Meet the First Speaker at Our Next VR Event: Sergei Vardomatski

Today, we would like to introduce one of the speakers, Sergei Vardomatski, founder and member of the management board at HQSoftware. The company builds and delivers outstanding solutions for various industries from healthcare to entertainment, and Sergei will share his expertise on how to use VR tools for team collaboration.

Sergei holds a degree in international economics and founded HQSoftware, a software development business, in 2001. He now deploys his wealth of knowledge and experience to drive the development of the company forward:

When I lost my last job, I faced a dilemma: should I look for another job or do something very different? I was living in a country that had just left the Soviet Union, and there weren’t many opportunities available. So I decided to launch my own company, and it soon grew to employ more than 100 people.

At HQSoftware, VR is one of the key areas of work, and Sergei is keen on building VR training solutions for teams and whole businesses:

We used to be a typical outsourcing company but at some point started to emphasize building VR competencies. This involves two main components. One is the exciting field of extended reality itself.

Sergei Vardomatski
Founder, Member of the Management Board
at HQSoftware

“The immersive experience, as we understand it, is what really drives the customer journey, but it comprises just 10% of all the development done in the field.”

The second part is still old basic programming, devoted to solving the applied tasks—first of all content management, then integration of this content management with external systems, and simply making the whole orchestra play together. So as we grew our expertise in this field, we realized we already had most of the  tools and all the experience we needed.

This is how HQSoftware’s journey into the world of Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality started. Since then, the company has successfully delivered numerous projects, but there was this particular one that started it all:

We received a request from a company that produces industrial equipment, asking us to be a part of their educational team. They produce industrial equipment, and their problem was that their training team needed to travel a lot to help their customers get the most out of their equipment. They wondered whether they could use a computer screen as a trainer. We immediately understood that we could use VR for that.

Creating a model of equipment in VR isn’t rocket science. The difficulty begins when you start building a storyboard and the educational process itself, and this is what the customer did for themselves. With that particular customer, we ended up not going for VR because it was too much of a challenge for them and they didn’t want to deal with new technology. So, we took our concepts to another customer and started producing VR courses.

As part of our market research, we kept an eye on what was going on in the market. So, we got some experience in building content management systems for extended reality, being one of the development teams for the US technology startup RealityBLU.

We wanted to see how these content management systems would work and how they would be used by both businesses and users. We understood that we needed to be able to make tools and instruments that would allow for online editing of AR/VR experiences, just the way it works for website CMS. That’s exactly what users need when it comes to extended reality, because it is mostly about the content.

Having collaborated with many businesses that needed scalable VR training solutions, Sergei now knows how exactly these solutions need to be built:

Basically, any learning experience or any learning process combines three main skills or roles. The first one is somebody who knows how things should be done — we’re talking about a professional, a knowledge owner. The second one is the person who knows how to deliver this knowledge; in that first instance, we underestimated the importance of proper organization of the learning process. And the third one is a technical professional, who will put all these things together, into either a screen-based video course or a set of VR courses.

When it comes to developing solutions for team collaboration and team building, businesses face challenges regarding all three of these roles, and Sergei will speak about them in detail during our online event.

To learn more about VR tools for remote team collaboration, tune into Explore and Wonder: Team Building in Virtual Reality.