Congratulations! You’ve managed to get your VR training funded. But how on earth do you keep it working across teams, sites and devices? A good, flashy VR training demo can win attention pretty quickly, but what happens after the solutions team leaves and the first few headsets arrive?
Cover image: VR Vision Group
A recent VR Vision Group webinar with ArborXR, PICO XR and Enel sought to answer this. The first part of the discussion focused on budget approval, ROI models and stakeholder buy-in.
The second half moved into the less glamorous part of enterprise VR training: devices, IT readiness, support, updates, security, connectivity, learning data and the operational work needed to keep the programme alive once it moves beyond a small pilot.
That side can easily get treated as admin, but shouldn’t be.
Lorne Fade, Co-Founder of VR Vision Group, said IT and security are often the stakeholder group that kills VR projects when they’re brought in too late; a useful warning for companies trying to move immersive training from pilot to rollout.
A headset demo can show what the training experience looks like. But it won’t answer who manages the devices, who pushes updates, how users are kept inside the right application, how learning data gets back into the training system, or what happens when a headset breaks the morning before a session.
Manual Headset Management Breaks Quickly
Matthew Hall, Chief Solutions Officer at ArborXR, put the problem in fairly plain terms.
Managing a handful of headsets for a pilot feels simple enough, but scaling to dozens or hundreds of devices across teams or sites gets complicated fast.
That pain can show up fast. Maybe a new software version needs pushing, or settings need changing, or devices need locking down. Someone has to stop users ending up in menus, app stores or places they were never meant to be!
For a handful of devices in an R&D setting, manual workarounds can get a team through the first phase. Past that point, the process starts to creak.
What works for a pilot breaks at scale. Having an MDM solution from day one gives you the control needed to manage your fleet and the analytics needed prove ROI as you grow.
ArborXR’s role in the webinar was to show what the management layer does once VR becomes a programme rather than a test. Hall described a web-based platform that lets organisations manage devices remotely, lock them down, control which apps and settings are available, and create a more controlled kiosk-style experience for users.
He also pointed to ArborXR Insights, which is designed to move training data back into a learning management system, so XR activity sits alongside the rest of a company’s normal training record.
If a business is using VR to support onboarding, safety, maintenance, medical training or technical skills, the data can’t just live inside the headset. Training teams need to know who completed what, how they performed, and whether that activity connects back to the wider learning programme.
Headsets Need to Behave Like Enterprise Technology
Dax Leepart, Commercial Director at PICO XR, made the “hardware version” of the same argument.
These devices need to be treated, managed and handled just like any of the other technology within a company.
That means laptops, tablets and headsets end up in the same conversation: policies, updates, support, security, access control, compliance and reliability.
Leepart said the initial choice is critical: choosing the right enterprise hardware for the use case. In his view, trying to put consumer devices into enterprise rollouts can work for one or two headsets, but the shortcomings become obvious once a company starts trying to scale.
He pointed to areas that rarely show up in the early excitement around VR training:
- Reliable casting to external screens
- Wired options for settings where wireless may not work
- The ability to opt out of updates, encryption at rest, HIPAA considerations, ISO certifications and support for vertical-specific requirements
- “Kiosk mode”
The update point is a good example. Most teams won’t care about headset update controls during a shiny first demo – they’ll care a lot when an update lands before a major training session and breaks something.
Enterprise support also came through strongly. Leepart said one of the things PICO customers value is direct access to the right technical support rather than submitting a ticket and hoping someone replies.
In other words, the device spec sheet is only part of the buying decision. Buyers also need to know whether the headset can survive the normal messiness of enterprise deployment.
Comfort, Connectivity and Offline Use Still Count
The webinar also got into the practical concerns that can slow adoption once real users get involved.
Motion sickness was one. Leepart said higher frame rates can help reduce the issue, and pointed to 60, 90 and 120 frames per second as the kind of performance range where discomfort can fall away quickly. He also spoke about balanced headset design, lighter devices and batteries positioned at the back, especially for longer training sessions.
This isn’t a small detail if the use case involves healthcare, surgery training or any other activity where learners may need to stay inside a headset for a meaningful amount of time.
Connectivity was another. Hall said some customers use kits of four to six headsets with a shared mobile hotspot. He also noted that once the initial setup is done, many field training scenarios don’t need much connectivity during the actual session.
Leepart added that some PICO deployments run completely offline, either because the Wi-Fi environment is poor or because the setting has security constraints.
Brian Stice, Director of Strategic Operations at Enel, backed that up from the buyer side. He said Enel had some early connectivity hiccups and had to use phone hotspots in some cases, while also working with IT to whitelist some infrastructure.
Buyers need a clear deployment model before they scale. Some sites will have good connectivity, some won’t, and some environments may require offline use by design.
The Pilot Still Needs the Right Shape
The webinar’s guidance on pilots was simple: don’t try to do everything at once.
VR Vision Group suggested starting with one use case, one site and one pilot. The strongest candidates tend to have five traits: high-consequence scenarios, frequent use, a measurable baseline, executive sponsorship and logistical constraints.
A dangerous procedure, regular onboarding workflow or hard-to-schedule field task gives the pilot a stronger chance of proving value. A once-a-year refresher with no clear baseline is a much weaker place to start.
The same logic applies to metrics. Training time, knowledge retention, learner engagement and cost per learner all came up during the webinar. Those are the numbers a company needs if it wants to move from “people liked the headset” to “this changed the cost, consistency or quality of training.”
It also connects back to Stice’s buyer-side advice from Enel. His view was to speak first to the people who will actually use the training, understand the problem properly, and build the business case from the ground up.
Talk to the people that are actually going to use it and understand the true challenges that you are going to be solving with this technology.
That’s especially relevant once deployment starts. The people using, managing and supporting the headsets will find problems no slide deck catches.
Scaling VR Training Means Planning for Boring Problems
There’s a familiar pattern in enterprise XR.
The first conversation is often about the experience. The better long-term conversation is about the system around it.
- Who owns the devices?
- How are they updated?
- Can they run offline?
- Can users get lost in menus?
- Does the headset fit the site environment?
- Can training data reach the LMS?
- Who supports the hardware?
- What happens when the pilot grows from five headsets to 50, 500 or more?
Those questions aren’t as exciting as the first VR demo, but they decide whether a training programme becomes repeatable.
VR training is becoming easier to justify in the right environments: dangerous procedures, expensive equipment, distributed workforces, high retraining costs and work that’s hard to practise safely in the real world.
The next hurdle is making the deployment feel normal inside the business.
A company that wants VR training to scale has to treat the headsets like part of its enterprise technology stack. Demo kits can get a pilot started. Managed devices, support, data, governance and IT readiness are what keep the programme running when the novelty has worn off.
