What if letting people play virtual reality together helps you better understand how they would work together? This is the idea behind AlignVR, an Edmonton company founded by Alex and Nathaniel Rossol after the fun and games led to an unexpected vision.
When the brothers launched a virtual reality escape room company called vrCAVE in 2016, they realized something about the equipment they were selling.
“As we were watching many, many groups go through our virtual reality escape rooms during our rehearsals, we started to see a pattern,” Alex Rossol said in episode 22 of Bloom, the Taproot podcast on innovation. “Shortly after a group entered, for the first five or 10 minutes, it became clear whether or not this team would be successful throughout the entire VR escape room experience.”
The Rossols began using virtual reality as part of their own hiring process, assigning short puzzles to groups and observing the “social collisions” that arose from their efforts to solve them.
Airbus then called in search of a recruitment experience, these discussions led to experiments to use virtual reality as a recruitment tool, and soon a company that was born in the B2C entertainment space found a great B2B opportunity. Rossol now wants to make more business leaders and HR professionals in Edmonton aware of the services AlignVR offers.
Learn more about AlignVR’s story in the July 14 episode.
At our sponsor site, you’ll hear Darrell Petras, director of business and community development at Innovate Edmonton, in conversation with Taproot co-founder Mack Male.
Bloom is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, and anywhere else where you get your podcasts.
Photo: A team works together in virtual reality to solve an escape room puzzle. (AlignVR)