Founder Eddie Obeng tells us his story:
So. About twenty years ago I was walking back to my hotel after
teaching managers all day, on a dark, wet early evening in Nottingham, UK
when, passing a shop window, I saw the strange sight of four people
standing up to their waists in the centre of what looked like hollowed-out
tree trunks with strange-looking helmets that covered their faces, waving
their black-gloved hands about. I watched for a minute or so and then,
filled with curiosity, I opened the door to the shop to find out what was
going on.
It was a virtual reality experience. I’d never seen anything like it, so I
paid my ten pounds for ten minutes. They asked me my height, which I
thought was a strange question and then I stepped into the tree trunk, put
the gloves on and smiled excitedly as they placed the strange-looking
helmet on my head… and I entered a different world. I looked at my hand.
There was a hand out in front of my hand but it wasn’t my hand. It was a
gauntlet. I moved my hand. The cartoon-like hand moved. I looked down at
my feet and someone seemed to have grafted a new pair of feet onto the
bottom of my legs!
Shuffling on the treadmill moved you forward and you could draw a sword by
putting your hand to your waist. I could see other figures. I could hear
them. We walked towards each other up the steps of a castle, we spoke to
each other… And then the time was up. I will never forget the shocked
amazement, like plunging into a pool of cold water on a hot day, as I took
off the helmet to discover I wasn’t in a castle but instead standing in a
tree trunk in a shop window. The other environment, where I’d made three
new friends, although cartoon-like, had felt so real, I’d forgotten it
wasn’t.
It was at that very moment that I realized that virtual education was
probably what I wanted to spend the rest of my life on. It seemed to me
that it would be infinitely more effective for learning and development
than the industrial age classroom or site visit. And probably more
efficient. My new challenge was now finding new modern concepts, tools and
frameworks people could apply and developing a real but virtual environment to
help them learn and bring it to life.
A silent video of a day in the life of QUBE’s Learning Director, Professor Eddie Obeng. Thousands of miles ‘travelled’ but without leaving his desk!
I am now Learning Director of Pentacle – which was the world’s first ever
Virtual Business School ( PentacleTheVBS.com ). I teach using our
QUBE ( QUBE.cc ), which is basically the equivalent of having your own Star Trek-style ‘Holodeck’ which you can ‘beam you up’ to whenever and wherever you please. Technically, imagine the cross-bred offspring of skype, a google hangout, webex, secondlife, telepresence, adobe connect, dropbox and join-me.
At Pentacle, we share the vision of creating a dramatic transformation in
the way people work and learn. We see a world where our clients’
businesses thrive because they are working in a new and more effective way
and on a day-to-day basis are using the concepts, tools and behaviours we
have developed at Pentacle to stand out and lead their industries. For the
people who work in these client organisations, their lives are more rounded
and fulfilled with less stress and better collaboration and support. And
eventually for the societies and countries we support we envision a
turnaround from the ‘Old World’ ways of life to a culture and approach suited
to the 21st century
We also believe that not only will our vision be good for our clients, it’s also
good for the planet. Last year in Pentacle alone we saved hundreds of
thousands of travel miles by delivering our learning and programmes on
QUBE.