because right now we still have the situation where I, as a user, go into a space that someone else made. But that’s not the success secret of the internet — the success secret of the internet is user-generated content. Everyone can post, everyone can upload photos, everyone can upload videos, and I recently read a piece in Time Magazine with the Nvidia chief, the graphics card manufacturer, they’re working very intensively on these technologies, and Nvidia’s technology chief says they already have more and more apps in preparation, and some already available, where I don’t just have text-to-image, text-to-video, but actually text-to-3D too, meaning at some point I might be standing there with the Apple headset, or its successor, and say, hey, I need a conversation partner who’s an expert in this or that field, and an avatar gets generated on my command, and I converse with it the way I can converse with ChatGPT today, in a very, very knowledgeable way — you are an expert in… I can have landscapes generated, created by the AI, and these are technologies that, according to fairly unanimous forecasting, aren’t going to arrive in 20 years, but that we can expect in the coming years. That’s why I think it’s a trend where two big currents, namely extended reality and artificial intelligence, are converging into one development thread. And I believe they’ll significantly change the way we experience the internet, and how we get to experience the merging of technology and all areas of learning and living in the coming years. And I look at this development with great curiosity and also great joy, because I see the opportunity, while well aware that it needs professionals who always look at all these technologies with a critical eye and with a view toward ethics and stance, and hopefully bring them into application in as beneficial a way as possible.
Yes, wonderful, thank you, thank you so much for this outlook toward the end too, and also for bringing in all these ethical and moral aspects again. That means it’s also, to some extent, about responsibility, and we’ve opened up these two sides again and again — that both the problem, in inverted commas, and the solution lie with the human being. That means the tool per se, regardless of what we’re talking about, the technology per se, isn’t negative or positive, but has a lot to do with how we handle it. And for that, the prerequisite is really approaching it with a certain curiosity and trying it out for ourselves. I think it’s wonderful too — Jürgen shared in the chat again, thanking you very, very warmly for this room, and what he’s taking away is that conflict management for distributed project teams is now technologically reframed for him. I think it’s great that we could pass along this curiosity or joy here too. Thank you, dear Franz.
Thank you.
Yes, thank you so, so much. That was Dr. Franz Hütter for today’s expert talk — we’ve talked together about virtual and augmented reality, really exciting insights, a wonderful outlook. Thank you for your time, and we’ll stay in touch, dear Franz. I wish you a successful day today.
We’ll do that, and a wonderful day to everyone too.
