Restaurant uses virtual reality app to train its employees

RESTAURANTS around the country are trying to cope with the increasing costs of employment as minimum wages, health care expenses and other employee benefits continue to put pressure on their profits.

Many are investing in technologies, such as self- serve kiosks and automated kitchen equipment, to eliminate some hourly jobs and control their labour costs.

But it seems that there’s another technology that may also help restaurateurs keep their employees particularly new ones, better trained and more productive. It’s virtual reality.

Honeygrow, a Philadelphiabased chain of Asian-fusion food has partnered with a local interactive art studio called Klip Collective to create a customised VR app that helps to solve a big problem: Train new employees better and faster.

The app is designed to show new employees how to do their jobs, using live action, 3-D animations and an interactive game.

More information about the technology used to create this app can be found on Klip’s blog.

According to a recent report from Road to VR, new employees at Honeygrow are equipped with a Google Daydream headset and controller that has specialised remote controls for their interactions.

Hundreds of internal restaurant scenes were captured on a specialised Nokia camera that have been preloaded into the application.

The result is a high-technology simulation that can be used on any Google Android device, where the employee is thrown into a “near 1:1 ideal” of what their job would be like. — WPBloomberg