XR tech is great for the extended classroom, but it’s not the only way it can be used to teach. Jason Palmer explains how Winged Whale Media is using VR and 360 video to train tour guides on travel destinations they can’t travel to right now.

Julie: Hello, my name is Julie Smithson, and I am your XR for Learning podcast host. I look forward to bringing you insight into changing the way that we learn and teach using XR technologies to explore, enhance, and individualize learning for everyone. Today, my guest is Jason Palmer. As the director of new media at Winged Whale Media, it's Jason's responsibility to help transform [the] client's vision into something that will make a difference. So with a background in digital communications from the University of Waterloo here in Canada, Jason spent the last 10 years in content creation with traditional media in videography and photography. Jason has spearheaded the use of 360 degree video VR content for a handful of clients, and now is on the forefront of producing 360 VR video content in the travel and tourism industry for major hotel brands, national tourism boards, and cruise lines. And now broadened its scope to include full virtual environments and is working on bringing tourism to people in unprecedented times of restricted travel. Thank you so much, Jason, for joining me this morning.

Jason: It's an absolute pleasure.

Julie: Why don't you tell me a little bit about Winged Whale Media? It sounds like it's a great place to start.

Jason: [chuckles] Yeah, absolutely. So, Winged Whale Media -- as you mentioned there -- we've been around for a little bit more than 10 years now. And we started out in the traditional side, doing a lot of photography and video. In particular with the tourism industry, we would capture a lot of resorts and destinations. For example, a tour operator or a resort would send us down to a destination -- usually in the Caribbean, I might add, which is always a benefit -- and we would capture the rooms, we'd capture the pools, we'd capture the casinos, or the discos, or what have you, and bring that content back. We've been doing that for a while and it's been a great ride. I don't know if you want me to get into the name of the company now. [laughs]

Julie: Yeah, absolutely. Well, obviously, with travel and tourism, the big question is, how is your industry doing? Because nobody's travelling, right? That's the first thing that everybody's probably thinking as they're listening to this podcast. So how has your business changed, and what kind of services are you starting to do within the company to support travel and tourism?

Jason: We've really kind of examined over the last couple of months how we can bring education to the travel and tourism industry. And I'll give you kind of a specific example in that. Typically, a destination such as Antigua and Barbuda, or the Bahamas, or really any country kind of on the planet will do what's called a familiarization trip. And that's where they will bring a number of industry professionals -- whether they're travel agents or press -- to a destination and kind of showcase the destination to them. And for the smaller organizations, you're maybe talking anywhere from 30 to 90 people for a familiarization trip over the course of the entire year. So if you're taking 30 travel agents down to showcase your product over the course of the entire year, that's not very many when you consider that there are 5,000+ travel agents in Canada, there are 20,000+ travel agents in the United States, let alone the number around the world. So you're not getting a great deal of exposure for the effort that you're putting in.

And so what we've been looking at doing is how we can broaden that scope and bring that to a