Irvine, California, May 9 2024: SimInsights, the Irvine based leader in AI and XR powered education and training, is excited to announce SimGenie. SimGenie is a Simulation Generator for education and training simulations. SimGenie is the next step in SimInsights’ mission of democratizing simulation based learning by making it easier to create immersive, AI-powered simulations.
Cost savings in XR content production
In 2017, Hololens and HTC Vive were popular MR and VR devices and most of the XR content was being created by programmers using game engines such as Unity and Unreal. On average, it took 6 months of effort by a multidisciplinary team of 3d artists, instructional designers, subject matter experts, coders and testers. Projects cost $50-100K on average. Not only that, the deliverables were apk’s that came with substantial technical debt. Unsuspecting customers found themselves stuck with apk files and source code, and were later forced to either abandon the project or pay heavy maintenance fees to vendors.
At SimInsights, we had seen this movie before and quickly recognized that this was not a sustainable path for unlocking the potential of XR for training and education. We had seen the $50K average price tag endure for many years even in the traditional domain of web based interactive simulations (e.g. phet) and we didn’t want to accept it as the new normal in the XR domain. Instead, we were inspired by SaaS companies like figma, smartsheet, canva and airtable, and wanted to build a hosted platform that offered the potential for low cost, easy to use tools, allowing everyone to capture their ideas, knowledge and skills in the form of XR content. We also heard very persuasive flashy people argue that XR software ought to be 5-10x more expensive per user because it’s 3D, etc. We deliberately ignored those opinions and continued on our quest, quietly working on building HyperSkill.
As we developed HyperSkill over 6 years, we ate our own dogfood and used it to successfully deliver client projects. We saw project delivery times getting faster, cost moving lower and functionality becoming more powerful. Every project we delivered with HyperSkill led to new features that brought down the cost for all future projects. Initially, almost every project required new features to be added to HyperSkill. Slowly but steadily, the number of features demanded by new projects went down. We started completing projects with zero new features needed.
The chart below boils down years of work to show the exponential reduction in the average effort required to create XR content with HyperSkill no-code platform. Given the variations in different XR projects, we needed to make some assumptions before we could simplify the picture enough to be insightful. Those assumptions are detailed here in the spreadsheet.
Please see data and assumptions behind this chart here Published – Exponentially decreasing effort of XR content creation
With the launch of SimGenie, we are combining the power of HyperSkill no-code platform, templates which was announced a few weeks ago, and generative AI, to reduce the effort of creation to just 1-2 hours. In this short period of time, a user can build a new simulation with 3D graphics, conversational AI and an animated character, all customized to their unique preferences. Once created, the user can share the simulation with anyone and gather rich time stamped data on their interactions. SimGenie is included in the HyperSkill Education tier.
It has been a long journey to bring XR content creation to this level of ease and convenience, and we are near the end of the road in terms of how much more we can reduce the effort. From this point onwards, we aim to focus on expanding the types of sims that SimGenie can generate, while keeping the effort around an hour. We envision a large library of templates, AI-powered agents and even customized analytics templates, similar to Canva, to enable anyone to create XR content of their choice and share with others. Here are some example use cases that are guiding our work:
- A middle school math teacher can generate a sim for her class by selecting the learning objective, environment and AI character.
- A business school professor can generate a sim for his finance class by selecting the learning objective in a negotiations course, 3D environment and one or more AI characters.
- A corporate training manager can quickly create a sim to onboard new employees on HR procedures by selecting specific sims from the template library.
- A manufacturing plant manager can generate a sim to onboard new employees. The sim will be customized to their factory and the AI agent will follow the protocols specific to the factory.
- Imagine a history teacher who generates a sim for her class and includes a historical figure as an AI character who can engage students in interactive dialogue while immersed in a 3D environment.
To try out SimGenie, please login or create an account here: https://siminsights.com/
About HyperSkill
HyperSkill is a no-code 3D simulation platform for both Virtual and Augmented Reality. HyperSkill was created to enable instructional designers to create immersive training content without having to learn programming. HyperSkill includes thousands of 3D assets and simulations that are accessible for free to users. HyperSkill enables non-programmers to author VR/AR content, publish it to various devices and audiences and collect and visualize experience data. HyperSkill has been developed with R&D funding from the National Science Foundation. To learn more, please visit https://siminsights.com/hyperskill/
About Skillful
Skillful is a collection of 3D immersive simulations for Virtual and Mixed Reality devices and web/desktop. Skillful was created using the HyperSkill platform. To learn more, please visit https://siminsights.com/skillful/
About SimInsights
SimInsights mission is to democratize the creation of 3D, interactive, immersive and intelligent (I^3) simulations. We believe that simulations are the most impactful way to learn, yet few people can actually leverage them as a creative medium. SimInsights offers HyperSkill, a no-code tool to enable everyone to capture their knowledge in the form of 3D immersive, AI-powered simulations and share it with others. SimInsights team used HyperSkill to create Skillful, a growing collection of simulations to help anyone master any skill.