Imagine being able to learn, hands-on, exactly how to operate a deep-sea submarine -- without needing the submarine! That's the kind of training opportunities VR training platforms like Immerse are able to offer with the technology at their disposal. James Watson and Justin Parry drop in to talk about all the other opportunities the tech presents businesses.

Alan: You're listening to the XR for Business Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. Today, we have two amazing guests, James Watson and Justin Parry from Immerse. Justin is the co-founder and chief operating officer and leads product strategy for Immerse. As a founder, he designed and led product development of the Immerse platform from scratch. He now oversees the delivery of all technology and VR content across the organization. Justin has 20 years experience creating and growing B2C and B2B products from startups to global organizations. He's developed and launched online platforms, websites, mobile products across the world, and joined Immerse from his role as global director of the Internet Yellow Pages for Yell Group. Immerse Virtual Enterprise Platform enables enterprises to create scale and measure virtual reality training content and programs. The platform enables enterprises to look at training and assessment in a completely different way, providing the tools to help maximize human performance, resulting in a more engaged, better equipped and safer workforce. If you want to learn more, you can visit immerse.io.

Guys, welcome to the show.

Justin: Hello.

James: Thanks, Alan.

Alan: [laughs] Hey. So you guys

are in beautiful, sunny, warm UK. How's it going over there?

Justin: Well, it was very sunny

until last week, actually, with the sort of slightly freakish weather

that we've been having, but today is cold.

James: It's British grey.

Justin: Yeah.

Alan: British grey. Oh, well,

we'll just assume it's beautiful and sunny. So let's get digging in

here. I've had a chance to try out the Immerse platform. It's really

amazing. You're completely immersed, and the demo that you guys did

for us: We were inside of a submarine. We not only go into it, but

interact with all the bits of the submarine and start to learn parts

of, “how do I make some things work?” And the great thing about

it is you guys were there every step of the way. But one of you was

in VR, and the other one was on a tablet or a computer. Talk to us,

just to how did Immerse come to be?

Justin: Well, we've been in the

training space quite a long time. We weren't initially in VR. We

actually delivered our training applications via desktop, but they

were always multi-user. So we would be tying together people from

somewhere -- maybe even Kazakhstan, some oil and gas training that we

did -- with trainers that may be in Iraq, or in the UK, or wherever

that might be. And that was all done in a sort of virtual world. So

it's a little bit like the old Second Life, if people remember that.

So it's a powerful proposition, but it's still a little bit difficult

to sell. So with the advent of the headsets -- or the latest

generation of headsets, at least -- we made the move into VR and a

lot of services that we built there just kind of immediately made

sense, and we got traction very quickly. We effectively then pivoted

the whole company to be a full-on VR training platform. We rebuilt a

lot of those services, especially for VR, because there was obviously

some small itemization that we need to make. And so we find ourselves

where we are today.

And just in terms what you said there,

Alan, obviously that multi-user piece and being able to have people

in the space together and in VR, but also in the browser, i