Jon Brouchoud: Hi everyone and welcome to episode 47 of Simulation Pulse Live. I’m Jon Brouchoud, co-founder of Arch Virtual, the developers of Acadicus, and we have Bill Ballo from Madison College with us and Rick Castille, our customer experience specialist here at Acadicus. And today we kind of want to talk about two things. First of all, we wanted to talk about how to get the word out about what you’re doing in virtual reality. And then we’d like to share a little bit of a preview of the campus product that we’re working on that some of the organizations we’re working with are able to make use of to have multiple labs, to be able to run multiple simulations simultaneously and what that looks like and how do you set that up. So I guess with that, I’ll turn it over to Bill. Talk a little bit about how do we get the word out about VR simulation, the work that you’re doing in VR?

Bill Ballo: Yeah, thanks, Jon. So this came from a comment today between Rick and Jon and I. So last night, I was with Gateway Technical College and doing their paramedic orientation. I’m the newest tutor for them. And I was sort of, I was asked by their medical director, hey, what’s Madison College doing for virtual reality? Well, I can stand there and talk forever on this, right? So I can go on and on and on about what we’re doing for virtual reality and the 22 programs and all of these different places. And we do standalone and we do PC-based and I can talk about our PCs, I can talk about all that stuff. And sort of during that conversation, he said, Well, have you published any of this? And I went, not much. And so that was part of the issue. So I’ve done presentations. I’ve done a few presentations at national conferences and stuff like that, sort of, you know, showing what we’ve done and that kind of stuff. And then of course, I can point to the publications of other people. So I can point to Dr. Slamon, I can, you know, I can point to Mitch and the things that both of them have done. But then, of course, I can point to all of the research showing virtual reality is good, but it really kind of tripped something in my brain. There’s so much that we’re doing, and there’s so much information that comes out of what we’re doing. There’s a good amount of data that comes out of what we’re doing. But no, I haven’t published it. It got me thinking. I really need to. And I was just telling Jon before we started here, like I’ve spent probably the past, well, so it’s been a little over a year since the center has been open. But keep in mind too, like I’ve been off part of this summer. I was off part of last summer. So I’m really only at the one year mark when it comes to the center. And so I’ve been just treading and trying to kind of keep my head above water, especially because of all of the programs that have come to us over the year to start doing virtual reality. So I’ve really just been treading and keeping my head above water as much as I can. And I haven’t necessarily thought like, Yeah, I should. I should start writing some of this stuff down. I should start publishing some of this, even if it’s not like major research, those kind of things. There are plenty of places that want to hear about this kind of stuff. And so that’s kind of what I asked if we could talk about today, especially if anybody has any resources. places to go, those kind of things. You know, every once in a while, Jon will send me a, hey, check this out, you should publish here. And I agree. So that’s where I’m at with it. That was my thoughts.

Jon Brouchoud: Awesome. Yeah, I appreciate that. And one of the things I wanted to share is that there’s a new journal called the Journal of Medical Extended Reality. which I believe Marianne Liebert publishers came out with. And so it’s focused exclusively on XR medical applications. And I think there’s a great opportunity. They’re definitely going to be eager to hear stories from people that are using VR and XR, AR in interesting and compelling ways. So that’s a possibility. And I know there’s a bunch of other journals that are also open to publishing research on, you know, XR innovation as well. So there’s a lot of opportunities to publish. And I’m just, I’m really not personally familiar with the process of publishing. Like, how do you submit that? What, you know, the, I know several of our customers have done this and maybe they can, you know, comment at some point, but, you know, it’s, what, what does it take? What does it take to publish? Like what, what kinds of information do you need and how do you, how do you submit these studies for, for publication?

Bill Ballo: You know, at Madison, we do have sort of an institutional review board, an IRB. You know, of course, I can begin with that file with them, obviously. You know, our data, the thing is, is like, I’ll look at it and go, oh, that’s not really all that interesting. Like, who’s going to want to look at that? And then you start talking about it and they go, Actually, that is kind of interesting, you know, so I sort of sell myself short in the sense that I’m like, who’s going to want to read like, you know, our students really enjoyed the VR experience and they felt like they got something out of it. And they really feel like their retention was bow. Wait a minute. That sounds really great, actually. Right. So that’s what happens is like, you know, you kind of sell yourself short. So I think for me, I think where my start is going to be is sort of, you know, going through our sort of institutional review board, just making sure that everything is above water as far as, you know, are we, you know, concealing personal information enough, those kinds of things. And that’s, you know, for us, we haven’t collected any personal information, so we should fly through it pretty quickly. And then it’s just a matter of sort of putting the information together and putting it in a package that looks, you know, looks interesting. At least that’s where I’m starting, I think.

Jon Brouchoud: Yeah. And in addition to publishing in peer-reviewed journals, there’s also the opportunity to just essentially share in any kind of format, like a white paper, a blog post, a podcast, a Pulse Live, and to get the word out about the work you’re doing. What about publishing less formal white papers? Because I feel like sometimes a lot of the organizations that I talk to or that we’re working with, they’re sort of a little insecure about what they’re doing with VR. They don’t think they know. You know, we’re just trying to figure this out. Nobody really knows. And so they’re a little bit timid to share what they’re doing because they think they’re behind. When in actuality, if you really look at what they’re doing, they’ve got a VR lab set up and they’re running simulations. They’re ahead of the curve. And I guarantee there’s a lot of other leaders and instructors at organizations who would be eager to hear those stories. Even if they’re not these robust peer-reviewed IRB studies, there’s a whole lot of lessons learned and best practices that we need to start sharing and get that that communication going, I feel like. And I’m always referencing those early days of mannequins, but I think it’s the same thing. It wasn’t until the instructors started using them and sharing, and that’s, you know, IMSH was essentially sort of, you know, stemmed from that sharing and became this whole community of people that are like, you know, what you could do is you could take that and you can mix up you know, red food coloring with flour and make blood and moulage. And, you know, it was all that sharing became this whole huge, massive, life-changing, life-saving industry. And so the same thing is true with VR. We need to keep that sharing going. So what about like, you know, not necessarily peer-reviewed journals, but sharing in other sources of publication?

Bill Ballo: Yeah, I mean, I’ve even looked at some of the sort of EMS trade magazines, right, National Association of EMS Educators, GEMS, those kind of things that, you know, getting in touch with, they always have little, you know, contact us, you know, they have those, the ability to do that. And a lot of times those magazines are looking for that. And that’s what a lot of the people like me I have a tendency to read. I do some reading of PubMed, those kind of things, like peer-reviewed stuff. But then if I’m going to be reading stuff, a lot of times I’m looking for something of interest in one of those magazines. If I’m sitting at the station or something like that, a lot of times those magazines are out. And you go, well, hey, let’s take a look and see what’s in there and what’s new. So that’s a good point, Jon. And that’s something I didn’t even really necessarily think of. thinking, okay, research, research, research. But it doesn’t necessarily have to be that. I mean, it can just be, you know, here’s what I’m doing. Doesn’t this sound cool? I mean, it can be really sort of almost that simple. And it, and you’re right, you know, the more sharing we can do, the better.

Rick Castille: Yeah, there’s this whole, whole element of crowdsourcing we can do today, right through social media. And I’ve been into this, this field now for about five years, just exploring it and seeing what was possible. And it’s interesting. Sometimes I’ll go through, you know, there’s Facebook, there’s X, formerly Twitter, there’s Reddit, there’s LinkedIn. And I start to look through my feed sometime and I go, oh my gosh, the only thing I’m getting in terms of news is about VR and XR and MR. And, you know, because you’ve kind of honed down the people you follow and the groups you’re involved in to those interests. But what’s great is that when I do have a question or I want to ask somebody for, you know, what’s the latest on X, Y, Z, I can really quickly, like often same day, get a response from somebody that says, oh, yeah, I’ve I’ve either done this or I’ve tried this or I know so reach out to so and so. And so we have these connections now that just spans such broad audiences that, yeah, we can’t ignore that, right? And it’s not this kind of very rigid exploration like you would do for a research paper. But, you know, that crowdsourced kind of at-the-desk information is really, really valuable from the people who are doing hands-on stuff. You know, you can’t ignore that either. And I think there’s a wide breadth of information that’s out there, right? Every day I pull up my LinkedIn feed and I just go through and I see stuff from Jon and I see stuff from other people who are in simulation and VR simulation and other companies and see what people are doing. Because that’s the way you understand and stay on kind of the cutting edge of what’s there, right? all the rage right now, and there’s a lot of talk about it, and people are playing with it. It’s not there yet, but you get to see kind of how people are dabbling and what that means and how it may become a thing someday. So, yeah, I think there’s a lot of value in that. And really, you just get in on these platforms, right, and you start doing searches and building kind of categories of people and companies and topics that you follow. And you can really rapidly build, you know, your own knowledge base in terms of wanting to know what’s going on.

Jon Brouchoud: Absolutely. And I think there’s also a thing to think about in that context where you can share as an organization, right? So through Madison College, there’s an official Madison College LinkedIn and Twitter or X and Facebook channels. And you can go through those proper formal channels and come up with, you know, PR marketing oriented kind of you know, posts and things like that. But I think people should think about themselves as individuals, as innovators. And your voice is important as an individual. And you don’t always necessarily have to publish under the title of that formal organization. And, you know, chances are you’re in there tinkering, probably at times not even getting paid. You’re beyond your hourly limit. You know, you’re in there working because you care about this and you’re very passionate about it. And why not share some of that right like put that out there on the social media because it’s going to be interesting and engaging to other people that are very curious about how this works and what the value is and, you know, all of us on the inside of this sort of, you know, industry we get it. But it’s an important mission. We’re literally on a mission to save lives. We know that simulation is an effective modality. We’re trying to increase access to it. We’re trying to lower costs. We’re trying to get the word out. And so why not use your voice to help express that and share with people, what are you working on? Hey, today I just learned that you know, you can use these special hooks to put the cords up and, you know, here’s the thing I learned, you know, little tips and tricks like that, you know, like, it’s, it’s super valuable. And social media is a great way to share that. And there is kind of a, a small but growing community of people that are sharing those things, like Rick said, so, you know, just not being afraid to share. And again, I’ll come back to my previous point that you might think that you’re behind. You might be insecure about the work you’re doing and not want to share it because you’re like, oh, there’s these other schools. And I know, you know, this other school has this whole big XR lab and they’re doing these amazing things. My stuff doesn’t really. But it does matter. It really matters. The work you’re doing is important. And it’s it’s really a great idea to share that, I think.

Rick Castille: Jon, I know you say this over and over about, you know, people feeling like they’re behind. And you’re exactly right. Nobody is behind at this point. I mean, we’re very fortunate that Bill Ballo’s with us because Bill Ballo and his organization is way ahead, right? I mean, they are out there cutting edge. They have a lab and it’s amazing what you guys are doing, Bill, honestly. I’m so thrilled that you’re a customer and a friend and somebody that shares with us so much. But those of you who are like, oh my gosh, we’ve got nothing. Well, 90% of the rest of the country doesn’t yet either, right? Everybody is kind of still dipping their toe in the water and still trying to figure this out. And so nobody’s behind. And we’re here to help you if you’re interested in exploring it further.

Bill Ballo: You know, Rick, that brings up a good point. Okay. So, you know, and thank you for that, that, that compliment. Um, but I still feel like we’re behind. I’ve been at this for 5 years. I’ve got a 12 bay XR center. I’ve got 22 programs that I’m working with. And I’m still like, I don’t think we’re doing enough. And I don’t feel like an expert by any means. I really don’t. I would say almost every day, well, I guess not every day, but very frequently, I get this feeling like, I don’t know what I’m doing. Like I’m making stuff up or something like that, that imposter syndrome feeling, right? And I get that relatively frequently. So if there’s other people out there that are like, we’re not even really started or we’re using one laptop and we’re using a Rift S or something, I still have my Rift S over there. like, yeah, there you go. Yeah, mine’s, mine’s a little further out of my reach. But it’s a return on investment right there. I’m telling you. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, and I still have my my Alienware laptop. OK, so this is how I started. Here’s my Alienware laptop, recommended to me initially. This is four years ago now, Jon. Recommended to me by Jon. And like, hey, here’s what you should think about, that kind of stuff. And it just finally, like a year ago, it went out on me. But that thing got used so much. And, you know, and I look back now at the early days, it’s hard to do that sometimes to look back, like, where was I? I had a very small area to work in. I had this, you know, laptop, those kind of things. I had a Rift S, and I was just learning how to how to pull things into a catechist and do that kind of stuff. So when I start feeling like I’m not publishing enough, maybe I’m at that point now where it’s like, yeah, you sort of can get past that imposter syndrome feeling. But that’s sort of my next concern. That’s my next worry is like, how do I get the word out more? I like the idea of social media. I have tried that for a little bit. But it, you know, over the past year, it’s been keeping my head above water. It’s been just trying to make sure that I can keep things going and sort of, you know, the fun stuff like social media and those kinds of things sort of took a back seat. I told Jon that a lot, because I like making content for a catechist. I like making all that cool stuff. But it’s been hard. We’re going to do a tic-tac-tic talk. I do actually have a TikTok channel out there. It’s the VR medic, the virtual reality medic. But I haven’t touched it in probably, I don’t know, nine months. And that’s been the problem is like I did all of that for a while. It was really, it was going pretty well, but then I kind of had to back off on it again. Now what I’ve been more sort of doing is getting things onto my YouTube channel and sort of working on that because I get a lot more questions from faculty. But Jon’s point on this is like the TikTok channel was to get with some of those students. and sort of start the grassroots there, too. So, you know, I need to go back to that. But now, of course, fall is coming up and it’s like, oh, boy, this is going to get interesting. You know, so. I guess what I’m trying to say is for people who feel like they don’t have time to get the things done that they want to do. I’m with you.

Jon Brouchoud: I’m with you. Well, you know, I would tie this together with this idea that you don’t have to necessarily publish in a peer reviewed journal. There’s a lot of other ways to get the word out and not to feel behind. You know, I would combine that with this idea that social media is something that you have to spend a lot of time on. Right. And I think it’s one of those things that you have to get in the habit of just posting things, even if it’s not perfect, even if it’s not polished in some cases, especially if it’s not polished, because that’s where everybody’s at right now. And you’re kind of meeting them where they’re starting and they’re like, I don’t know, where do we put these cords? How high does the desk need to be? How do we make sure that it’s accessible? How do we, you know, all those little nuances that you might take for granted are gems for programs that are just getting started. So I think of it as a slow trickle. where you just, you know, set up a structure and a consistency to it. And of course, I need to take that advice myself with our own catechist channels. You know, it’s difficult to do that, but to not be afraid, you know, put things out there and just, you know, people may not like it. It might not get any engagement, who cares the next time you post something else. And what about this? And I think that’s the character of the industry that we’re defining right now. We’re kind of defining a new category or a new dimension of simulation And I see this as a very slow ramp, like it’s a very, very slow process. And this is a tangential kind of a thing, but it’s also relevant to how we’re funding virtual reality. It’s like, I think there’s a lot of investment interest in taking virtual reality and trying to extract as much profit as fast as you can. And investors are obviously looking for that. And that’s why we have been very reluctant to take institutional capital because there is this desire to like just go full blast and go from zero to 200 overnight. I don’t think this industry is ready for that. And I think it’s a slow, gradual process. And the way we approach publishing and the way we approach sharing on social media is much more, it benefits from a gradual process where you’re sharing informally instead of waiting until everything’s ready and everything’s polished and everything’s perfect and now we can share it. I think it’s too late at that point. You know, I mean, it’s always great, but like, you know, like they say, when you’re building a product, if you’re not embarrassed by what you’re shipping, then you’re shipping too late. And I think that’s probably the case with these social media and publications where it’s okay. If it’s not perfect, don’t be afraid. This is a gradual process and we’re defining a whole new category. So be fearless.

Bill Ballo: Yeah, actually, it just made me think of some things to add to my social media, be it my TikTok channel, which I think needs to come back to life, and my YouTube channel, which needs to fly a little more. But this kind of helps. This actually is going to bring this circle back around to exactly what my question was earlier. How do I get information out as to what I’m doing? I mean, maybe I just go into my lab, do a TikTok on here’s what I use for this, or here’s what we do for that, or here’s the behind the scenes of the virtual reality medic, you know, those kind of things. That’s maybe a really just good way to get out some information and you know that kind of almost revives sort of some of what I had been doing and you know making it making it. that unpolished feel. Because I had been focusing, and you’re right, so much on making it look really nice and making sure that there’s a different camera angle and all of this kind of stuff. And then I have to go into editing and all that. And maybe I just don’t do that. Maybe I just do it a whole lot more raw. And maybe that is the better way to go. I’m with you.

Jon Brouchoud: You know, the pulse actually started like that. You know, we had a couple of different iterations of this and we called it a round table for a while. And then it was just the pulse. And, you know, it was, I think that what took us a while or a long time to get this moving was this fear that it wasn’t ready. And I held it back, I think, because of that. I always wanted everything to be perfect. And it wasn’t until you know, this group of people, you know, you guys and, you know, Mitch joining us and Paul Cusick and just getting together where we’re just like, we’re having open office hours and we’re going to record it. Because every time we get together on a call like this, we talk about things that I know other people would benefit from if we shared it. So let’s just start recording our weekly calls. And suddenly that is the pulse. And it became, you know, it’s still, you know, we’re still just doing whatever, you know, we come up with topics, but we’re learning as we go and we’re getting better and better. If you look back to a few, even 10 episodes ago, you know, we’re coming a long ways in terms of how we structure these things and we have a lot a long ways to go. But I just think fearlessly going out there like this is what we’re doing. We’re all just trying to build this together and we’re not just being less afraid, less timid. Because even like in your, in your lab, Bill, like you say, you could go in there and post on Tik TOK. Like you could, you could make a post about here’s the chair, here’s the stools we picked out here. Here’s why we pick this tool, this stool, here’s how much they cost. And the reason why it’s important is because it swivels and we want armrests and we need to be able to do this. And it has to be able to, you could do a whole post on just the chairs you picked out because I was there when that conversation happened and there was a lot that went into that. So anything at all, it’s valuable, I think.

Bill Ballo: Yeah, yeah, that’s totally true. And you know, I just sometimes, you know, and this is, I think where everybody’s at is sometimes we just think, Yeah, that’s not a good story. Who cares about that? But you’re right, Jon. You’re absolutely right. And our pub table’s pretty awesome. Why did we put a pub table where we put it? Why do we have a pub table? And why is it that every time we bring people in, the pub table’s pretty much the first place that everybody goes? You know, and then I have comfortable chairs and I have them all the way up front. Why did I put the comfortable chairs up front and not in the back? You know, that kind of stuff. You’re right. You’re absolutely right. And hey, you know, those of you that are interested, coming soon to my TikTok and my YouTube channels. So, you know, yeah, I love it. I love that idea of just go out and do it and just, you know, show people what you’re doing and You know, we’re just getting ready to do a refit or a potential refit. We’re going to be building at some of our satellite campuses. We’re going to have, uh, uh, you know, miniature XR centers at two of our satellite campuses. So like, how are we building that? Uh, who are we going to staff it with? You know, I am one person. So how’s this all going to happen? Um, yeah, those are all great stories. They really are. You know, It helps me a little bit. That’s why I asked this question today. I knew some answers would come out of this. So this is awesome.

Jon Brouchoud: I love it. The pub table is a great story. I mean, that that really did work. And that was a very specific, strategic decision that was made about how to make it feel welcoming to come into the space. So you don’t have to sink into some big, comfortable chair where it’s all formal. And I don’t know if I belong in there or not, but you put a couple of pub tables out there with some stools. People are always leaning on them and, you know, just, you know, sharing stories and socializing. And it worked. It worked. Yeah. So why not share that? You know, I think other schools would benefit from that, too, because there’s hundreds of people out there right now, thousands probably that are going, huh, so we’re going to build an XR lab. Well, how does this even work? What do we do? What do we you know, and they just they don’t know. They’re not thinking of that. So it’s yeah.

Rick Castille: Yeah, I do our demos. And without a doubt, one of a couple of the slides we pause on almost without exception are the image bill of your lab. and of Mitch’s lab. And I always get a ton of questions. Well, what is that? And why did they do it that way? And it also kind of allows us to talk a lot about the flexibility of the platform that it’s not just this room with everybody in headsets, right? You’ve got VR, you’ve got non-VR, you’ve got passive participation, you’ve got possibly even online participation all going on at the same time. And so when you design a space, right, you designed it so that you could have folks in headsets, folks watching passively at the pub tables or in the recliner chairs, the space for the instructor to be in non-VR, the big screen so people could watch it, you know, projected in any way. And, you know, obviously you could go online, you know, from there also if you needed to. Yeah, so designing to cover all those potential use cases is important. And Mitch did the same thing, right? He’s got those big, I don’t know, 32-inch monitors on the wall where he can view and see everything that’s going on, as well as passive viewers can see what’s going on, as well as people in headsets participating. So yeah, there’s certainly a method to the madness, if you will. that helps as you kind of understand how you’re going to use it. It’s not just, you know, put duct tape on the floor and have people stand on an X and put a headset on, you know?

Bill Ballo: Yeah, and I advocated so hard in the early days when we were really getting going with virtual reality for it not to be part of simulation. And y’all are going to go, those watching, you guys know why, but those watching are probably like, what? He advocated for it to not be part of simulation. I didn’t want us to be known as just part of simulation. Because the culture at our college, when we were talking to people and we were thinking about what simulation is, almost inevitably people would say, oh yeah, what they do over in nursing or what they do over in health or what they do. Everybody aligned it with health care. And I would have people that would come in and go, oh, I’d love to do some virtual reality, but I don’t do health care stuff. And that’s what you guys do. And I was like, oh, I don’t want that to happen. You know, I really don’t want that to happen. And we’ve expanded now. You know, we’re doing language learning. Right. So we have our Spanish class. We have English as a second language. that’s gonna be working with us starting this semester as well. So like I didn’t want people to think this is simulation and it’s for healthcare. And I wanted to avoid that. Now, obviously, one of the things that we do, or one of our big hitters, is health care. Nursing, EMS, respiratory therapy, vet tech. Yes, they’re health care, as far as I’m concerned, just for other mammals. Well, other animals in general. But that was what I advocated so hard to not just be part of simulation. Jon, I know you remember back in the day when we were talking that way, and I was just like, I don’t want to be known as the virtual reality arm of simulation. There was talk of putting everything under the simulation umbrella, and then here’s mannequin simulation, and here’s VR simulation, and I really, really advocated against that. In some ways, maybe it made people a little upset that I was doing that. But that was why, because I wanted the XR Center to be more focused on what we can do overall in VR. And we started out with like three programs that were interested in it, and they were all health care. So I was the salmon swimming against the stream. I was swimming upstream. But now it’s, you know, architecture and botany and all of these other different programs that are working with us. And I love it. I love that it’s, you know, just been focused mainly on what we can do in virtual reality.

Jon Brouchoud: That is such a great point, Bill, and I’m glad you brought that up. And I remember those conversations and I didn’t fully understand it at the time, but now I totally get it. And I think, you know, when I see even what’s happening at like Minnesota State University, Paul immediately did the same thing. You know, he was like, we got to get this to social work and speech therapy. And, you know, also, you know, part of the tangential benefit of that is that if you’re getting it, you know, I think almost all of the prospects that we’re talking to at this point are like, I have a nursing program or I have a medical program and I need to run, we’re thinking about adding VR to our program. And you’re in this narrow sliver of the entire school, the entire campus has all these different programs. And sure, it can provide value there, but you’re thinking too small, right? You should be thinking bigger that all these programs are going to benefit from this. So why not share that, the resources and build a bigger make a bigger investment in a bigger XR lab that can serve more departments in your school than just trying to corner that into like one specific program. Because I think you’re missing a lot of opportunities that the schools that aren’t doing that are enjoying.

Bill Ballo: Yeah, it was myself, Carly and Jeffrey Krentz. The three of us really have been the ones that are, you know, trying to pull in as many programs as possible. And when people come and ask like, ooh, what could we do in VR? I had the volleyball coach, like the volleyball coach came in and said, hey, what can we do in VR to increase the reaction time of my athletes? And I was like, I don’t know, but we’re going to find something else. So immediately I went over to Jeffrey and I said, hey, Jeffrey, You know, he found our language learning program. I said, this is the idea. Here’s the idea. Let’s find something. And Jeffrey did find something. But I mean, I even went to like, what if we just did more Beat Saber, right? That increases your reaction time. Let’s do some of that. Now, then circling back around, talking about research, right? If I can get athletes that come in and before they do VR, their reaction time is X, and after they do VR, their reaction time is Y, that’s just cool to show anybody, you know? So like those kind of things, like, you know, and then we just do team building, like our soccer teams, our basketball teams, they come in and they just do team building. You know, we just play games. We have fun. We laugh. You know, we just enjoy being together and working together and doing some VR stuff. You know, so like as small as you think it may be, it actually can have a pretty big impact. And the soccer team came from the basketball team. So the basketball coach came and talked to me and we were talking about you know, VR and turns out she’s from Florida. And I was like, oh, well, hey, now we’re definitely doing something, you know. And then one of the basketball team students is also on the soccer team and went to the soccer coach and the soccer coach contacted me. And then we went, so it’s just this sort of, we just kind of built it and we want them to come. And that’s sort of the way it’s become.

Jon Brouchoud: That’s awesome. Very inspiring.

Rick Castille: And I think over time, we’re going to continue to find that VR does certain things really, really well. We understand how really well it does at simulation. Well, that extends itself to also things, Bill, like you’re talking about with Beat Saber and physical education and training. I mean, some of the things that even I’ve done casually in VR from a fitness perspective are incredible. wild. Everything from these simulators that can get your heart rate just, you know, it’s definitely in the upper range to more casual meditation things, right? There are these very, very powerful gamification elements to doing things in VR that we can leverage, you know, and we do leverage in a catechist, but even for other programs that are there just more casually that It should be a no-brainer to you, right? Okay, it’s a rainy day, you can’t take your team out on the field. Wow, you know, you talk about team building and fitness, put them in headsets and, you know, put them in Racquet Club or any of these other team-based games that you can play together and it’s extremely powerful.

Jon Brouchoud: Yeah, very, very good points. I think that’s that’s one of the key things I think one of the misunderstood or undervalued or otherwise just, you know, people just don’t see how beneficial simulation can be outside of healthcare. And I think you’re absolutely right, Bill and Rick, you know, it’s just we’re expanding access to this powerful modality where it used to be, it had to be in a very confined space because it’s very expensive equipment, expensive personnel. It’s an expensive place. You can’t just have people going in there. And, you know, it’s very, so it’s very focused. Right. But now that we’re in this virtual dimension, It just blurs those lines. And now it can be any industry, almost any sphere of human influence could benefit in some way from some kind of XR training. And I think we’re starting to see that happen. It’s again, very slow process. This is innovation. It’s going to take time, but we’re seeing those use cases playing out and it’s pretty exciting.

Bill Ballo: Yeah, actually, since we’re mentioning that, I’m going to go through just some of the programs that we work with, you know, because, you know, maybe it’ll inspire some other people as well. And, and I’ll just go through real quick. So nursing, EMS, dental, respiratory therapy, CNA, HVAC, vet tech, botany, interior design, architecture, disability resources, Spanish, and English as a second language. So I should actually say language learning. because our French teachers also coming to us as well. Marketing, we have a 3D art class that runs every, this semester is going to be every Wednesday night from like five to eight. And it’s even an open to the public thing. Like we have people come in because they want to use the VR stuff. We did two summer camps this summer for kids for high school and for middle school, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, academic advancement, career services, our basketball team, our soccer team, and now our volleyball team. The other thing is when we’re talking financing and you want your administration to look at it and say, yes, we can finance this. if you’re trying to finance it through one single source or one single department like nursing or EMS or something like that, that’s gonna be a little bit more difficult. And that was something that even was said last night in the conversation with some of the people over at GTC is like, you know, nursing’s got the money and the resources and that kind of stuff so they can do a lot of this. We don’t do as much of that. It’s like, well, you already have it. So like, If you have it, why wouldn’t you try to use it? And then it was, well, people have to learn new things. And that’s where you need that advocate, that person that’s like, no, I’m not going to make you learn something totally new. I’m going to bring you to do this. And that’s why we’ve had no fear. I love that. I love that idea. And in our XR Center, bringing people in is because we’re ready to go. We’re ready to try it. You know, I’m willing to try anything. I love hearing these ideas and stuff and going, yeah. And then you bring that to your administration and you say, OK, we need to keep financing this VR program. And they go, well, why? That’s nursing’s problem, not our problem. Well, no, that we have all of these programs that come here. It’s not just nursing that comes here. Plus, if you have to finance by going to departments, it’s a lot easier to go to multiple departments to finance than it is to say, oh, well, nursing’s got to finance at 100%. Yeah. Totally.

Rick Castille: It’s like saying nursing needs to finance the library or the media center, right? Everybody can use this as a resource. Again, there’s so much rich stuff out there I think you’re dead on, Bill, that there’s probably not a program that exists that wouldn’t find some utility. And I think we can also kind of overthink it a little bit. And certainly, you know, college professors and folks in academics can tend to do that a little bit. You know, one thing, you need to do one thing. I know some of the folks that I work with, they get their, you know, get in a catechist subscription They get started and I just tell them, let’s plan to do one thing that you can do. Let’s not try to eat the elephant. Let’s do that one thing, right? I think last week you guys talked about that. Start with the hazard room, right? Something that can be successful. And just do that, right? Let’s just plan to do that and do it successfully. Review how it went and then do it again. And then you do it again. And then it will grow itself, because people are going to just latch onto it once it happens and want to do it more and more. But it’s like, plan that one thing. Don’t think you have to replace all your classroom time in a headset. That’s not going to happen. That’s not what we’re trying to do. It’s do that one thing, and then you’ll build from there.

Bill Ballo: Yep.

Jon Brouchoud: Absolutely. It’s just a tool. That’s all it is. Keep trying to remind people that it isn’t the thing. It’s the thing that helps you do the thing. You’re the teacher, you’re the instructor, you get to do it. This is just a tool. It’s here to support and augment what you’re doing, not replace it. So many, so many don’t get that. They just don’t see it. They just like, what does it do for me? And they just want it to like set it and forget it. And it’s like, no, you’re the instructor. You get to keep being an instructor and your teaching is what’s valuable. And you can use XR as a tool to help extend that.

Bill Ballo: Yep. Yeah, that was actually part of the discussion last night too. It’s like, you know, well, we tried some VR stuff and, you know, it wasn’t that great. Like, well, did you try a sim lab, like a VR sim lab? And that’s the way I introduced it as like a VR sim lab. And they’re like a VR sim lab. Like, what do you mean? You know? And then, then, then the discussion comes in as to what do I mean? Right. It is like you said, Jon, I get to continue being the instructor. That’s where I was from day one, day one, meeting you and learning about a catechist from day one. It was, I want to be involved. I don’t want my students to get some sort of Ron Pope feel things. I didn’t forget it. I don’t want that. You know, there’s plenty of stuff like that. That’s a, you know, diamond dozen as far as I’m concerned. So.

Jon Brouchoud: It’s another huge, huge leap for instructors to understand that. And another reason why it’s important to sort of slow trickle these data points, because people just don’t know. It’s a total lack of awareness. It’s one of the things that, you know, keeps me up at night is trying to figure out how do we raise awareness? Because when we get people into the community and they understand what happens, it sells immediately. VR converts on contact. You just have to try it. And to understand that this is not a homework assignment that you just have the students go off by. It’s like you’re still the instructor. You still matter. And communicating that is just really challenging. Most people just do not understand how that works. It’s like, but you use mannequins, right? You know, that that’s how that works with mannequins. You’re still the instructor, you still get to facilitate, it still matters, your voice still matters. And I had a post earlier this week, you know, where I just said, you know, imagine asking your mannequin, you know, how am I going to be sure that you’re going to teach my students with clinical standards? You know, it’s like, the mannequin’s just going to stare at you. The mannequin’s a tool and VR is a tool too. And if you’re looking to outsource educators, you know, instructors to VR, I think that’s a misguided direction. I think that’s going to be prone to failure. But if you’re looking at it as a tool, that’s going to help your instructors do what they’re already doing and try to be as minimally invasive as possible and trying to learn a whole new language and a whole new thing. Why not build on what they’re already doing? And that’s something we’ve covered here on The Pulse lots of times, but it’s so important. Still, people don’t get it.

Bill Ballo: And I’ve heard so much fear around AI. You mentioned AI earlier. And it is the new shiny object. It really is. I mean, when there were some surveys done of people at Madison that are in a group that’s meant to build classrooms that will lead us into the future, And we started asking questions about what things are you most interested in? VR wasn’t quite as high. I mean, you know, it just wasn’t there. But AI was like way up because it’s the new shiny object. And because there’s a lot of fear around AI. I’ve heard instructors and a philosophy instructor tell me AI is going to replace instructors. Well, I and I said, OK, well, only if we let it. Like, it’s not like, you know, I’m not thinking Terminator when it comes to AI. I’ve mentioned this before. I’m not thinking Terminator when it comes to AI. I’m thinking WALL-E, right? Where everybody’s sitting around in the chairs and the AI is doing everything for them, and they’re just sitting there. Like, if we let it, sure. But if we don’t let it, then, you know, if we control ourselves and control our desire to just kind of Ron Popeil these things, Ron Popeil, this guy’s going to be like, hey, this is great. I keep getting ads for this. But if we resist that urge to do the set it and forget it method, and if you look at your accreditation, they’re resisting that urge. So if you’re doing something that you want to be part of your accreditation and not just some homework thing that you give to your students, you do need to focus on instructor-led and not going somewhere else.

Jon Brouchoud: That’s my, I mean, ask your students, right? That’s your target market. And you ask the students, how do you feel about, you know, just having to go do a homework assignment? You know, it’s, they just don’t, you know, they’re, they’re paying tuition for expert instruction. You know, that’s what they’re there for, you know, because you’re the expert as the instructor, they’re there to learn from you. And they’re not, I just feel like that’s an obvious thing if you talk to the students, that they don’t want to learn from AI. If they want to learn from AI, they can sit at home with chat GPT all day long. But that’s not going to bring that hands-on expertise that you’re going to get from a live instructor. So I think that’s the gold in a school like that, is that live instruction. And I just see too many of these schools are trying to just outsource that to technology and AI or VR. And it’s just a misguided direction, I think, you know, it’s tempting. It’s tempting because it’s powerful stuff. And you think, oh, let’s just let it do all the teaching. Well, you know what, if that works, you’re not going to be in business for much longer. You know, I mean, that’s one thing. It’s sort of the elephant in the room, you know, is just that, like, if you really can turn over simulation to a VR app and just have it handle everything and you don’t need instructors anymore. Well, you’re all out of business. We don’t need any schools anymore either. Cause why wouldn’t a student just stay at home with a VR headset, learning all this stuff? You know, they don’t need it. They don’t need teachers anymore. We know that that’s not true. Like instructors and experts are, that’s the valuable thing that we need. Humans still matter. Instructors still matter. I guess that’s the thesis here.

Bill Ballo: If it’s been a while since you’ve seen the movie, Wally, go watch it again. It’s a warning. It’s a warning, you know. So just like if you’ve ever seen the movie Idiocracy, okay, that’s the warning about social media running amok. But, well, other things too. But Wally, Wally is always what I point to. You know, it’s not going to be Terminator. That’s, that’s, it’s too hard to conquer a species by being the Terminator. Okay.

Rick Castille: It’s really easy. Pretty easy, right, Bill?

Bill Ballo: Real easy to conquer a species. If you just make everything easy, easy for them and they get to just sit back and relax and do whatever they want. Yeah. Real easy to conquer a species that way.

Rick Castille: You could freeze the Terminator easy. Say, make me a round box. Right. And then, you know, you can run away because it’ll be locked up. Right.

Bill Ballo: That’s it. That’s it.

Jon Brouchoud: Yep, absolutely. It takes too many resources to, like, you know, forcibly do these things will be will be if it’s going to put us out of existence will be coddled out of existence, I think. So that’s right. Yeah. So you’re right. It’s up to us. Got to fight back.

Bill Ballo: There you go.

Jon Brouchoud: Judgment day starts here. It’s still relevant.

Rick Castille: And I think part of the fighting back is recognizing and demonstrating, right? Embracing, you know, things like VR, things like AI and showing them how through you as a professional and an expert, it can be used effectively. That’s the key, right? I mean, again, you can buy a VR headset now and put it on and there’s lots of fun things to do. but to use it effectively, right? I can say I can exercise in VR, but I bet I would do a better job if I had somebody who was a physical education major building me a program to do certain things in VR a certain way, right? It would probably be a lot more effective for me than me just going in and saying, oh, let’s do Beat Saber for 15 minutes, right? So yeah, there’s still that element, you know, just like with VR. You could put a headset on a student and say, go do this thing, but without you being there as that expert and the person with the experience to kind of guide that process and fill in the gaps, right? That’s, you know, when I think way, way back as a student, there were always these kinds of gaps I didn’t understand. from instructions to do something because I’d never done it. And so I needed that person over my shoulder to say, oh, you know, tap that syringe because the air bubbles will go up. Oh, I wasn’t in the documentation, you know? But hey, you kind of realize that little step, that little idiosyncrasy that professionals or people who’ve done this before knew that and can share, right? That’s stuff that AI and VR and all the technology in the world isn’t going to bring. So you learn to use the technology and employ your expertise and your experience with it. That’s when you have the power.

Bill Ballo: Yeah. And using AI for some efficiency. I do most definitely. One of the things I always point to is I had to have a cleaning policy for all of the headsets and all of the stuff in the XR Center and all of that. For that, I went to chat GPT and I said, hey, what would be a good cleaning policy for an XR Center or for VR Center? That was great. That was a really good efficient way to use my time. or to utilize ChatGPT to help me with my time management. That was extremely helpful, doing those smaller things, acting more as an assistant. But it’s still my assistant. It is the assistant to me. And I use it for that smaller stuff. where I’m not looking for it to create really new awesome things for me. I’m just looking for it to help me when it comes to how I’m going to clean the XR Center. Because I can say, well, I’m going to wipe it down, I’m going to put it in the clean box, I’m going to do this, I’m going to do that. But in order to get it laid out relatively efficiently, I think that’s a great way to do it. But I don’t want it to just take over my job as an instructor. I don’t think that that’s what we need. And embracing it and being okay with it being there and knowing that you’re going to be utilizing it and people will be utilizing it. And just not having the fear about it, but finding ways that you can use it to help with your efficiency. And I think that’s great. You know, I don’t want to count AI out completely, but I’m still here. I’m still the instructor. I’m still the expert. And that’s still my job.

Rick Castille: Absolutely. We’ve always pursued and built technology to kind of do the repetitive heavy lifting tasks that we could do. You could have sat down and spent an hour, you know, typing out the steps But why? You’re repeating something somebody’s done somewhere else at some point. What you can do is because you have that intimate knowledge and you’ve helped design the center and you know the materials that are used in there and the type of surfaces and the type of headsets. That’s where, again, your unique knowledge and expertise comes in to go, OK, I can use this as my shell, but I still have to add all the very detailed specifics that are unique to how I’ve helped design this location and to make this a unique document.

Jon Brouchoud: Absolutely. You’re not going to just show up in your lab one day, and there’s going to be a sheet of paper there, and it did it. It doesn’t know. It doesn’t know you even need it. You know you need it, and you know what the outcome needs to be, and you’re just using it as a tool to express that function instead of just like, it doesn’t know you need that document. You have to tell it. You have to work with it. You have to correct it. You have to refine it. And like the human stays in the loop. And I think that’s where it’s at. And I think all applications of AI are similar in that way. Got to have a human in the loop. Even in terms of like artistic creation and our little, if anybody has watched past episodes of The Pulse, we now have a little trailer song or a little intro song that we made. And that was AI generated. I played a few of them a few weeks back and it was a little crude, but I worked with it. It didn’t know what I wanted, you know? So I had to tell it like, no, no, no, I want it like this and I want it like this. And I had to work with it. So I didn’t write the song. I didn’t perform the piece, but I sort of edited and prompted it into being this little 10 second thing that we use. So again, human in a loop, like AI not by itself, isn’t going to know like, Hey, you need a little jingle for the beginning of your podcast. And here’s what I think it should be. It doesn’t know. It takes a person has to go in there and say, this is what I want. This is what I want the outcome to be and refine it. So yeah, for sure. Well, this has been a great episode. I think this has been one of my, one of my favorite conversations. We didn’t get to the campus, but I think we’ll, we’ll pick up on that in another episode. We’ll give it some more time. And, uh, I think that’ll be a good episode as well to show people what we have in store for that. And Sean has done a lot of work building that he’s with us here. So we’ll be able to maybe tap, uh, on Sean to see if he’ll share some of the, the, uh, behind the scenes in developing that campus. So we’ll go from there. Is anything left on set or should we wrap it up?

Bill Ballo: I think we had a great episode. We kind of started off like, I’m not sure if we’re going to make it, you know, what are we going to talk about? Yeah. And then we just kind of went like, I mean, it’s good stuff. It was good. It was great.

Jon Brouchoud: It was really great stuff. Have a great weekend, everyone. Thank you. We’ll see you next Friday.