Here’s my interview with Michael Peeler, Business Development Manager at Mass Virtual, that was conducted on Thursday, June 12, 2025 at Augmented World Expo in Long Beach, CA. See more context in the rough transcript below.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.438] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR Podcast. It's a podcast that looks at the structures and forms of immersive storytelling and the future of spatial computing. You can support the podcast at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. So continuing my series of looking at AWE past and present, today's interview is with an interview that I did this year at AWE with a VR training company that's been working with the military for a number of years called Mass Virtual. So Mass Virtual had this demo that I had a chance to see and it was super high fidelity, really polished and just really well done in terms of putting you onto the airfield and walking through these procedural things that you have to know in order to work this specific job within the context of the Air Force. They also had these collaborative exercises where you could have multiple people in the same training exercise at the same time and working as a team and being able to walk through all the different steps and procedures as well. So I had a chance to try out their demo and then have a chance to chat with their business developer manager of mass virtual, Michael Peeler, to talk a bit more around what they're doing with military training, but also moving into more enterprise use cases as well. So we're covering all that and more on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Michael happened on Thursday, June 12th, 2025 at Augmented World Expo in Long Beach, California. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:01:29.898] Michael Peeler: Hi, my name is Mike Peeler. I'm a business development manager at Mass Virtual. Mass Virtual is a human performance company, which means that at the core of who we are, we care about elevating the performance of your team. We paint with an XR brush, which means we're going to deliver training solutions to you in extended reality, whether that's virtual, augmented, or mixed reality. We're going to provide solutions to elevate your team. Great. Maybe you could give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into the space. Sure. My background actually started in the Air Force. I'm a 25-year veteran of the Air Force, a pilot. I ran a schoolhouse for the Air Force, for all the C-17 air crew that were trained globally. Toward the end of my career, I also ran the ROTC, the Officer Development Program at the University of Central Florida. So from an educator perspective, I've seen what works and what doesn't. From an air crew perspective, I've seen what's healthy and what's not. And so the opportunity to join a company like Mass Virtual, where we're actually delivering in a meaningful way and giving back to our service members, but really it's a movement that's happening where we're transforming learning and putting it in a virtual immersive environment and we're making for better students, better quality folks to join our force.
[00:02:47.817] Kent Bye: And so from your own journey with Mass Virtual, when did virtual reality start to come on to either your radar or the company's radar to start to integrate that into the type of simulation and training and if it was a core part of the founding of it or if the company exists before that? So yeah, just a bit of a history of the entry point of XR into your business.
[00:03:06.050] Michael Peeler: Right, so our founder and CEO, John Brooks, is also a military veteran, air crew member, C-130s, C-141s, and a self-taught computer designer artist, worked in Silicon Valley, worked in the gaming industry, and as the XR solutions as headsets were coming online and he was working with very close friends who were developing those, he realized that the importance now was going to be in developing good quality content. Because if we don't have good quality content, people are going to set the headset aside and we're not going to continue on that movement. And so about 16 years ago, John started the company out of his garage and really focused on making good quality content. And it was at the beginning of this wave and he'll tell the story that he was out there alone and unafraid trying to make the best thing that he could do because he realized the value of it and how it was going to change the world of learning. In the last six years we've been working very closely with the Department of Defense and we're now providing, we're the primary provider of XR solutions, XR training solutions for the entire DoD.
[00:04:10.717] Kent Bye: Wow. Okay. And so I was just talking to your marketing manager and being based in Florida, Orlando, there's a simulation conference that's happening there each year. And so maybe just talk around that region and what's happening and why being in that space is particularly helpful for thinking about both simulation, but working in the context of military contracts.
[00:04:30.290] Michael Peeler: So Orlando is emerging as the epicenter of all modeling, simulation, and training for the US. It's really based on the fact that the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force have organizations down there that are seeking solutions in the modeling and simulation spaces. So the intersection of the federal government at some wonderful universities, in the University of Central Florida, Full Sail, and others, who are producing students, you know, the academic side of that. And then you bring in commercial entities like Mass Virtual, who are providing solutions. So all three of those things intersecting in a really unique way in Central Florida, there in Orlando, makes for a great place to pull awesome talent, to provide amazing solutions, and benefit the whole country.
[00:05:16.072] Kent Bye: So it sounds like you're based in Orlando. Is a lot of the experiences that you're producing, are they going out all over across around the world to all these bases? Or are they having to come to Orlando? Just talk a bit about where are people experiencing mass virtual experiences?
[00:05:31.678] Michael Peeler: Mass Virtual's immersive learning solutions are deployed globally. Right now, today, over 200 locations that are using our solutions. 31,000 students annually are getting certified to do their work on and around aircraft, heavy machinery, missile silos, vehicles, all through this immersive solution. So Mass Virtual's solution for the Air Force is called Virtual Hangar. And in Virtual Hangar, the Air Force can park all of their aircraft, and we have almost all of them created. We have learning created for those aircraft that maintainers, operators can get certified on and really be safer, better. High velocity learning is what we're all about.
[00:06:13.291] Kent Bye: Yeah, I did the demo here a couple of days ago. And one of the things I was really struck by was just the level of visual fidelity and polish and even the attention to detail for having footprints on the textures of the planes. And so maybe talk around, why is it important to have such a detailed, photorealistic depictions of these different aircraft and equipment? And also, obviously, the right scale. But yeah, just the level of visual polish that you feel like is a key part of allowing people to immerse themselves into these learning experiences.
[00:06:40.598] Michael Peeler: Yeah, at Mass Virtual we don't believe in the thought that something could be good enough, right? We can always make it better. And we want to make it better because we want to make a better training solution for the individual, for the organization. It's based in science. So when we're operating at the highest level of Dale's learning continuum, which says that you retain 10% of what you read and 90% of what you do. So the more realistic we can make that do style learning, the more we can trick your brain into thinking you're there. We call it the suspension of disbelief. When we suspend disbelief in the right way, it imprints that experience in your long-term memory. So your retention is through the roof, your confidence is through the roof because your brain thinks that you're there. And so for us, it's very important that we have the highest quality content, the highest level of fidelity, and the most immersive experience you can imagine to accomplish that training.
[00:07:35.765] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I think if we go back to the link trainer, that's one of the very first simulators, and then flight simulators. It seems like it's been, even from the very beginnings of virtual reality, from both Tom Furness, who I think was creating more AR, VR solutions for pilots that are actually deployed, or some aspects of training for a super cockpit that he was working on. But there seems to be a long, history of not only the founding of virtual reality but also artificial intelligence being funded by DARPA that all these technologies are coming together because there is such a compelling use case for training and simulation. I'm just curious how you think about that history of this long lineage of XR and it being tied to the military and training contexts.
[00:08:15.273] Michael Peeler: So as a pilot myself, and knowing about the Link trainers, and having gone through all of that training throughout my career, there's nothing more powerful than being able to put yourself in the experience. The challenge though, is that a lot of those experience come at high cost. Whether it's operating in a real aircraft, or the high fidelity level D full motion simulators that are thousands of dollars an hour to operate. They're very important and they're important for a specific reason. What we found recently is that a lot of those reasons, a lot of those things that were being done in those expensive simulators can be done in even a better way in a virtual reality. And that virtual reality solution is a lean solution. It doesn't take a lot of space. You can have multiple versions of it running at one time. You can quickly go from one lesson where you're learning about hydraulic systems to another lesson where you're learning about how to pre-flight the flight deck. And so it makes for a very lean solution, a very good use case, a less expensive way to accomplish even better training than ever before. So it's just the next evolution from the link trainer to the full motion sim to virtual reality. You know, let's go.
[00:09:22.102] Kent Bye: One of the other things I really appreciate about the demo is that you have a map, a 2D map of some of the different things that some of the operators may need to interpret the abstractions of the map onto the physicality. But then you show how things are actually laid out onto the physical context. And there's less translation from the abstract into the spatial relationship from the 2D to the 3D. So I'd love to hear how you start to compare the way that training has been done before, and then if you're able to quantify or describe what's different when people actually have a fully immersive and spatial context of that same data.
[00:09:57.802] Michael Peeler: So a couple examples of that, one being a two-dimensional black and white schematic of a system, an electrical system. And it takes a lot of time and interpretation. It takes a lot of brain power to think, how does that actually overlay onto the real piece of equipment, onto the airplane? Where now in virtual space, we can take the skin off of that airplane. We can show how those electrical components are connected. And when I flip this switch, where do those electrons go? So you can really better understand how those things work than you ever could before in a two-dimensional black and white space. And then we translate that into what is colloquially known as a rock drill or a sand table, where a maneuver unit is going to, in a sandbox, move rocks around to decide how their relationships are going to go with adjacent formations. Well, we can do that in a virtual way. Now you can actually see those formations. You can see the ground, the terrain that they're interacting with. You can speed up time and watch it happen faster so you're not waiting hours for things to play out. You can slow down time and say, let's rewind that again and let's try this in a different way. It just enables all types of users from around the globe that can be connected virtually to the same virtual learning space, but not in the same physical learning space, to collaborate, to work together, that crew coordination can all happen in real time.
[00:11:21.826] Kent Bye: Yeah, I know there's always limitations for standardized testing, but in terms of trying to measure the effectiveness of this type of virtual training, how are you able to quantify the impact of your system?
[00:11:32.867] Michael Peeler: So we were lucky enough that when we started down this road with the US military that they needed to quantify the return on their own investment. And so they did their own internal studies. Their own internal studies found that we were achieving a 45% faster course completion. That means it didn't take as long to get students through the same material. Students can work at their own pace, they can work as a group, and in some cases they need to collaborate and work as a team. But they could also, if you have a slower student or a faster student, you're not keeping the faster students back at the pace of the slower ones. And so overall, they were achieving 45% faster course completion. Another really important metric that they found is that the use of those training aids, those physical assets that they used to use to put people through that needed to be scheduled or put on the ground if it's an airplane, wear and tear was a real thing on them. And now we've reduced the need for that by 50%. So 50% less need for an airplane to practice on. Well, all that translates into that airplane being able to do what it's supposed to do. If you're a commercial entity, that means revenue for your airline. If you're the military, that means that airplane is back out there doing its job. Maybe it's a life flight helicopter that no longer needs to be parked to practice doing maintenance on. It can save people's lives. And then in terms of actually putting fuel through an engine, right? We don't have to actually put fuel through an engine to practice turning that engine on. That saved the Air Force $30 million. That's $30 million real dollars that can be used in other spaces to increase readiness. You don't have to put the wear and tear, put the oils and the fuels through the systems anymore. We can do a lot of that training without that.
[00:13:08.379] Kent Bye: And there's one scene where there was loading up an artillery piece of weapon, but there is almost like a social or collaborative sense where there's multiple people that are operating this, maybe even simultaneously. And so maybe talk a bit about the social coordination that you could start to do in virtual spaces that, again, may be difficult to do or redo over and over again when you're working with some of this equipment.
[00:13:30.069] Michael Peeler: That's right, Kent. So, you know, very rarely do we work or operate in a silo by ourselves. We often work as a team. And one of the other powerful benefits of XR is that we can also train as a team. So our solutions will come out in a single user, multi-user or multi-role. And in that case, what you saw with the artillery piece is that various members, different members of the team had to collaborate, had to work together to get that thing to operate the way it should, right? And when one person does something in a way that affects another, that's how you get good team coordination. And so we can practice that crew coordination in a virtual space, and they can, again, be distributed across the globe. They don't have to be in the same physical space to do that. You don't need the same physical asset, but you can work together. When you're jacking up an airplane to change a wheel on it, it takes six people to jack up that airplane. And what one person does on one side is going to affect the other. They're going to communicate via the headset in a virtual space just like they would in the real world. And now we can reinforce those real world habits, that real world crew coordination.
[00:14:34.423] Kent Bye: And when you think about the different types of training, do you have genres of different types of things, like spatial relationships or different tasks? How do you start to think about the spectrum of different types of training that you do?
[00:14:47.796] Michael Peeler: I'll start by saying that we're limited by our own imagination. So I'm going to give you an answer that is limited because we haven't thought of all the different ways. When we talk about training, we tend to group them into two different aspects. One is a procedure-based training where you have a checklist that you have to run through. You've got to accomplish all the steps in the correct order. And that's very, very important. We're a checklist-oriented service. And so, in that way, what we've done is we've standardized the way you get that training done, or standardized the way you operate that. Now everyone is learning the same way. You're going to solve for all the bad techniques that were passed down over time. The second way we talk about training is in terms of a theory of operations. And so if I need to understand generally how a high bypass turbofan engine works, well, let's make one in a virtual space. Let's start it up. Let's now take it apart while it's running so I can see where those air flows are going, where those stator veins are going and how that exhaust is being pushed out the back. We can understand those more complex systems in a theory of operation sense. So generally, that's the two types of training that we talk about. But I know that I'm limiting us because we just haven't thought about the next thing.
[00:16:00.365] Kent Bye: In terms of most of the training experiences, are the users sitting down? Are they up moving around? Are using other things like haptics or other types of spatial sound? Just trying to get a sense of upping the immersion in the optimal way that you found people going through these trainings, whether it's one-to-one mapping of their body, moving their body through space in these virtual spaces, or if you find that sitting down is sufficient.
[00:16:23.891] Michael Peeler: So training can be delivered in a number of different ways. Sitting down, standing up. It can be delivered in a virtual reality. It can be delivered in augmented reality or on a tablet. It depends on the use case, on the need of the customer. In many cases, what we've seen be very successful is a VR laboratory where you have stations where students can come in and maybe an instructor's going to teach a class on thermodynamics. Or maybe they're going to go in and they're just going to log in themselves and run through a scenario so they can practice. whether it's standing up or sitting down. Again, it depends on the use case, on what the needs are. In some cases, you need to be standing up so you can practice that movement around a large piece of equipment and ducking under to look at something or turning on your virtual flashlight to look around in the space. In other cases, sitting down is good because the experiences are so immersive that we find that people that are unfamiliar will feel like they're there. They'll stand up and start walking away because they're in that virtual space. It's just a use case dependent situation.
[00:17:26.084] Kent Bye: Do you find yourself working at a simulation company on training that you have now learned a bunch of stuff that you never thought you'd learn?
[00:17:32.849] Michael Peeler: I have learned so much about this industry in the last few years of being a part of this amazing company. I've learned that there are some really unique ways to deliver training. There are some really unique ways to elevate the game. But just as importantly, there is a group of people that really care about what they do. They take a lot of pride in providing the very best solution they can. and the smiles on their faces when they get to see this solution that they worked on get deployed in the real world and actually make an impact. This is out there, this is today, and they're getting the joy of watching this get delivered and make a difference for our US military and for the entire modeling and simulation training ecosystem.
[00:18:18.530] Kent Bye: Yeah, there was some commentary with Palmer Luckey being with Andrew and speaking here and people questioning to what degree should AWE be involved with entities that are involved with military contracting. There seems to be some ethical thresholds that people see around the different type of work in the industry and in a professional context. And just curious if you encountered any of that while you're here at AWE or any additional comments on the role of simulation in the wider XR industry.
[00:18:46.725] Michael Peeler: From our perspective, we haven't seen any kind of cause or concern or anything like that. We've been very open, and the folks that we've engaged with here at AW have been very open. The thing is, the people that are here are visionaries, they're creatives, and they can easily see that what we're producing right here for this organization translates directly to other organizations, and they see the goodness in that, and that's really why we're here. So we've done a lot of work in the defense industry, but we're really here because it's now time to take the goodness that we've delivered to them and open this up to the commercial side. The commercial sector has challenges that need to be solved, and we want to be partners with them. And so the good thing about AWEs is bringing all these people together to explore new ways of doing business, of learning, and we're going to be a part of those solutions.
[00:19:34.732] Kent Bye: So you're looking to expand beyond just like military training contracts into more commercial contracts then?
[00:19:40.270] Michael Peeler: That's correct. So we are already expanded beyond the military contracts. We're in the commercial space, but we want to broaden that. We want to broaden that outside of aviation, outside of rail, outside of power plant operations. We want to explore what other needs are out there, what other organizations can benefit from us elevating the game, elevating the performance of their team.
[00:20:00.259] Kent Bye: And you've been having lots of good conversations here at AWE?
[00:20:02.701] Michael Peeler: We've had some fabulous conversations here at AWE, whether it's other organizations that are looking for solutions or other companies that are looking for partners because they see this as beneficial to the way they're doing business too.
[00:20:13.711] Kent Bye: Great, and finally, what do you see as the ultimate potential for XR and all these immersive technologies and what they might be able to enable?
[00:20:22.645] Michael Peeler: Yeah, immersive learning is going to change the game. You know, the young people of today are already very familiar. They're digital natives. They love to learn in this way. It's unfair for us to take them back to the way of learning on a chalkboard or with a PowerPoint slide. We owe it to them to train them in a different way. And we're just getting started. We're just breaking the surface of what is possible in immersive learning. And I'm just so excited to see where this goes. It's going to go beyond any of our imaginations, and I can't wait for that to happen.
[00:20:56.208] Kent Bye: Anything else left unsaid that you'd like to say to the broader immersive community?
[00:20:59.537] Michael Peeler: Ken, I'd just like to say thank you. Thank you for the opportunity that AWE provided for us to be here. Thank you for the opportunity that all these other companies, you know, they're elevating the game and they're challenging all of us to get better and we love it. So thank you.
[00:21:12.060] Kent Bye: Awesome. Yeah, I do think that training within the virtual context is one of the killer apps and I feel like that you certainly have a lot of polish in the way that you're putting everything together and just really enjoyed going through the experiences and having a chance to unpack it a little bit more. So thanks again for joining me. All right. Thank you very much, Ken. Appreciate it. Thanks again for listening to this episode of the voices of your podcast. And if you enjoy the podcast and please do spread the word, tell your friends and consider becoming a member of the Patreon. This is a, this is part of podcast. And so I do rely upon donations from people like yourself in order to continue to bring this coverage. So you can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash voices of VR. Thanks for listening.
