Virtual Reality Apprenticeships (TRANSFRVR)

TRANSFRVR is a virtual reality apprenticeship platform providing trainees with hands-on experience to acquire the skills required to succeed on-the-job. 

The students who are the most likely to succeed are those who have access to the best resources. We aid students who lack access to expert level teachers, coaches or mentors. The cost of a quality education has risen so high that it is unaffordable for most. The cost of tuition “has been rising almost six percent above the rate of inflation" and the total student loan debt burden is an eye-popping $1.2 trillion. These costs make it difficult or impossible for people with few economic resources to acquire professional skills. That is why we propose what we call TRANSFRVR apprenticeships. A TRANSFRVR apprenticeship is a virtual reality environment that provides trainees with hands-on training experiences in an immersive, simulated environment that enables them to practice and acquire the skills required to perform a job. When the trainee makes a mistake a digital coach powered by machine learning and artificial intelligence provides feedback to the trainee on how to improve his or her performance on the job. The trainee obtains a score that indicates when he or she has mastered the skills in VR and is ready to practice or transfer the acquired skills to a real-world environment. 

TRANSFR Inc is committed to finding a new business model for education. Employers pay for the TRANSFRVR apprenticeship model while trainees use the platform to prepare for employment. The employer benefits from having an employee that is highly trained and skilled before joining their workforce while the trainee benefits by being better qualified for their interview and having access to a high quality learning resource that the employer paid for.

A fundamental challenge in learning and development is that access to expert instruction is scarce. TRANSFR apprenticeships simulate the one-on-one coaching that an individual would receive from a mentor in a live apprenticeship experience. In our model, a trainee puts on the virtual reality headset and sees what they would normally see on the job. Whether the user is interested in working in hospitality, manufacturing, construction or surgery, a trainee can practice the day-to-day of a profession in a low risk, simulated environment. Trainees can make mistakes and learn from them without a penalty which is important since penalties in the real world can result in job loss or even death in high risk jobs. While the TRANSFRVR apprenticeship provides a low risk opportunity make mistakes, it also provides a high reward environment to hone one’s skills and learn quickly.

One-on-one instruction can help raise an individual’s performance by over 50%. The challenge is that one-on-one instruction is not scalable or affordable. We believe that through TRANSFRVR apprenticeships we can scale the ability for people to acquire skills required for professional success at a significantly lower cost. In the future, we would like to offer TRANSFRVR apprenticeship programs for people around the world, especially in developing nations to train for jobs than can significantly impact the quality of life such as nurses, doctors, surgeons and civil engineers.

What makes a TRANSFRVR apprenticeship unique is that as students make mistakes in the simulation, our digital learning coach provides immediate feedback and a score to help trainees identify areas for improvement and master the skills they need for the job. People can learn much faster when they have their own expert coach and with our simulations, trainees get the personalized coaching they need to practice the skills required to succeed on-the-job. We used existing technologies such as virtual reality and machine learning to develop a coaching process to solve the challenge of equipping young learners with skills at scale.

A TRANSFRVR apprenticeship utilizes virtual reality, artificial intelligence and the advances in computer processing power to provide a realistic simulation of a job environment as well as digital coach that learns to be as knowledgeable, effective and empathetic as an expert trainer. Technology is at the core of what we do. A TRANSFRVR apprenticeship would not be possible without these technologies which enabled us to innovate a scalable model for job training. If our training model were not scalable, it would not be affordable or attractive to employers who fund the development for use by trainees. 

While research shows that learning in virtual reality can be beneficial, no one has proven a model for virtual reality apprenticeships. Over the next 12 months, we aim to train 500 to 1,000 job seekers and conduct a study to demonstrate the effectiveness, cost savings and scalability of our model. We focus on the hospitality industry since companies in the industry constantly trains new employees. We are focused on bartender training and coffee barista training because these jobs offer wages that can lift hundreds of thousands of people out of poverty and put them on an income generating track.

In three years we believe that we will have developed a proven model for training individuals with low or no skill and prepare them to become successful professionals. We believe that once we prove the benefits and cost savings to employers and trainees in one industry with one job that many other industries will be interested in working with us to replicate the model for their companies. In five years we expect to replicate our model in developing nations with industries that will increase the quality of life such as healthcare and civil engineering.

Currently, we partner with corporations who are hiring trained professionals to fund the creation the TRANSFRVR apprenticeships, validate the accuracy of the training for their job and provide training on site. We also partner with a local school or training program with the same industry focus as our corporate partner to deploy the training at a safe, trusted, central location that trainees can attend. Our model provides a very practical and direct link between the school, the trainee, the employer and the job by providing a simulation of the job the trainee is working to obtain.

We work with about 765 trainees in Mumbai, India. Each student is training at our partner school or national restaurant chain to work in the hospitality business which offers a legitimate career path out of poverty. Over 90% of our trainees come from families lacking financial resources to support education. Our trainees work to become bar tenders, a job that now pays 75,000 rupees per month, up from just 500 rupees. The students are elated by our model because the learning is fun and effective, they get a job and they get to use the latest technology. 

Within 12 months we aim to have proven out our TRANSFRVR apprenticeship training model by training over 1,500 trainees in hospitality at their place of employment or a trade school. Additionally, we aim to have agreements in place with industry leaders such as Starbucks that have a goal of training over 100,000 opportunity youth nationwide over the next 3 years. Our goal is to enable all trainees to acquire the skills required for professional success by practicing and mastering them in a virtual reality environment so that they can immediately get on an income generating track to further their livelihood.

Our current team is a mix of an experienced ed-tech startup entrepreneur  high net worth angel investors, learning scientists, educational data mining experts, hospitality executives, VR developers and a former banker. Collectively, we have the experience to build the technology, deliver the promised educational outcomes and raise several million dollars in equity. The biggest challenge will be to identify a unique business model in education to serve students who are left behind in the current system and to build a scalable business model that meets the needs of employers.

A TRANSFRVR apprenticeship is funded by the corporate training budget. Current corporate training programs utilize videos, webinars, classroom style lectures and seminars which are less effective than one-on-one, personalized instruction. Less than 25% of learning and development professionals would recommend their own corporate training programs to others yet corporations spend over $75 billion on corporate training each year. Companies have a very strong incentive to develop highly qualified professionals since employees help drive profits.

For these reasons, we believe this model of selling to corporations is the most effective way to build out our platform. In the future, as virtual reality hardware costs decrease and they are as common as mobile phones, we believe that consumers will pay for their own learning. However, a consumer business model is years away since right now only consumers with financial resources can afford it which are not the opportunity youth we are targeting.

Our goal is to generate $500,000 in sales in 2018 to test this business model. So far we have about $150,000 committed.

We are applying to Solve because the challenge that we are trying to solve is difficult! Education is a notoriously difficult problem to solve because those who need a quality education the most lack the financial resources to access it. While we have some very promising data points that lead us to believe that we are on the path to success we want to be surrounded by like-minded people who can help us anticipate issues we may face.  Solve’s depth of technical expertise and corporate partners will be a great sounding board for implementing our solution worldwide.

Two of the most significant barriers to our success are a) developing the most scalable business model and b) developing a technological
competitive advantage. Solve has attracted the most brilliant business minds in the world. Though we have some paying customers we view them as data points, not proof that we have figured everything out. Discovering the balance between how much businesses, trainees and the government should pay for an individual’s training will be essential to scaling up the TRANSFRVR apprenticeship model. MIT would be a great collaborator to further develop and fine tune our artificially intelligent digital coach.