We are extremely proud to announce that we’ve been awarded our second Epic Games MegaGrant for our continued work to expand our EMPACT® Immersive Training Platform.
HTX Labs’ EMPACT Immersive Training Platform, built on Epic Games’ Unreal Engine and Microsoft’s Azure Government cloud technology, is designed to address the challenges experienced in bringing virtual reality and immersive technology to our enterprise and government customers to elevate the level of proficiency and preparedness of the next-generation workforce.
Our first MegaGrant, secured in late 2019, contributed to the development of our flagship EMPACT Studio no-code authoring tool for rapid training content creation within fully virtual environments . With EMPACT Studio, an instructor or subject matter expert can select a relevant virtual environment, record themselves teaching a subject and/or performing a procedure, and preview and publish this recording as a lesson for students to interact with and learn from on many types of hardware devices, including VR headsets. With the evolution of EMPACT Studio, our customers and partners can rapidly create, distribute, and sustain immersive training content at a fraction of the cost of traditional methods with a 46.1% reduction in training time. Read more about the results from our first MegaGrant results here.
Securing this second MegaGrant award will enable us to further expand our EMPACT Studio functionality to support mixed reality (XR) devices, such as the Varjo XR-3 headset, and will empower users to record their performances and capture their expertise in an XR setting to create original immersive content within the context of a physical environment like a aircraft cockpit or a maintenance facility.
The integration of mixed reality experiences into our EMPACT platform delivers a unique blend of virtual and physical components that provide an impactful way to engage students through the introduction of physical training materials, like flight manuals and maintenance equipment, that are not as effective in a fully virtual environment. The inclusion of physical environments in lesson creation further increases fidelity, reduces the potential for negative training, and helps improve students' performance and motivation to learn at scale (*Eckert and Mower, 2020).
Expanding our solution offerings through this MegaGrant award further transforms EMPACT into a fully immersive training creation and delivery platform, that seamlessly supports VR and XR experiences agnostically across any device.
Thank you Epic Games! We’re grateful to continue our partnership and honored to continue leveraging the Unreal Engine as a foundational component in our EMPACT immersive training platform.
About Epic Games MegaGrant
Epic Games has committed $100 million to support game developers, enterprise professionals, media and entertainment creators, students, educators, and tool developers doing amazing things with Unreal Engine or enhancing open-source capabilities for the 3D graphics community.
Integration with Unreal Engine allows HTX Labs to take advantage of industry-leading features, further enabling the ability to create next-generation simulations.
*Source:
XR-Immersive Labs Improve Student Motivation to Learn Kinesiology
How To Effectively Use XR Training In High-Risk Industries: 4 Examples - Roundtable Learning
