Case Studies
A major retailer was onboarding new managers at their warehouses, and many were not trained in basic people management skills. Using AI and XR, Cortney and her team built conversational avatars that could be updated and customized quickly and deployed at scale. 95% of managers who used the training said it boosted their confidence and they preferred it to traditional training methods.
A medical school needed a way to simulate conversational patient training at scale and help students upskill on conversing with patients who have limited English proficiency. Using AI and XR, Cortney and her team built customizable conversational avatars that could speak with students in a variety of languages, making sure that all patients could be understood and treated. To date over one thousand students have completed the simulation.
A major telecom was facing a potential labor action that would create immediate staffing shortages. They needed a way to upskill other team members quickly and at scale, in order to avoid service interruptions. Friends With Holograms worked on a suite of XR pieces that allowed users to practice climbing telephone poles and other dangerous skills in a safe environment. While the labor action was ultimately avoided, the company continued using the training and 90% of employees reported feeling safer on the job after completing VR training.
A major retailer was onboarding a flood of new seasonal hires — many of them teens — and needed to teach critical safety and compliance skills fast. The traditional video training simply wasn’t sticking, and current associates didn’t have the bandwidth for in-person training during a busy season. Cortney and her team created a fun, gamified simulation that turned boring tasks into a fun adventure and added a sense of urgency. The training resulted in a 50% faster time to proficiency and was rolled out across multiple locations.
A large retailer realized something subtle but serious: Employees wanted to help coworkers struggling with stress and anxiety — but didn’t know how. Friends With Holograms built a conversational XR training program that allowed users to make mistakes and be rebuffed, then self-correct and approach the exchange with openness and empathy. Users could learn best practices in a safe environment and feel more comfortable having tough conversations in real life. More employees reported confidence having hard conversations and there was a decrease in mental health days taken across teams.
Social workers who specialize in family and children’s services face difficult situations every day – situations that are quite literally life or death. Their training needed to be standardized and repeatable, and let users practice making choices and staying calm in the face of hostility. Friends With Holograms built a branching narrative that allowed users to choose different paths that gave them different perspectives, and they had to make a tough decision at the end. The piece won Best VR/AR at Mobile World Congress and was a finalist for a SXSW Innovation Award. It resulted in a 31% decrease in employee turnover and a 75% decrease in training costs.
It can be hard to understand situations like workplace exclusion unless you have lived the experience, and those who haven’t often struggled to empathize with people going through it. In order to help managers understand what their team members could be feeling, Friends With Holograms built a piece where the user experiences the meeting from hell – colleagues ignore their suggestions, talk over them, and condescend, and their boss gives unhelpful advice. The user interacts with their voice but nothing seems to make a difference, leaving a sense of frustration. One user said “that wasn’t a conversation, that was an emotional experience” and the piece was named “Best HR Product” by HR Technology.
Medical misinformation is a huge crisis, and doctors are generally not trained in how to correctly respond to patients who have questions or objections based on questionable information. It can be tempting to simply brush people off, but that often makes them defensive. Friends With Holograms worked with a major global NGO to create a training where doctors could practice speaking with patients, remaining calm and empathetic while also using facts to help them understand what is true and what is misinformation. The piece was rolled out in a new global training center and doctors reported feeling more confident having difficult conversations.
The JFK assassination is one of the most studied and documented events in recent history – yet using XR and AI, Cortney and the team at Targo were able to shed new light on the events of that terrible day. Using an AI image creation pipeline and immersive interviews with witnesses, JFK Memento represents a new form of documentary storytelling that places the user inside history. The piece was one of the most widely awarded XR pieces of 2024, with honors including an Emmy nomination.
A major retailer had a rash of bias incidents in stores, where customers were wrongly accused of theft based on their skin color. In order to create empathy among employees and also allow them to practice responding to bias incidents with kindness and care, Friends With Holograms created a piece that puts the user in the shoes of someone who experiences profiling in a store, letting any user feel just how awful it is. In the second part of the piece, the user helps someone who has been profiled file a complaint about it and must empathize with their treatment.
XR training is perfect for so-called “black swan” events – situations that hopefully will never happen, but if they do, must be handled perfectly. A natural disaster and the rationing of care at a hospital is one of those events. Working with a hospital chain in the southwestern United States, Cortney and her team crafted a VR piece that put the user in the shoes of a hospital emergency manager who had to remain calm in the face of uncertainty and follow guidelines about care while navigating a chaotic and emotionally charged environment. While testing the “success” of this would be near impossible, many people who have been through this piece report feeling less stressed and more calm in high stress situations.
Aside from practical medical skills, nurses and other care providers need to be able to notice small signs and symptoms early and always pay attention to patient cues. A large hospital wanted to make sure nurses were paying attention to early signs of sepsis, and Cortney and her team created a branching XR experience where the user had to observe and react to subtle things before the patient suffered too much harm. The piece is being deployed right now, and early data is very promising with regards to cases dropping.
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