ATU716 – XRGuru with Doug Smith

Hi, this is Doug Smith. I’m the Director of Learning Success at XR Guru, and this is your Assistive Technology Update.

Hello and welcome to your Assistive Technology Update, a weekly dose of information that keeps you up to date on the latest developments in the field of technology designed to assist individuals with disabilities and special needs. I’m your host, Josh Anderson, with the INDATA Project at Easterseals Crossroads in beautiful Indianapolis, Indiana. Welcome to episode 716 of Assistive Technology Update. It is scheduled to be released on February 14th, 2025.

On today’s episode, we’re super excited to welcome Doug Smith, Director of Learning Success from XR Guru, to the show. He’s here to tell us about all the great training tools they have available to help individuals with disabilities in employment, learning living skills, and many other really cool things done in the virtual environment. We want to thank all of you for listening, and also thank InTRAC at indianarelay.com. They are the wonderful sponsor of our captions and our transcripts. If you’re looking for a transcript of today’s show, go to eastersealstech.com. But for now, listeners, let’s go ahead and get on with the show. Today, listeners, we’re going to immerse ourselves in the immersive experiences created by XR Guru. Director of Learning Success, Doug Smith, from XR Guru is here to tell us all about the tools they have available to assist individuals with a myriad of learning and training tools. Doug, welcome to the show.

Hey, thanks so much. Happy to be here.

Yeah, I’m happy to have you and excited to learn about the technology. But before we do that, could you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself?

Yeah, sure. I’m Doug Smith. I’m here in Columbus, Ohio, with XR Guru. I’m the Director of Learning Success. And we’re a global organization. We just happen to focus on virtual reality content and developing content across the board for workforce development and education and training. But we’ve, the past few years, carved out a nice niche of content in virtual reality for the DD space and the individuals with the developmental and disability space. So that’s an interesting focus that we didn’t think we were going to get into, but we did. Personally, it rings home true to me. My family’s always been involved with individuals with disabilities. My aunt and uncle actually live in Romania. They moved there 30 years ago to set up group homes for individuals with disabilities in Romania. So always been a part of my background as well.

Wow, what an absolutely perfect fit. I love it when everything seemed to work out like that. You get the right person in the right kind of field and maybe doing something you didn’t even think you’d be doing. Well, we’ll get into all the things that can really help individuals with disabilities, but just big picture, what’s some of the content that XR Guru offers?

Yeah, so we actually started about 20 years ago in the training space, and then when this technology came about 10 years ago in its current form, VR has been around forever. I remember growing up near Lake Erie in Sandusky, Cedar Point, if you know that place, big roller coasters, whatnot. They were one of the first to adopt virtual reality, and this was 30 years ago, and you’d get in there and put a virtual reality headset on, you’d ride a roller coaster. It was pretty cool back then, or you could just go right over there thirty steps away and go ride the roller coaster. But it was cool at the time. And then looking back at that, what we have today is just remarkable, just so much better. The technology’s really great.

So this company, XR Guru, about 10 years ago, started developing content specifically for training and education because that was the background of the company, and really started with construction and medical services, think like nursing, NCLEX exams, prep for that, taking those hard topics, those difficult concepts, and putting them into a kind of virtual hands-on environment that made it a little more engaging, a little easier for folks to understand what those concepts were.

So fast-forward to the pandemic and the shutdown, and everything that was happening there. People were calling us up saying, “Hey, what do you have off the shelf that we could grab today and the topics that we can explore with training and education and workforce?” And we said, “Well,” we didn’t really have anything because we were developing content for our own students, and we were developing content for Midwest companies that were customized. And so it was really a situation where we thought, “Well, gosh, maybe we should create a bunch of content that’s off the shelf.” And we did. So we’ve got a thousand different topics, literally 1100 different topics that span from construction trade, skills, soft skills is a huge one, which we’ll talk a little bit more about here in this session, of course. We’ve got career exploration, which is also huge in the DD space, as well as just abroad, and healthcare, medical assisting, CNA skills, things like that. So a very broad spectrum in the education space. We’ve got sciences too. So long answer to a short question, but hopefully that helps.

No, it definitely does. And when we get into how to find out more, I definitely recommend folks go and look at it just because there is a lot. I did a little bit of research for this, so I maybe pinned down some stuff, and I was like, “You know what? We’ll just do an overarching thing,” because it’s a lot of information. And having come from employment before this, so before this, I was a job coach and worked with individuals, and sometimes just getting the hands-on, the figuring out what might work, the being able to see in the real world how these things work, it’s very hard to explain, or what even a daily duties would be. And we tried do what we could with internships, with job shadows, but that’s not possible with all businesses, and it’s not always a good way to go. So I guess that leads me into, let’s talk about some of the things that are specially created for individuals with disabilities. Describe some of those to me.

Yeah, yeah, great. So about three years ago, the State of Tennessee, which is now the DDA, the Department of Disabilities and Aging, it used to be individuals with developmental and intellectual disabilities. They’ve just merged recently, I think. But they came up with a pilot program for really as leaders in the space across the country, I mean, it was just remarkable to see what Tennessee is doing down there statewide, but really trying to figure out how they can provide virtual reality experiences for their service providers to go out and help individuals with DD who are interested in getting into the workforce, or maybe they’re already in the workforce but not on the right path.

So that’s really where we started to focus on the DD-specific content with career exploration. And I’ve got some really interesting stories about how we came up with that. And then also with the soft skills, the employability skills, just some basic skills for the DD space, hygiene, just basic taking care of yourself, looking good when you’re going into a job or a job interview, day-to-day tasks on a job. Is it okay to grab your phone and check your texts from buddies or your family when you got a customer right in front of you? What is that kind of just appropriate behavior for the workforce and getting folks ready and understanding in a real world environment, like you said, preparing for a job is one thing, but seeing it, feeling it, understanding what it is before you ever get into that job is a completely different thing.

Oh, for sure. And I’m sure for a lot of folks, it has to kind of bring down some of the fear, some of the unknown. “Oh gosh, what if this does happen? What if this does happen?” Being able to experience that in a safe virtual environment has to make a huge difference.

We really want to set them up for success. The service providers we worked with so far in Tennessee and other states, of course, we’ve heard that exact feedback. It’s really given people an understanding. One of the most interesting things about the career exploration aspect of it was people who wanted to be vet techs, veterinarian technicians. And they thought that because they wanted to pet puppies and kitties all day. And so if you know anything about being a vet tech, it’s not petting puppies and kitties all day. So you can have these folks who they think they want to be a vet tech, so they sign up at the career fair or whatever it is, and they jump on and they get on boarded, they get hired even, and then two months into the job, they realize, “Oh, wait, this is not petting puppies and kitties all day. This is not what I was going to do.” So then maybe they quit.

So that’s a no-go for everybody. And so that’s where we try to take that kind of visual experience, that understanding of what the career actually is. And this is a whole variety of careers that we ended up doing for the DD space. Vet tech was one of them, and we took images and 360 videos and immersive experience so that you could see and feel and just kind of be there in that virtual environment by wearing a virtual reality headset or on a tablet or a computer and see what that job looks like and say, “Hey, well, wait. This isn’t petting puppies and kitties all day. So maybe I don’t want to be a vet tech. Maybe I’ll go be a baker or something.”

Yeah. Oh, for sure, for sure. Doug, I’m going to jump around a little bit here just you kind of brought it up that this can work on some different devices. So I guess if I’m using one of the training programs or one of the career exploration programs or anything from XR Guru, what all kinds of devices is it able to work on?

So we push the virtual reality headset, so the ones that we default to are the Meta products, the Quest series. So right now we’re on the Quest 2, Quest 3 VR headsets. Those price points for service providers, not usually a huge deal. In today’s world, they’re about 300, $350 at Best Buy or Amazon or whatever retail. But we realize some people can’t do that, and especially if you’re an end user or a family with an individual with DD, then maybe you don’t have a headset or maybe there’s no real reason to get a headset or maybe there’s some visual issues there. And so you can access, even though this technology is meant to be immersive, the cool thing about the technology is that it can actually scale back into things that are not immersive, like tablets or the computer or even a cell phone in some situations if they have that. So it is compatible among many, many different devices.

Nice. And we always love that when it comes to accessibility. The more you can access it, the more accessible it might be. You said you had some good stories, so I’m just going to go ahead and ask, as you were developing some of these programs, what are some good stories of just how that all came about?

Yeah, so we’re here in Ohio, and we work with a lot of the different boards in Ohio, which is set up as a state a little bit differently than most states. Tennessee, of course, is a statewide run program with service providers. In between Ohio and Tennessee, if you know your geography, is Kentucky, of course. We work with their Department of Education. So it’s just a little smattering of who we work with and what we’ve been able to see firsthand with the different organizations. Tennessee was super interesting because this was where we went down to Nashville for a few days and we took our recording equipment. So we have this really state-of-the-art 8K resolution Insta cam. So if you know Insta, you might know the Insta cam series. It’s a product, and this one looks like an alien head. It’s just this ball with all these little video cameras all over the thing, and it has these little antennas sticking up, so it looks like a little alien looking at you.

So we did get a lot of looks when we set that up in places, but the whole goal was to set up this 8K 360 degree video camera. And the very first place we did this was a partner with the State of Tennessee. They have, of course, industry partners out in the community, and one of their partners is the Nashville Sounds baseball stadium. So think of if you’re a Major League baseball fan, you guys being where you are, maybe Milwaukee Brewers isn’t your favorite team, but the AAA team for the Milwaukee Brewers is the Nashville Sounds baseball team. So we were down there and it was opening week of the baseball AAA team there in Nashville. And so energy was high, everything was really great, and the baseball stadium itself hires a lot of individuals with DD.

So we had a really good experience of setting up this camera in the middle of the baseball stadium right before the gates were opened for opening week. And so then we were just trying to capture all the different parts of the baseball stadium where individuals could work, where they could get a job even tomorrow if they wanted to and to showcase that. And so that’s one of my favorite ones because we were able to check out the concession stands, we were able to check out the food prep back end. We were able to check out some of the ushers and the ticket takers and the counters and all these different jobs that those individuals could get even as quick as the next day.

And so from there, when people started coming in, we were asking questions about what does this do? What are you guys doing here? It’s just a lot of interaction with the community, with the workers there at large, and like, “Hey, yeah,” as an individual with developmental disabilities, these folks would come up to us and they would say, “Yeah, this would be great. I needed this technology when I was looking for a job.” And we just got some really great ideas from the community itself and understanding what to do next and how to format it so that we would be best received by those users who would be ultimately using the content.

Nice. And I love that you took that into consideration, making it specifically for folks and involving them on what do they wish they knew? How is it best presented and really tailored to them. So that’s really awesome. And Doug, what about the soft skills stuff? So the hygiene and things like that. I guess, what kind of planning went into that, or how did you decide which ones were important for folks to be able to have those skills in order to find good jobs and be able to keep them?

Yeah, soft skills is really interesting because today with the AI component of things, there’s a lot of AI going on everywhere, of course, a lot in assistive tech, and then virtual reality is no different. We’ve got AI components that I’ll work my way to talk about here in a second, but when we talk about the origin of soft skills, it really did start from the service providers saying, “You know what? When I hear from employers who are looking to hire, the biggest things that come up are this, this, and this.” And those tended to be how to interact with people, basic hygiene, and then just day-to-day tasks doing the job. And so how do you take every possible scenario and every possible industry and then boil those down into consumable, easy-to-understand scenarios that anybody could use for skill development?

Well, it wasn’t easy, but we ended up doing it over a period of a few months, we were able to figure it out. We had a lot of great help from subject matter experts and people in the field, of course, and we took it, and really, our first one was super interesting. It ended up being hand washing. And so we used the CDC’s recommendation, and this is 2022, I want to say around 2022. So still on the cusp of COVID and everybody being sensitive about washing hands and stuff. And so we wanted to make sure everybody knew how to wash their hands.

So imagine in a virtual environment world where you are walking around and you’re in a bathroom and you’re being guided on how to wash your hands appropriately. And so this turned out to be a really, really interesting lesson for folks to understand how to do that appropriately according to the CDC. Actually took it to a biology teachers conference later that year for the first launch of it. And all these biology teachers, biology teachers, they’re supposed to know how to do this stuff. And they get in there and they’re like, “Wait a minute. Do I have to wash my hands for 20 seconds? Oh, this is crazy. This is too, it’s so long. What am I doing?” And I’m like, “Wait a minute. We’re at a biology teacher conference here. What’s going on?” So just how that’s translated, how that piece of content has translated, not even from the DD space, but just generally how it’s translated into working into a lot of different scenarios.

So we have all the basic skills and the hygiene lessons, and then we’ve got some really cool soft skills as far as job interview simulators. We’ve got some really cool different scenarios like professional communication back and forth. And with the advent of AI, I’ll talk about that for a second, it really is this totally, I don’t even want to say customizable, because AI itself is the customized product enough that you are talking kind of fluently with a virtual person back and forth, and they are talking back and forth with you, changing the way they’re talking based on how you’re talking. So taking this to a soft skills interview, professional communication, all these different types of simulators with all these different types of subjects has just been a game changer.

Oh my gosh. Yeah. And you kind of brought up, and I’m glad you brought it up because I wanted to talk about that, but yeah, just dealing with customers, dealing with coworkers, all those things. But then the fact that the AI can change. So it’s not like I’m just figuring out how to beat the game and get this non-playable character to do the thing I want it to do. I actually have to interact. And the fact that it can talk back to me, that’s just so different. I know different folks that we’ve worked with in not just kind of the developmental disability kind of space, but really so many others, these are very hard skills to learn. And then if I have to look a real person in the eye while I’m doing it, that’s just even more challenging.

But if I can do it with this AI component that can sit there and actually respond as a real human being would, just what a difference, because then I can learn these skills, I can hone them a little bit, so in the real world when I face those, I’ve got some backing. I’ve got some skills. I’ve got some practice under my belt. So that’s awesome. I love that you brought that up and it’s so cool that yeah, it’s able to adapt kind of on the fly. That is just absolutely amazing. So Doug, we talked about independent living, we talked about work and other stuff. What are some other things that we can do with VR with some of the tools from XR Guru?

Yeah, outside of training and education, cognitive thinking, critical thinking, we’ve got some puzzles for the cognitive skill building. And then meditation’s been huge as well. Just folks who want to take a breath, maybe they’re overwhelmed with life, maybe they’ve got some choices in front of them that they know will overwhelm them, they can jump in a VR headset, and those meditation experiences are just there, quite a few out there, some on XR Guru of course. And they just really help people get into a good zone, a good mental space, get some good breathing exercises, things like that to just get ready for the day ahead or maybe a choice that they have coming up or maybe a bad day that they had.

And then, Doug, I did see in this as well that it’s possible to kind of create and design customized content. How does that work?

Yeah, good question. So we do have some service providers in the DD space who are using this tool. It’s called the XR Design Studio. And it’s a no-code authoring tool that allows you to create your own content, mainly for training or prep environments. Here, we’re going to be going into this kitchen, and here’s how you’re going to make your peanut butter sandwich today. And so they kind of replicate that. Again, they can use a 360 video camera, like a GoPro. You can get those for 100, 150 bucks these days. So it’s not difficult to get that. Or we have actually an AI generator inside the tool itself. So you could say, “Create a kitchen,” and type that in. And the prompt comes up where you have a 360 degree video that AI has created on our tool that’s a kitchen. And then you could take that kitchen and start to replicate the different steps or the different actions that you need to take in that kitchen to create a peanut butter sandwich, for example. Meal prep’s a big one so I’m just going to stay on that for a minute.

Or you could have 3D models, not just 360 videos, but 3D models that you could generate from our own tool, or there are plenty of stock photo kinds of websites out there that you could pull in any 3D model that you want. So let’s say you had a, I don’t know, refrigerator model or something. You wanted to put that in there, and then you could identify on the refrigerator which one’s the freezer part, which one’s the fridge part, make sure it’s closed. And you could just put all sorts of different kind of lesson-type indicators and processes and things like that on the tool that then can spit out into the virtual reality headset or onto the computer or tablet so people can see that as an assessment, or a training tool, or a train-the-trainer tool even for service providers, or even just kind of an independent living checklist. That’s what we’ve seen some of that being used for actually.

That’s super cool. And yeah, just open it up even more accessibility. Well, Doug, all these tools are amazing, amazing things. I got to ask, what’s on the horizon? Is there something you guys are working on you’re excited about or just honing these and making them even better?

Yeah, I mean, with AI, obviously things are moving so fast, we don’t know exactly, but in the forecast for this year, it’s going to be an independent living house. And again, this will be more for service providers to kind of check in with families to see if this individual’s ready to have some independent living and this will kind of assess them in real time and give them some pointers on what to look out for. So not quite there yet with the development, but really excited about it where you could jump in, walk around a house, have 10 to 20 different actions that you have to critically think through, if something goes wrong with buttons beeping, maybe locking the front door, whatever these things are, some of the things that we’ve talked about over the years, just to kind of give it as an early assessment tool for service providers and families to understand if that individual’s ready to have some independent living.

Oh, that’s awesome. That’s awesome. That’ll be a great, great tool for folks. Doug, if our listeners want to find out more about XR Guru and I recommend they do go at least explore all the really cool stuff that’s kind of there, what’s a good way for them to do that?

Yeah, go to xrguru.com. That’s xrguru.com, XRGuru. I’d suggest looking at first, starting looking at the Marketplace, which is our collection of content with 1100 different pieces of content there. Check that out. At any time, submit the form. That form will go to me and my team. I’m always happy to connect with folks and show them on a call, like a Teams call or something, about the content. Talk through how they might be able to use that, whether they’re a service provider or a family or an end user. Doesn’t matter to me. I’m always happy to take 15, 20, 30 minutes to talk through and show you some use cases and see if it might make sense. If folks out there do actually have headsets, Quest headsets, I’d be happy to send them access to some of our VR content as well, just for listening to the show.

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Well, we will put a link down in the show notes so that folks can easily get over there. Doug, thank you so much for coming on, for telling us the great things about XR Guru. I always love when something’s made for a purpose and then sees another need and is able to kind of jump into that space and use those skills. And I feel like this is just a great tool for, yeah, like you said, the job skills, but also just independent living and helping people. Really, just those circumstances that are going to come up, be able to really hone those skills in a really safe environment, it’s just a great tool. And thank you so much. Very awesome. Thanks for coming on.

Thank you.

Do you have a question about assistive technology? Do you have a suggestion for someone we should interview on Assistive Technology Update? If so, call our listener line at 317-721-7124. Send us an email at tech@eastersealscrossroads.org, or shoot us a note on Twitter, @InDATAproject. Our captions and transcripts for the show are sponsored by the Indiana Telephone Relay Access Corporation, or InTRAC. You can find out more about InTRAC at relayindiana.com. A special thanks to Nikol Prieto for scheduling our amazing guests and making a mess of my schedule. Today’s show was produced, edited, hosted, and fraught over by yours truly. The opinions expressed by our guests are their own and may or may not reflect those of the INDATA Project, Easterseals Crossroads, our supporting partners, or this host. This was your Assistive Technology Update. I’m Josh Anderson with the INDATA Project at Easterseals Crossroads in beautiful Indianapolis, Indiana. We look forward to seeing you next time. Bye-bye.