Navy coming next week to recruit Central Florida students using VR
The U.S. Navy has enlisted virtual reality in its effort to recruit high school students, with a weeklong push planned for Central Florida next week.
Representatives of the military branch will visit 13 schools across the region starting Jan. 22 and going through Jan. 29.
They will bring with them an Oculus Rift headset equipped with a Nimitz VR simulation mission that will have students work through a scenario during which they must extract Navy SEALS from a mission.
The plan is to visit classrooms at Colonial, Lake Howell, Winter Park, Lake Minneola, West Orange, Lake Mary, Hagerty, Cypress Creek, Ocoee and South Lake high schools.
“The Nimitz offers users the most realistic Navy experience possible,” Rear Adm. Brendan R. McLane, Commander of Navy Recruiting Command, said in a press release. “To reach a high-caliber pool of recruiting prospects, we need high-caliber recruiting tools, and this display is truly state of the art.”
The move is a play out of the business community’s playbook.
For years, companies in various industries have used VRbased experiences to lure workers and let them preview their prospective roles.
The car company Jaguar, for instance, has used VR to try to fill software engineering roles.
The U.S. Navy launched its virtual reality recruitment efforts in 2017.