Tag: Engage

  • The predicted downfall of ENGAGE XR

    The predicted downfall of ENGAGE XR

    Decorative image of a messed up 3D printed blue boat.
    Photo by Megan Lee on Unsplash

    Given that it looks like EDUMetaverse is headed to the turf, I might as well get a blog post up prognosticating that ENGAGE XR is going down too. I might as well.  I’m not even early to these thoughts; I heard through the grapevine that ENGAGE XR was laying off folks within the past 12 months.  I did research that and it is true. 

    LinkedIn shows negative 41% employee growth in the past 12 months.

    Capture from LinkedIn as of February 2026 showing a 41% negative employee growth in the past year at ENGAGE XR
    Negative 41% employee growth.

    The Irish Times reported a stock slippage of 8% on January 6, 2025 due to contracts with Middle Eastern partners that had not come through or realized yet.

    Capture of headline from The Irish Times article, Irish virutla reality firm ENGAGE XR's shares slide on sales warning

    By June 2025, there seemed to be further delays and possibly more loss, although this article from Sharecast from 6 months later seems to have the same figures as the January article.  So it is unclear to me if this is more of a tumble or a new tumble.  With the dramatically increasing interest in AI during this time, it would not surprise me at all if the investors were looking elsewhere for returns.

    I had heard “layoffs” but didn’t know of anyone specifically. It appears that Glassdoor did. 😕

    To be clear, I’m not kicking a man when he is down here. I’ve had a beef with ENGAGE XR for years due to their false learning claims using virtual reality.  I’ve written before about their contract with Meta and Stanford University.  I’ve written about their foolish “metaversity” concept. I’ve written about their strange use cases and the evidence that they use to push their snake oil use of VR for learning.

    Capture from inside of the virtual campus of Morehouse College, otherwise known as their metaversity.
    Not aging well? Morehouse College, ENGAGE XR, and the Metaversity

    So this is a case of the chickens coming home to roost. One can advertise all one wants to about how great one’s XR is, but if one is propping up untruths, failure will follow. 

    BTW, in the same bucket with ENGAGE XR is VictoryXR. I might write this out more later. For sure, with the early evidence of what AI is doing to education (impact on learning), it’s going to get ugly. 

    Note: be aware that there is more than one company with the name “Engage” in the virtual reality space. 

  • When Tech Platforms Donate The Resources

    When Tech Platforms Donate The Resources

     

     

    [EDIT: This post was originally written in January 2023 and lightly edited in 2025]

    Jeremy Bailenson

    As much as I admire Jeremy Bailenson’s research work (really!) his Communication 166/266 Virtual People course in June 2021 had some real problems. In its defense, it was a first-of-its-kind course, even if it wasn’t the very first course in VR. Depending on how to define VR versus XR, groups of this size, 263, have met synchronously in other platforms.

    Boast Much?

    Bailenson defends: “To the best of my knowledge, nobody has networked hundreds of students
    (with) VR headsets for months at a time in the history of virtual
    reality, or even in the history of teaching.”

    Further, he states:

    The scale of this course is what sets it apart compared to other “in-VR” courses. In addition to having a relatively large number of students enrolled in the course, we also had a large number of sessions taking place in VR over time, many of which were in a networked virtual environment. To our knowledge, prior courses that have used VR in an educational setting have rarely accomplished all three of these criteria.

     
     

    Here is a YouTube video, Stanford “Virtual People” class in the Metaverse posted by Bailenson.

    The ENGAGE Platform

    In the video clips, we see the ENGAGE platform.

    Why ENGAGE? It was not deeply explained, here:

    In addition to the headsets, the course also needed software to connect
    the students and teachers. For this, Bailenson said the university
    decided to use the ENGAGE virtual communication system. ENGAGE is used by major companies and educational organizations to hold virtual meetings and events.

    A Big Problem


    I looked at some of the film clips closely. I searched and the early clips appear to be deleted off of YouTube.  I have facilitated small and large events in XR.  

    In the video clips of this course, I can detect that sound appeared to be a somewhat major problem in the platform; getting users to hear, signal that they could hear, or having multiple groups in one space (like a lab) and hear over top of each other.

    The Headsets

    Learners in the course received the Quest 2 headsets.

    “Virtual Reality is becoming mainstream, with more than ten million
    systems being used in the United States alone. This class examines VR
    from the viewpoint of various disciplines, including popular culture,
    engineering, behavioral science, and communication. Each student will receive an Oculus Quest 2 headset, and the bulk of our learning will
    occur while immersed in VR.”

    Each student was given the headset:

    Each was given an Oculus Quest 2 headset

    According to another course from 2022, headsets were to be returned at the end of the semester:

    Screen capture of a Stanford 2022 course with price of US$3699 saying headset would be provided but must be returned

    Facebook Meta provided a “workaround” for the forced use of Facebook accounts in the headsets:

    The Facebook login requirement had sparked complaints and privacy
    worries, leading some organizations to seek a workaround. Stanford
    University uses Meta’s headsets in its courses on VR, said Jeremy
    Bailenson, the founding director of the institution’s Virtual Human
    Interaction Lab. To ensure student privacy, the lab had to seek Meta’s help in creating anonymized accounts for classroom use.
     

    This article comes right out and says this:

    And money for the project—as well as donated VR headsets for students at
    the participating colleges—comes from Meta, the company that owns
    Facebook.

    The connection between Facebook Meta and Stanford has been documented.

    While the experience was good in that, at the beginning of trying out any new technology, there will be false starts. Said another way, it is good to learn that bringing in 30 learners to one large-ish lab space to teach separate labs of 5 people each won’t work if there is flat sound. That has be learned. I think his course showed that.

    But overall, conducting a course with donated technology and then turning around and saying the learning was great* is a conflict of interest.

    I found a written summary here, but it’s light on conclusions. There a few glimmers, but otherwise, they did seem to hint that the groups versus sound problems that appeared in the video did happen.

    * What does “the learning was great” actually mean?  Bailenson and Han claimed better presence, enjoyment, motivation, and transfer. While I could let you consider if any of those deserve merit, I railed against the conclusions of the course in my The Immersion Delusion post.  This post, being written more than 2 years before I hit publish, focuses on the hype just as the course was starting. Therefore, obviously, this particular post does not hit hard on hype versus results. It only focuses on hype and the conflict of interest of hitting the airwaves with how amazing your course must be, to be a first of its kind, learning about VR in VR, yada yada yada. 

    [EDIT: I decided to publish this post on 12/26/2025. I’ve done quite a deeper dive on that course and the publications around it.  I feel even more confident and I edited this article to come right out and say that Bailenson had a conflict of interest, rather than a “dis-authentic event in research” around the entire course and following publications.]

     
    Learning About VR in VR

    Video of spaces from Victory XR  (Unsure if these were used in the Stanford course or not)

  • The first step into the Metaverse isn’t the hardest. It’s the nth step that you do for the nth time.

    The first step into the Metaverse isn’t the hardest. It’s the nth step that you do for the nth time.

     

    Photo of architecture in Iran

    Response post to: The Forgotten Stage of Human Progress


    I’m knee deep in an XR implementation project. It’s going forward by
    inches; each step aches with how small it is. If I measured it, it feels
    like it would barely tick one mark on a stick. However, like a gardener
    that makes one small snip here, one pull of a weed there, there is no
    overnight transformation. But still– in the messy work of
    IMPLEMENTATION, I’m making a garden that turns heads and makes people
    think “I want to be there.”

    Seriously, here is the garden:

     

    Today is one of those days where it feels like we are going 2 steps backwards with no step forward. When you hear it mentioned quietly, but over and over and over, that one of the biggest implementation problems we have in XR for education is “sound” — WE ARE NOT KIDDING.

    We have more problems with sound that with any other aspect of an experience. It is the TOP problem source.

    Virbela had this problem in buckets. My hosts cringed every time I estimated that 20% of incoming users had sound problems. 20%!  If YouTube had a 20% failure rate that they presented to users, they would far, far out of business by now.

    I watched this video dated November 5, 2021 put out by Stanford University touting the first course taught in XR with Jeremy Bailenson where he claims it will be “an incredible journey for about half of this class”

     

    Here is the video promo text: 

     “263 students, all with their own VR headsets, across 20 weeks and two courses, spent over 200,000 shared minutes together in the Metaverse. They engaged in large group field trips, small group discussions, performed live music and skits, and worked both alone and together to build their own virtual worlds.”

    First: posed shot OR photoshopped image. Notice: no Zoom markings at all. It’s not “live”, people are not moving.


    For someone like me with enough live event logistics and tech support experience, watching this video shows me that I suspected the course was riddled with sound problems.  

    The background music starts at 0:18, so “hearing” the students will be hard.

    Watch for how much students were cordoned off into small groups (that’s not just a teaching method, that’s to put them soundwise AWAY from each other and minimize disruption) and then just listen to what you CAN hear of the sound provided in the video, you will get snippets and what you will hear will be blurbs of users acting more awkward and users waiting around on another user.

    The “you made it” comment is somewhat telling. It is HARD to get users into XR. Admittedly, it might easier if you are at Stanford and everyone has an Oculus Quest 2 (Meta Quest). (smirk)

    Privilege much?

    At 1:14 there is a LOT of talk over and by 1:18 the video has been sped up to just overwhelm with ADDING models or processing to VR on the ENGAGE platform.

    I’m not trying to douse flames of innovation here. But I’m trying to point out that implementation, as the Atlantic article points out, is a much messier, day-by-day process than the glitz and glamour of a moment.

    The video shows THIS as what appears to be a class highlight moment.


    The sound is a man speaking saying “Nice work everyone!”

    Just let that sink in while looking at that image.

    2021. Stanford University. That is one of our very best learning instituations, folks.

    Ironically, all of the avatars with awkward arms ARE the users actually using headsets. That one avatar in the middle in the gray shirt with this hands at his sides? He is the one user in 2D, not a headset.

    Snicker now, because he is the only one looking normal in this bunch.

    Implementation is HARD!