Variable Labs

About the Team

Team Members: Dennis Bonilla, Mario de la Vega, Barry Pousman, Jorge Calderon, Zach Pousman, Adam Zuckerman
The Variable Labs team includes award winning virtual reality creators who have developed simulation systems for NASA, content management systems for the Department of Education, and helped stand up VR initiatives at Discovery Networks and the United Nations. They have created tools to make simulation-based learning applications which distribute VR curriculum for measurable behavior change. Their clients include the United Nations, Google, The Atlantic, and the American Association of University Women.

The Solution 

This proposal recommended the use of off-the-shelf roomscale virtual reality (VR) hardware, such as the HTC Vive, as well as augmented reality head-mounted displays, such as the Microsoft Hololens. They identified that HTC has released positional tracking hardware which can represent a wide variety of real-world objects. They further suggest that, as KPIs are refined, more exotic hardware such as Intel Project Alloy may be used to augment simulation and after-action review capability. The Variable Labs team recommended a client-server architecture which mimics modern games. The key to the solution was to establish user and system performance baselines during system design, alpha, and beta testing with regular measurements to tune gameplay, i.e. training curricula. They emphasized that using accurate real-time data is vital to represent the current state of performance however, a proper safety standard needs to be established and measured for the virtual environment.