Think of a child learning to play chess 200 years ago, studying the game by playing or reading about it. Today, anyone can experience dozens of games and hundreds of chess problems in a single day, allowing for exponentially more learning opportunities in a much shorter time. (Poker is another good example here.)

This is the central experience and opportunity of immersive learning today—controlled learning situations that simulate real world experiences, enabling effective and efficient learning by providing safe environments with unlimited tries and do-overs. We can now learn better and faster.

Immersive environments allow people to learn complex skills rapidly and effectively. They can help train a manager how to better interact with employees, and provide new skills to a frontline worker responding to an angry customer.

Today, we see learning and development at a tipping point, where the technological capabilities are sophisticated enough, and the cost of development and adoption are low enough, that immersive learning will transform every aspect of education, work, training, development—you name it.

To help people navigate this new reality, we’re pleased to announce the release of our immersive learning market scan and partnerships with four companies that are driving solutions to scale as part of a new JFFLabs Impact Accelerator cohort: Floreo, Interplay Learning, Mursion, and Talespin.

A goal of the JFFLabs Impact Accelerator is to identify and scale today’s best immersive learning tools, and toward that end we scanned the market in search of solutions that demonstrate the ability to generate meaningful social impact and significant business value.

Immersive learning has the potential to solve many key learning challenges. It can help keep students engaged in learning while lowering the cost and improving the effectiveness of training programs in high-stakes industries such as public safety, medicine, defense, and aerospace.

At JFF and JFFLabs we’re going deep on immersive learning through ETF@JFFLabs to provide capital and communities to entrepreneurs and teams who have technologies that’s poised to drive real social impact. ETF@JFFLabs is a leading social impact fund of JFF that invests in technologies that close skill gaps and improve economic mobility for underserved communities.

We believe in the power of supporting companies so much that to further drive the social impact and economic advancement of workers we joined a $3.2 million seed investment round for Embodied Labs, a developer of an immersive learning platform that uses VR in training for the aging care workforce.

Learn how immersive learning technology is driving business outcomes for companies and creating new professional development opportunities for workers in 2020 Immersive Learning Technology.